● 07.11.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 11/07/2023: Old Computer Challenge and Mastodon Blog Comments Automation

Posted in News Roundup at 8:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Except it isn’t really a chorale, more like four voice harmonic practice, except it isn’t really harmonic practice as not much attention is paid to chord progressions nor are fancy chords used (except in passing). What is going on here is some counterpoint, Dorian mode (-ish), vague modulation to dominant, and a some harmonic sequences, in particular the ground bass from Pachelbel’s Canon which is a -4 +2 sequence though can be modified with inversions so the bass line is somewhat less jumpy and not so bleedingly obvious.

• I once owned this thing [1]. It was around 2008, I think. It was the second, updated model with larger (inflatable to 90 psi) wheels.

• If I remember correctly I was very unsatisfied with it – it wasn’t as small as I expected and it was rather uncomfortable when carried in its dedicated backpack. But as a bike it was quite a disaster. It rode well only on ideally flat surfaces (like corridors in buildings). And I wasn’t able to climb anything (there are no ideally level surfaces in the real world). The final problem was that one of plastic parts broke after a few weeks of use. So I sold it.

Politics and World Events

• Abdullah Öcalan, also known as Apo (“uncle”), is born 4 April 1949, in eastern Turkey. He is a founding member of the militant Marxist-Leninist “Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)” in 1978, which was based in northern Syria from 1979 to 1998 as a sanctuary, and led part of the Kurdish political movement from there.

• During the 1980s, the Turkish state began a program of forced assimilation of its Kurdish population. In protest against this fascist act, the PKK began an armed rebellion against the Turkey, and in connection with it began attacking its military forces.

• Like so many others, I used to think that anarchists were violent pricks who enjoy throwing Molotov cocktails and destroy property. As usual, the propaganda machine _reverses_ reality completely.

Science

• I have got this old film camera. It wasn’t expensive. Actually it is an interesting piece of German engineering. It’s fairly simple, it’s made mainly from plastic materials (including its faux leather case) yet if produces relatively nice images [1].

• I’m starting my full-time teaching load in a little under three months and while I was full of confidence and vigor before now a lot of the self-doubt is creeping in.

• I’m teaching multiple sections of the intro to computer science class, CS 160, and CS 250 the intro to math/logic for CS. I’m also supposed to work on revising CS 205, the intro to C and assembly programming class so I can start teaching it the following term. That one is the one I’m weakest on in terms of practical experience but, I mean, I still know this stuff I just need to practice specifically x86-64 programming instead of risc ISAs used in teaching compilers classes such as MIPS. I’m rusty on C but not incompetent at it, if you get what I mean.

Technology and Free Software

• That reminds me of how as a kid (roughly 50 years ago) I’d hide notes/messages in library books: sometimes in the cover flaps, sometimes in the spine, sometimes just between pages. It would surely be nice to know if any were ever found.

• Makes me wonder if I can shift my posting motivation from “to meet and interact with interesting others” to “to bless others with serendipitous finds”? Because the former seems essentially impossible.

• Since I obviously suck at being texturally edgy in ways engendering interaction, I’m shifting my motivation for writing to reporting on placing messages on paper scraps, 3×5″ cards, etc. in somewhat hidden public places, making such messages what I want to call “serendipitous finds”.

• I’ll likely post their content, and then go on to report on whether or not a message has been found. That’ll be obvious if/when a message is gone. But I suppose I should place things in ways recognizable to me as having placed by me in case people carefully re-place them. So I should also log the details of their placement to make evidence of having been found unambiguous.

• written on GPD Win 1 via PuTTY as first daughter mumbles herself to sleep: “this a-way, this a-way” (from the song 500 Miles)

• I am not actively participating in Solene’s “Old Computer Challenge”^ this year–I only heard about it yesterday evening and am not in a position to go all in at the moment. However, I do want to follow the spirit of the challenge this week by reducing my energy and technology footprint.

• There are two ways I’m approaching it. The first is using a smaller machine with more limitations and requiring more active configuration, and the second is reducing the amount of content I passively consume.

• All my notes regarding the old computer challenge are now here…

• I’m a bit busy today celebrating my birthday so I won’t have time to do anything for the challenge, but I’m writing this from the old computer.

• I just have spent a nice half of hour by reading of other people’ Old Computer Challenge Entries [1]. Pretty interesting but some computer - while really old by today standards – dot’s seem to be old to me.

• Some weeks ago, I submitted a support request to change my Pinboard username. I still haven’t heard back!

• And today, I happened to run across people on HackerNews (yeah, I know) talking about how Pinboard has been broken for them, how their paid archival functions haven’t been working (I don’t have an archival account, so I didn’t notice that), how the owner, Maciej, has been completely incommunicado on the Pinboard blog for *years*… And yet every time someone makes a complaint on HN, he’s right there in the comments with some snarky response.

Internet/Gemini

• This is a brief announce to let anyone know that for a colossal pebcak I deleted my VPS, and therefore I had to create a brand new VPS and to create new self-signed certificates.

• What I’ve been up to since the last blog posts in this server? Not much, but there’s been changes. Notably it’s running off some old bottom-tier Intel Celeron laptop from ~2007 now instead of the Raspberry Pi 2B as some minor-ish enough updates has been causing it to no longer boot properly, and this issue wasn’t even new, I’ve known it since the last 2 years when trying it with Alpine Linux and wondering why that happens also. This time it’s Debian so I guess better to just throw in the towel with that hardware and just use the laptop I had laying around instead. It was already having troubles anyway before that and giving “illegal instructions” errors when just trying to setup some files for some few packages during apt install. It’s probably the SD card issue, or maybe armhf architecture is too niche and left underlooked, or both, but for sure I don’t want to deal with it anymore. I can at least say that laptop was able to do a major upgrade from Debian 11 bullseye to 12 bookworm sucessfully, so it certainly doesn’t have that issue. I did managed to hastly move some services and datas over to the laptop, only leaving out setting up a Gopher server mostly because I still haven’t bothered to have my site generator setup to do Gopher yet, and the Debian repository, cause I somewhat can’t be bothered to set that back up.

• When I post here I usually also put the link out on Mastodon where people will sometimes comment. I’ve always done this by hand but, since I know just enough bash to be dangerous, I recently started thinking of ways to automate this step for me and also link back to the Mastodon post from the original blog post while I’m at it.

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