💾 Archived View for tilde.town › ~insom › 2023-04-21.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:20:41. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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2023-04-21

I'm playing with Guile Scheme and I've generally spent more time writing code than usual lately, including some for fun. I currently have a computer hobby that makes me happy instead of filling me with dread, and that's good and I've sorely missed this. I've even fit in a healthy mix of actually playing video games instead of just collecting them.

I spent some time getting a Quake 1 port working on Haiku (mostly Makefile and HaikuPorts stuff, because SDL is doing the lifting to make things _work_). Spending time with old computers is something I used to view as a bit of a psychohazard -- it'd pull me in and eventually I would feel frustrated at the time I had "wasted" on it. Armed with some new mental tools and outlooks, I think I'm able to do retrocomputing in a more healthy way.

Also: I am interested in the future. Like, typically when I program for fun, recently, it's been with technology I'm very comfortable in (like C, microcontrollers, Unix) or that I'm picking up after a long break (like C++ and Python, FPGAs, Win32). Now I am interested in seeing what's possible in the low-latency but web-related world of Rust, io_uring and WASM.

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Originally I'd opened my text editor to write about Guinness Foreign Export Stout. In my memory, Guinness used to be brewed in other places, and then eventually its production was centralized in St. James' Gate in Dublin. I remember drinking Guinness imported from Nigeria (FES) during the brief period where I was old enough to drink legally, and while I lived in Ireland. I'd assumed this had disappeared, but it's still brewed in Lagos. It seemed perverse to import Guinness to Ireland, but it's a pretty different drink.

Anyway, it turns out I was wrong: only UK and Ireland Guinness production moved to St. James' Gate -- it's brewed around the world, although a lot of the precursors (like flavoured wort) still come from Dublin. Its unlikely that these breweries could continue to produce proper stout if they were cut off from the motherland.