Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Shakuhachi is calling

    My hobbies are legion, but my interest and attention rotates through them in a meandering path. I wish I could hold that attention still in one place a bit longer, and I also wish the wandering followed a predictable path. Alas, no such luck.

    I was recently hyped back on my shorthand practice and managed to get through a difficult reading threshold. But that has waned. I have supplies for bookbinding now, and I really should move on that hobby since I intend to use it for gift giving this Christmas, but it hasn't claimed me yet. Maybe this weekend?

• Books

  • I reread Carrie and now I'm mad about the economy

    I reread Stephen King's Carrie last night, because I last read it when I was nine, and mostly what I remembered was the false bill of goods it provided on the wonders of puberty. (Still waiting for my telekinetic powers....)

    This morning I am shelving books, minding my business, when suddenly I get burn-the-school-down mad over this:

    In the book, we're told that Carrie's mom supports their household on an entry level job at a laundromat. We're not told, or given the impression, that Carrie has a job.

  • Return to the Red telephone box book swap

    My blog a few weeks ago talked about the 3 book swaps I've visited in my home county over the last few weeks. Two are housed in old red BT phoneboxes. There is also a fantastic website that tracks all these old boxes, categorises them on location or current usage (book swap, defib etc).

• Technology and Free Software

  • Investigating ATProto here and for Knowledge Commons

    After a recent post by Brennan Kenneth Brown, I decided to investigate what it would take to get this site – and, then, Knowledge Commons – onto the ATmosphere, using ATProto. This was a pretty steep learning curve, as I did not, before, understand many of the key concepts in this space. After succeeding, though, in publishing this blog to the ATmosphere (I took Brennan’s excellent advice to proceed immediately to Sequoia) I am left pondering.

    [...]

    So, interestingly, there are no current standard.site or standard.document aggregators that display the document in their own interface (at least that I could see). Everywhere I tried linked back to the canonical web reference. But, interestingly, they WERE able to find the content and pull it into their aggregation streams.

  • FAIR and Square: making a static site support FAIR signposting

    After my previous post about Zotero ingest, I wondered what else I might be able to do to make this scholarly (and personal) blog more accessible, navigable, harvestable, and ingestable. One thing that occurred to me, that I had not implemented, is that I might make this blog FAIR. That is: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

  • TextRPG Engine/Game

    The game isn’t done. It started as an engine with no specific game design, but I was adding features I wanted the engine to have without first nailing down the goals for the game. So now it’s more of a playable sandbox. The biggest technical hurdles have been surpassed (decent frame rates, lighting effects, animation, and performant multi-player over reticulum with a little craftyness to hide latency).

  • Playing old games

    An associate here at sdf emailed me to ask what I'm up to. I sometimes fail to respond, but I adore emails.

    I've been working more shifts at the hospital than usual. Census drops for the November Thanksgiving holiday and the winter break. So we're short-staff- ed now, and I'm not as likely to be able to pick up as many shifts as I want soon.

    As a result, no fun hacking days. Instead I'm researching by reading articles and documentation, and playing old games. I want to make a usb-dos distro with adventure games for kids older than 8 and adults.

• Slop

  • claude helped on my latest project

    I’ve progressed by leaps and bounds with a prototype of the engine I want to make, but at this point, it’s more written by AI than by me.

    I’m not sure how I feel about this. It felt like I was making awesome progress and making a cool prototype. It felt empowering. But also a little addictive, but not in that way that people use the word and mean it in a positive way.

    I spent many days and ultimately produced something that aside from the prompts I specified, I have no idea how it works.