💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › u › stack captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:25:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Electric cars: reprise — [gemini link] Thank you for this and other responses. No cars is better than any cars of any kind -- that is true; public transit, density and sensible city planning are much better. In the meantime, electric cars do offer a reasonable-seeming solution for short suburban commutes with lots of time to recharge, in places where infrastructure is available. But I still think we are fooling ourselves about pollution (unless we are in Norway or some place that does not use...
💬 10 comments · 4 likes · Dec 26 · 2 days ago
Toilets: Good, Bad, and Exploding — Americans are obsessed with bathrooms, and my house has four. To be fair, it has (conservatively) 10 bedrooms, so it's not really excessive. I think it was a whorehouse in the early 1900's. One of the toilets, my favorite, had a jet-engine flusher. Sequestered on the top floor and used mainly by me, it was incredibly powerful: nothing was ever unflushed as a blast of water blew through it with tremendous force. It was truly awesome, and I became a butt...
💬 7 comments · 1 like · Dec 26 · 3 days ago
A Shopping-Free Christmas — One thing to be grateful for - I've reached an age where I no longer have to worry about Christmas presents. I don't want anything. I have everything I need. My partner feels the same. My kids are old. My house is full of boxes of stocking stuffers of years gone by - unwrapped, hugs exchanged, stuff thrown into a box for me to sort and try to get rid of years later. Happy holidays to all of you.
💬 4 comments · 5 likes · Dec 24 · 4 days ago
Running With and Without A Big Dog Today I ran 5K straight. It took me about a half hour -- no records broken. I usually run a bit less in a single run as I don't really want to wear out my knees, but it felt good today, so I kept going. I worked up a sweat by the end of it, but wasn't at all out of breath. I have to crank up the speed again to get more of a workout. I mostly run on a treadmill. For some reason it is much, much harder for me to run IRL -- I don't know if it's dealing...
💬 2 comments · 1 like · Dec 22 · 6 days ago
Abandoning FreeBSD; back to Linux — I give up. I gave it a good try, and kind of liked it. But it's just too painful, and I was beginning to feel like may hands were tied behind my back. I especiallly liked the minimalism. Only a handful of processes running (as opposed to hundreds on my xubuntu machine). Fast and clean. But I did not like the constant struggle for simple things. Mounting drives. Editing wpa_supplicant file to connect to wifis, like it's 1999. Everything is like pulling...
💬 7 comments · Dec 15 · 2 weeks ago
Wiring a dimmer turns weird — I finally got around to replacing a dimmer for the classic three pendant lights over the open-plan kitchen/lr counter. These had been dark for months now as I was elsewhere, then procrastinating too much. It ws time. The old Feit dimmer failed in an unforeseen way: the large rocker on/off switch got internally detached and was now just flapping in the breeze, not clicking or doing anything. The unit is sealed with triangular-slot screws. E-waste. I had an...
💬 2 comments · Dec 11 · 2 weeks ago
Brainfogged... — The last week or or two had been hard... I feel like someone had hit me in the head with a shovel, sans the pain. But I never get headaches, and no exception here. No pain, but a kind of dizziness, and weird visuals - feels like slightly out of focus but not really... Most importantly, my brain is not functioning at capacity. It took me a while to remember the word 'brainfog' when I sat down, and I had to get up and dick around for a while... I've been using my brain daily...
💬 7 comments · 1 like · Dec 10 · 3 weeks ago
I wrote a Lisp... — There are many 'make a lisp' projects resulting in a crippled scheme, using your favorite language. I wanted something that would be super-simple and reasonably performant, bootstrapped in pure assembly, like JonesForth. But there was nothing like that. So I wrote one. Let's call it SmithLisp. It seems as performant as Picolisp, which is pretty good. Unlike Picolisp it has real lexical scope, and real McCarthian Lisp semantics, currying and all. Right now it assembles to...
💬 View post · 4 likes · Nov 10 · 7 weeks ago
Getting Sick of Linux — My pretty minimal installation of Xubuntu, running with dwm (no desktop or related crap) is beginning to feel like a lead weight. It is plenty fast on the old i5 ThinkPad (I've been scaling down - a couple of years I only used i7's), and I have few complaints, really. But I feel like I am drowning. It is running like 200 processes, without me doing anything taxing right now. I have no clue what 95% of these are. Some are downright scary sounding: idle_inject,...
💬 12 comments · 1 like · Oct 02 · 3 months ago
I drove across the US, and Google Auto was a disaster — Decades ago I had a GPS navigator, and I thought it was pretty bad. But it was a paradise compared to Google Auto running on my Moto G Play in conjunction to the Sony XAV-AX5000 (which came with my used car). This combination results in a truly dangerous road experience. I was also trying to listen to podcasts, which added yet another layer of horribleness to the experience. Let me try to summarize what happened: First, my tablet had a...
💬 1 comment · Sep 30 · 3 months ago
Do Dogs Face North When Pooping? — I saw a stupid Youtube segment that claimed that dogs prefer facing towards the magnetic North when crapping. This sounds like nonsense, but it seems that many other places of questionable reputation concur. I've been watching my dog, and indeed for 3 days she faced North, but today she faced East.
