● 08.06.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 05/08/2023: New SIM and a Goodbye

Posted in News Roundup at 7:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I have two vehicles, one is 17 years old, the other is 23 years old. I’ve always driven older cars, and I try to work on them myself, when the repair is something I can tackle–when it’s not, the car is usually ready to get rid of.

• At Wednesday I was on a bicycle trip. Some 130 km in relatively flat terrain (the middle parts was in Nizky Jesenik mountain so ther e were some hills). A very nice trip except the strong headwind.

• Well,it’s summer and I am not able to do any creative work in my office where the lowest temperature is over 30 C. So I am working now at 22:00.

• except for the modulation (if you could call it that) to the dominant, and another to the dominant of that dominant, or F to C and then C to G Major (but not for very long). In theory you’re supposed to go back to the original key, I guess. Minuets are also supposed to be dancable, though music has something of a tradition of turning danceable music into that which is not. There was even a diet of worms edict when church music got itself too fancy, or you can find chorus music from the 1500s that used chromaticism not seen again until some while later:

• I purchased a bicycle in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and a time when most gyms and swimming pools in my area were closed. Though I had Ring Fit Adventure and a Pump It Up arcade machine at home, I get cabin fever very quickly, and I needed something to do outside the house.

• As the region began to reopen in 2022, I found myself cycling less and less. This was primarily because I could satisfy my itch to go outside in other ways, but as I began cycling regularly before then, I found that it wasn’t easy to use my bike as anything other than a dedicated exercise machine.

• I feel like I am broken. On the surface I might seem ok but under-neath, it feels like something is seriously wrong here, mission control. There is now a cast on my leg where I tore my achilles, which has further impeded my mobility. This injury has put the brakes on, or even halted many things that could be going on had it not manifested. I think this was not happenstance, rather, this needed to happen. My trajectory has not been sustainable,

• Recently, I have been reacquainted with an old chair. It is a chair that I was gifted by my friend, Sandy, when he was moving out of his studio, almost 30 years ago (I feel so old now.) The chair is old, metal, and heavy for its size. Not sure how old it really is, but it was made during a time when things were built to last and made to be repaired by the owner of the chair with common parts found at a local hardware store. Over the years I have replaced various parts, even re-riveting a couple broken rivets on the hinge that attaches the back of the chair to the back post and also adding a tie-on seat cushion since the original chair padding has long since flattened over the course of use and time.

• Just a heads up: gonna be some spoilers for the Lord of the Rings novels down below.

• Magic has started making cards from other games, books, or shows like The Walking Dead, Street Fighter, Arcane, Fortnite, Warhammer 40000, Doctor Who, and The Lord of the Rings. That’s called “Universes Beyond”.

• I’ve been all for that, with one exception—I don’t ever want to see “brands”, like “I tap your 3/3 Pepsi with my Tide pod”. I get that an IP is a brand but I hope the line between what’s a cultural artifact, like a novel, versus a product with a logo, is clear enough even for Hasbro.

• My players are pretty strict with meta information.

• I had three parties step into the same trap and die and I was like “guys, what’s going on!” and they were like “our new chars don’t know what our old chars knew!”

• I was satisfied with that. In the end made PCs quick-witted enough to deal with the situation without meta knowledge.

• I’ve said they are free to meta as much and as little as they want, it’s a lever they’re completely on their own for, I don’t mind it at all but to the extent that it takes away from their experience, they don’t do it

Technology and Free Software

• You know, the SGI IRIX is dead at last from 2006 so there are almost no new apps. Definitely there is no “current” WWW browser (people have been trying hard but it seems to be impossible). The latest one is the Firefox 3.0.19 with ages old SSL suppurt (so almsot no https://).

• Some devices have very long battery live. So long so I usually forget that they are batteries at all. This time it was the PSION MC600.

• The main battery is just an 8xAA block and there is a backup battery. But the backup can work for days and not for the whole month. These old PSIONs use RAM cards as storage. They are also backed up by batteries (all backup batteries are the CR1620). This time one of them don’t survive so I lost the whole G: drive (about 2 MB of data and programs).

• I was in the Prague last week. I had only the GPD Pocket with me (an Item Atom-based machine). I did some light computing here (some FEA) and found that speed on my unoptimised software is still rather acceptable here. After return I tried to do the same on the MNT Reform. As expected the MNT was about 2 times slower (it has an industrial ARM CPU which is wasn’t the fastest even when it was new).

• My Palm Centro decided to die. So I have had to replace it. Things have not been so easy because my old full-sized SIM (trimmed to the microSIM format anyway) do not fit any modern (or semi-modern) phone.

• Thus I visited my phone provider’s shop today. It was a story for itself: the Sturmey-Archer hub on my Brompton bike have started work incorrectly. Then was a heavy rainfall. But I ahve got a new SIM.

• I’m in the process of renovating my office so as my desktop computer is stashed away, I’ve been using my travel laptop, i.e. my only laptop, as my main computer for nearly a week now. I’ve been aware of all of its pitfalls since day one but using that computer for that long, has made them harder to bear.

• I bought a GPD Pocket 2 a few years ago, as a replacement for a slightly bigger netbook, which in turn came in replacement of my beloved first generation eeePC that perished in battle. It’s insanely practical, and portable. It will fit into any bag, and probably into cargo pant or spacious coat pockets. It’s also much beefier than most currently sold sub-12″ laptop on the market. The screen is however 7″.

Internet/Gemini

• This will be my last post on Gemini, as I just don’t have a good reason to use it anymore. You can read more about my thoughts in my latest blog post, linked below.

• So Magic had an announcement day where they laid out their plans for the next three years. I’ve sorted everything that they announced by how much I’m into it, and a short thought on each.

• So this is not the order they’re gonna come out in. Instead, I’ve placed them from “aww yeah” gradually down to “Not into it”. For me personally. And not having seen the sets.

• I sometimes buy classical music from Hyperion Records, because they are one of few classical labels to provide downloadable lossless audio files. However, their site is rather outdated and they push you to use a ‘downloader’ application (for Windows or Mac only) to download your purchases. That doesn’t work for me.

• They do provide a webpage with all your purchases to download regularly, but with individual links per track! That quickly gets annoying.

• So, it seems that I have started a literary magazine[1]! I have thought about it on and off for a few years, but nothing seemed to really come together. The idea that finally did it as something that came about after reading one of my wife’s recent stories. It just felt so comfortable and nice and I felt like I wanted more stories like that in my life. So, Hearth Stories was born.

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