Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd — Apples #3180

  • Moving Challenges

    I bought a house recently. As I am currently renting, I have had the luck of being able to move slowly. I spent a fair bit of time disassembling annoying furniture left behind and being able to clean the place before moving in.

    One of the challenges is that I needed to move Barry, my crested gecko. He resides in a vivarium which is roughly 60cm x 60cm x 100cm. It is a tall bugger of a glass vivarium to shift. Barry is also not the happiest gecko when it comes to handling. He does not really enjoy it. He also tends to want to bite my hand. Not unusual for male crested geckos of a certain age. They are violent shaggers for sure.

  • 10 December 2025

    To start on a positive note: My dad, who is now living for about a year and a half in an retirement home has made big recovery steps recently and is now contemplating how he could move back in with the rest of the family. I would never have thought that a dude at 85 with heart problems and a badly healed broken leg decides 'Nah, it sucks to be so frail... better make improvements'. Surprisingly he even started to make improvements in his walking abilities, which is even more surprising taking into account that the doctors who treated him said that he will never be able to walk more than a few steps again. Sigh,

    Currently i am driving my mom nearly every other day to some form of doctor, either the dentist (she finally decided to get a partial tooth prothesis), the general practicioner to get her blood pressure in order and the orthopedist to get her carpal tunnel syndrome fixed. It's weird, both my parents let everything regarding their finances and their general organisation go to ruins just to make the decision to get everything right now.

  • Christina's December questions

    No discoveries, but when I pass night meds on the detox unit I've been revisiting albums I haven't listened to for 25+ years, because the radio's too subdued to keep me alert. Some of them I rediscovered I like. Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails is probably the one I spun the most.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — DHINOPY Wordo: TIMED

  • Is This What I Sound Like?

    Recently my sister read one of my posts about electronics. That fact alone was a little surprising, since she has never shown any interest in electronics so far as I can remember. Later, she sent me this note, which was her translation of what I wrote, as she understood it.

• Science

  • Further AC Explorations + Electromagnet

    A little while ago I built a coil by wrapping thin transformer wire around a soft iron cylinder that my dad gave me. My coil is — roughly speaking — 600 turns in three layers — with the layers being about 9.5 cm in length, and the cylinder core being 0.5 inches in diameter.

    For learning purposes, I tried to calculate the inductance of the coil, by putting it in series with a 470 nF capacitor, and a small value resistor. I hooked up the scope across the resistor, and then used the signal generator and the audio amplifier to find the resonant frequency, looking for a peak of voltage on the resistor. The peak I found was at 3.1 kHz. Using the formula f_r = 1 / (2 pi sqrt(L C)), and solving for L, the result I got was about 16 mH. I was expecting some higher number, since I have 10 mH inductors that are smaller than the end of my pinky. But, on the other hand, the length of my coil is much longer, which reduces the inductance, and I suppose the wires in the tiny coil are smaller and wrapped more tightly. So I suppose 16 mH is a plausible value.

    Something fun is hooking up the coil to my variable power supply and using it as an electromagnet. The power supply is digital and has a current limiting feature, so that I can just set the max voltage very high, specify the current I want, and then it will lower the voltage appropriately. I found that I start to see some noticeable pulling force at around 100 mA, with it holding onto small metal washers.

  • This Vine-Like Grasper Gives Robots a Secure Yet Gentle Touch

    Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, and the University of Florida have developed a soft robotic gripper well-suited to handling delicate yet heavy objects — taking inspiration from strangling vines.

    "Heavy but fragile objects, such as a human body, are difficult to grasp with the robotic hands that are available today," says co-author Harry Asada, Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT, of the team's work. "We have developed a vine-like, growing robot gripper that can wrap around an object and suspend it gently and securely."

    "Transferring a person out of bed is one of the most physically strenuous tasks that a caregiver carries out," adds first author Kentaro Barhydt of the target use-case for the new gripper. "This kind of robot can help relieve the caretaker, and can be gentler and more comfortable for the patient."

• Technology and Free Software

  • Battery gained 489 days

    When the Silicon Graphics IRIS Indigo workstation starts then it prints - among others - how long it was off. It simply counts days when being on the time-keeping battery.

  • AI for lazy people

    I "needed" to backport one of my programs which use Gtk+-2.x to the Gtk+-1.2. Why? Because IRIX 5.3 has only 1.2 in the /freeware (and porting of such libraries to anything older than the IRIX 6.5 is very hard).

    Of course I can rewrite the stuff by hand. I can just find the Gtk+ 1.2 and 2.0 programming manuals, find the differences and try to rewrite the stuff call-by-call, function-by-function.

  • Thoughts on Bits & Bops rhythm minigames

    It's a collection of 21 rhythm minigames, each playable with one or two buttons and set to its own music. I backed it on Kickstarter a few years ago and was excited to see it finally release. It's a pretty short game and I've already gotten a Perfect rank on every minigame. And now I have opinions about them.

  • Hello!

    By chance, I have recovered the gemurl program and have updated and uploaded it to my repository on Codeberg.

  • MNT Pocket Reform notes

    After a recent upgrade, poweroff, shutdown and friends stopped doing their job. The system starts shutting down; only the keyboard lights are still on, then nothing happens for a few seconds and then the Pocket Reform reboots again.

    I posted on the community forums, asking for help, and *josch* came to the rescue once again. The key to finding the problem is running `reform-check`.

