Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • no bad people

    I don't believe in the existence of bad people. And to be clear: I don't believe in the existence of good people either; and I'm also not saying "It's not a binary, the moral value of a person lies on a spectrum", I'm saying that there is no such thing as the moral value of a person.

    Of course, I'm not denying that there are people who have gotten very, very used to doing very, very bad things. But I want to pick apart what we mean when we call such a person 'bad', and I think the concept of 'bad people' is unhelpful in various ways.

  • Notes on an overheard coversation as commercials are playing

    “They just used ‘their’ when they should have used ‘his or her.’”

    “It's a foregone conclusion—‘they’ is now a singular pronoun in addition to being a plural.”

    “It's just wrong!”

    “Singular ‘they’ goes back to the thirteen or fourteen hundreds.”

    “Someone was wrong then, and they're wrong now.”

    “Did you just a singular ‘they?’”

    “Quiet! My show is back on!”

  • Clouds in a Blue Sky

    Clouds in a blue sky
    Are what I want to see
    Some days they're high
    Some days they're big
    But some days they're not there at all
    
    
    A clear blue sky
    Has a meaning
    Maybe high pressure
    Maybe dry air
    But wait and the clouds do return
    

• Science

  • abacus

    So I did end up getting an abacus. I actually have 3 right now: two 1:4 sorobans (one has beads that are a bit too tiny for me to accurately move quickly; I frequently pick up other beads), and one 2:5 Chinese suanpan. The main difference between the two is the number of beads in each section: the soroban has one 5 bead and four one beads, meaning you can represent 0-9 exactly one way on each rod. It's pretty cool, although the 5 bead means you have to learn 5 complements and know when to apply them. It's the "modern" abacus that's only about 80 years old or so, used in Japan.

    The 2:5 suanpan has two 5 beads and 5 one beads, meaning you can technically use it as a Base 18 calculator if you chose to let the two beads represent 6, though it was used for Chinese currency that was using Base 16. The biggest advantage of the 2:5 is that it allows beginners especially to physically see and use carries in Base 10. It also allows you to calculate in Base 16 and Base 18, AND you can use it as a 1:4 if you just ignore the last bead in each section. I mean the last bead is going to signify ten total in the 5 beads or five total in the 1 beads, so you're supposed to move them to another rod anyway (for Base 10).

• Technology and Free Software

  • Practical guide on out of tree mitigations on Linux

    My previous blog post was a quick one and a reader from Gemini sent me an email asking what exactly I did for implementing the mitigations. Thanks for asking and sorry for making you ask. This article should explain what is done and how to tweak the recipe.

  • Spare IT Equipment

    My employer recently changed the location of its corporate office. The new building is much more strategically located, but is server room is significantly smaller, and there's less storage space in general for IT equipment. As such, our department has been tasked to decommission as much as we can and store the rest in one of our warehouses.

    The company had been located in the previous building for decades. That inevitably led to a huge accumulation of devices that were severely out of date but had never been formally retired. One such trove included a pile of old smartphones, which I've written about in a previous log. However, bigger and more valuable devices are being consigned to the scrap heap as well--and are free for the taking.

    Last week I was given a Lantronix universal device server. This handy box takes arbitrary data from a serial line as its input, wraps it inside TCP packets, and sends it out over Ethernet. Any device on the network can then ingest the packets and recover the raw serial data as if the device was plugged in directly. I have some ideas for sensor projects I could do with this UDS, maybe even creating something for next year's ROOPHLOCH.

  • Overview of villager housings

    Three screenshots, I'm glad I've done them, cause this part of my base gets serious revamp, later this year.

    You might have noticed, clouds on those screenshots changed to more realistic ones, I believe they come from "ComplementaryUnbound" shaders (although I do not remember to be fair).