💬 3 comments · Sep 11 · 4 months ago
When your Forth is smaller than 4K... — I had a funny realization today. Normally you work with a sizable toolchain, and are working on some code that is tiny in comparison. But when your tool is 4K, it is kind of disposable - you can attach it to every piece of source without making a dent... I started out with trying to figure out how to boot nForth - it starts up, then loads a forth file to expand itself. But it turns out that it is easier to append the forth file to the binary - it saves...
💬 View post · 4 likes · Sep 07 · 4 months ago
nForth update pushed — Just pushed an overhauled nForth source (and binary) to: [https link] In the last couple of days I got back up to speed in 386 assembly, learned an awful lot about the (lack of adequate) Linux support for i386 executables, and got nForth to work in the treacherous Address Space Randomization environment. It now works with as little as 8K of heap, and runs as a CGI with minimal resources. Now I can get back to whumpage.
💬 View post · 2 likes · Sep 04 · 4 months ago
nForth - trouble in paradise — Just as I was beginning to enjoy low-level assembly coding after a long break, and looking forward to whumpin' on some home-made forth, the bastards got me! My mom tried to tell me to be normal, and do things the way other people do them, but no! I had to be this weirdo who just gets more and more restless doing things the 'normal' way. And so, 32-bit code is apparently over, just when I was really embracing the i386, with its limited registers. But I love being...
💬 3 comments · Sep 03 · 4 months ago
CGI from nforth — [gemini link] Again, human error. CGI will not work if the script returns anything but 0!
💬 View post · 1 like · Sep 02 · 4 months ago
CGI from assembly — OK, my last failure was due to stupidity. It works fine. [gemini link] A simple 182-byte executable CGI. I am probably the only person in the world writing CGI scripts in assembly, this decade.
💬 2 comments · 12 likes · Sep 01 · 4 months ago
Nothing is simple when computers are involved. — After trying to get nforth to work as a CGI and failing, took it a step back and wrote a simple assembly program that outputs '20 text/gemini' followed by cr and lf, and a hello world line.. Again, works on the command line but not as a cgi... Incomplete header. Which implies that at least it executes, because it's a FASM file with a handmade ELF header, 32-bit version1. I suppose I should check how many bytes were sent in my kernel 'write'...
💬 View post · Sep 01 · 4 months ago
Spent the day hacking on nForth -- with the goal of running it in a CGI environment. Since the core is around 4K, it should load fast and keep the server load to a minimum. Most of the day was a slog figuring out what I was doing a year ago. Got it to load silently and parse argv for the file to load...
💬 4 comments · 1 like · Sep 01 · 4 months ago
It was bound to happen! DiscoGem (discover new capsules every day) is one of my favorite time-wasters and discovery engines. I found some amazing gemholes. Today, discogem hit on @bacardi55's own gemlog! And I haven't been there in ages, since I was dicking around with microgemlogs and spartan protocol. And I discovered the mainweb blog, which has some great articles. Thank you, @bacardi55! [gemini link] [https link]
💬 3 comments · 4 likes · Aug 30 · 4 months ago
re: Alone in space [gemini link] Why don't you join us here at BBS? It's very easy to post quick notes, interact on specific topics, or create surveys...
💬 View post · 6 likes · Aug 18 · 4 months ago
@mieum, re: your 3-year-old wearing dresses. My trans daughter transitioned in her early 30's. I was surprised, but in retrospect... At 3 she was a very fancy dresser, and we were delighted at that. Who said a boy can't wear a dress or a fancy outfit of any sort! The outfits were always cool, later turned to capes, pink and glittery suits, pimp canes and theatric outfits, you name it. In her late teens she went very conservative with khakis and sweatshirts, to our disappointment. Another...
💬 View post · 1 like · Aug 16 · 4 months ago
50 Years of Text Games @Ruby_Witch suggested this book, and I could not resist. — I really wish I could get the paper edition, but it was sold out. I got the digital version for $25 (pdf, epub and text), but... The book has tons of insets, photos, and graphics, and the epub, unfortunately, cannot keep up with it. CoolReader, my favorite epub viewer, does not break lines correctly in example text, and surrounds each inset with things like [preformatted] which really makes reading a dismal...
💬 4 comments · Aug 16 · 4 months ago
Re: The Minimalist Vegan [gemini link] Being a minimalist and a vegan, I noticed that many veggies are incredibly delicious raw. Broccoli, caulifower, turnips, and many other I can't think of now. Sure, they taste good slathered with oil and broiled as well.
💬 2 comments · 2 likes · Aug 14 · 4 months ago
After pulling a few photos from my archive drive (and scaling/recompressing to fit into 100KB), I was surprised by the high quality of images from my old Moto X phone. The colors are decent, the lens is sharp...
💬 View post · Aug 13 · 5 months ago
— tilde.cafe/~stack/gemlog/2023-08-11.covid.gmi
re: first wavers — moved, please follow link
💬 View post · Aug 11 · 5 months ago
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