  • Repairs

    I've managed in the space of the past month or so to find the time to get quite a bit of assorted repair/maintenance work done. Some of these tasks are things I've been putting off for a while, others were responding to things as they happened. Once the ball got rolling I kind of got into the mindset and it became easy. Well, actually, it wasn't a ball I got rolling, but rather a wheel! The first task was replacing the bearings in the back wheel of the Franken Peugeot, which I had been putting off for a very long time.

    The mirror bumper in one of my Pentax ME-Supers had degraded to the point where the mirror sometimes gets stuck up on the gooey foam stuff. I bought a replacement bumper off eBay. Removing the old one was a bit of a chore. I got it all off, but not without making a bit of a mess of the focussing screen in the process. I want to clean that up nicely before I install the new bumper. Oh yeah, remember one million years ago when I bought a cheap Pentax MX[1]? I still haven't put a single roll of film through it because I haven't gotten around to replacing the light seals on it. So I bought a kit for that from the same seller at the same time, so maybe that'll happen sometime soon as well. The light meter in my other ME-Super died abruptly in the middle of a holiday about a year ago, I still need to look into that some time.

  • Alcohol and Gentoo

    I always had a rocky relationship with everything addictive, somehow my brain really likes the idea of taking something that makes it feel good / dizzy / relaxed and keep convincing me to not stop or find creative explanations why - just for example - i today can surely drink because it was a sooo much of a stressful day. Regardless if i decided in the morning of the same day that i will stay away from booze.

    Over the last couple of months it got a bit out of hand... no, i didn't do harmful stuff (at least not harmful to others), i was never a "raging drunk" or something like that, i always functioned, stood up in the morning, went to work, took care of wife, kid and parents, but i noticed the amount i drank was growing (peaked at about half a bottle of Whiskey in one evening) and that i noticed effects on my health. I gained a lot of weight (alcohol makes me HUNGRY), slept like shit and started nearly every day with more or less of a hangover. So, this needed to stop.

  • Taking linked notes with Vimwiki and integrating it with Forgejo wikis

    A couple of days ago, I stumbled over a Mastodon post by @johl[1], in which he shared `vimwiki`[2] as his approach for taking notes in `vim`.

    Which immediately piqued my interest, as I have so far been just taking my notes in plain `vim` without a way of linking them.

    While I'm not someone that really uses (or feels any benefits from) _second brain_ note-taking[^1], I do take enough project-related notes that being able to cross-reference prior notes could be useful for me.

    And in the process of trying, I also found out that it also works great for interacting with `forgejo` wikis – as e.g. used in many FLOSS projects on Codeberg[1].[^2]

  • play it Grand

    it makes sense but it doesn't seem like a thing I'd want to call attention to. you can fling all the shit at the wall you like to see what sticks but celebrating the spectacle doesn't make sense to me. it's cute but mostly it just creates clutter. half thoughts and smoke dreams.

    ultimately though, while it didn't seem like my thing it never really bothered me enough to say anything, I saw the appeal it just didn't appeal to me. I mention it now because it helps frame why the following speaks to me so deeply.

    in his show this past Wednesday[3], screwtape[4] paraphrased a quote by object-oriented programming and GUI pioneer Alan Kay. something I hadn't heard before.

  • FRST Computer Exits Stealth Mode

    Tonight, FRST Computer exits "stealth mode"... One of the unique advantages of gopher has been its quiet, out-of-the-way quality and I've enjoyed the quiet of this space to "air out" some of my ideas on personal computing, permacomputing, cyberdecks, solarpunk... But tonight, I'm sharing some more details of what I've been up to in my lab and how I plan to expand my reach. (while continuing to prioritize FRST's gopher presence) This is happening -- I'm finally ready to sell you something! :)

  • Bad blocks

    I didn't know whether this was the disk in my laptop or the backup disk.

    [...]

    The answer is that it is `/dev/sdb1` and that's the backup disk. Well, that's better than the laptop disk!

  • Internet/Gemini

    • I Think I Found an Acceptable Gopherhole Stylin

      Thanks to the figlet styles “rustofat” for titles and “rusto” for headings, I feel much more motivated to post on Gopher. I also decided to move the date to the bottom of the post, which allows me to put the email address there as well.

    • On the "indie Web", real and fake

      My recent week had been extremely difficult in every possible sense. However, I managed to stumble upon an interesting phenomenon I never met before: fake indie Web. What do I mean by that?

      Imagine signing up in a place that poses to be the opposite of big, commercialized Web, "striving to bring back the spirit of Web 1.0", designed in a cyberpunk asethetics, emphasizing on usage of no AI, algorithms, tracking or other modern scum, distancing itself from "the cyber malls of the corpos". The place looks nice and promising a great hacker vibe at the first glance.

  • Programming

    • All I want for X-mas is a system without Rust

      Rust has the reputation of being a safe language, that helps to prevent nasty vulnerabilities, memory leaks, and so on. Some organizations even promote to write software that converts C-code into Rust-code.

      All around the world software developers are embracing Rust, with the result that our systems get more and more infiltrated by dependencies on Rust. This even starts to touch elements of the kernel.

      Using Rust sounds very cool, but have you ever tried to install Rust and Cargo from source? This requires quite a beefy computer. Don't expect to be able to do that on a simple system with, say 4 GB RAM or less. Which raises some questions about the words 'everyone' and 'efficient' in the Rust credo.