author: marmaladefoo
Two weeks of work up the swanee. The back I was making just started developing lots of tiny micro-splits everywhere. Castello boxwood is very pretty but sadly just not reliable enough. Sycamore and ash are my trusty fall-backs.
Techno-refuseniks of the world! Unite against the hive mind and the N-Gram who fortell these are the Dead Ends of IT. Still, Gemini isn't on the list at least, so what do they know? Phew, I guess? https://github.com/guettli/deadends-of-it
Surely I can't be the only one who finds Aldi UK's Kevin the Carrot to be terribly tragic. Was shopping there this evening and Kevin and his family with their hopeful little faces are plastered all over the store. Hasn't anyone told them what will happen to them on Christmas day? https://www.aldi.co.uk/kevin
If someone cannot be bothered to learn how to solder their own microcontroller, do they deserve to be allowed on Gemini? Methinks not and so maybe I should excommunicate myself. There is a lot of tosh around in the Gemini tubes at the moment about who is allowed to participate. I'll get my popcorn, if I can find it under all the half abandoned projects on my desk
Obligatory Internet Cat Status Update: Its now October so my cat has stopped living outdoors and is now generally inside demanding attention. If he wasn't so cute and oblivious to everyone else's needs I'd be annoyed that his favourite spot is to curl up atop my mouse and mousemat. Even when I'm still using them
Walking round my garden on an autumn's morning. Lots of snails everywhere. One up a tree and climbing. 25 on one rotten apple still hanging. And two micro snails on a branch trying to have snail-sex, not entirely successfully, but they look like they are having fun anyway..
Trying to churn through a big personal decision. Fed up with my sensible side tending to win the arguments of the internal dialog. It's had its way for too long, it thinks it owns the place.
My customer came today to pick up his new lute - he was delighted with it, and brought along a bottle of red to say thanks for the photos of progress I had been sending him as I built it. When you build real things for people the moments you hand them over is one of the real treats you cherish. Writing software for customers on the other hand feels a lot colder and impersonal. When will a customer bring me a bottle of wine because I sent him screenshots of code that didn't compile yet? I live in vain hope!
What would be the cruelest yet still effective way of writing a Gemini client? I'm thinking of a MS Word document whose content is a rendering of a Gemini page, then uses VBA to refresh itself. Can you get more cursed than that?
Just trying out a parametric CAD desgn tool - SolveSpace. It is brilliant when you have a family of parts to design, each of which is related, but not just a scaled up or down version of each other
Chatting with a friend about Brian Eno reminded me that I put together a Gemini app for his Oblique Strategies card deck that does the easy work of selecting a card for you. The more interesting bit is how to apply it: gemini://gemini.marmaladefoo.com/cgi-bin/oblique-strategies/consult
After a while of building Gemini applications it is strange to realise you have internalised more or less the whole Gemini specification. This must be what they call "going native"
Just got my second Gates upgrade. I hope he appreciates it.
When you work with your hands, the days when you just feel clumsy are very frustrating. Still I'm glad I don't have a table saw on such occasions. I would go from feeling all fingers and thumbs to having less fingers and less thumbs
Writers, come to Gemini: We'll give you just enough formatting to be useful but won't let you become an annoyance to the rest of us. Apart from Emoji!
Testing whether station works with GemiNaut - it does. Now my only problem is to think of some witty follow up post to grab your attention. That's the point of social media isnt it? Even if it's on Gemini