● 08.28.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 28/08/2023: Sometimes Everything Goes Wrong and Brute Forcing Cheat Codes

Posted in News Roundup at 7:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I felt very confident and competent that day. I made my way across the long, dark hallway with impossibly-high ceiling. Past the scary round cast-iron ash cleanout door on the wall, large, rusty locking handle taunting me to turn it and release the horror insided. Hugging the far wall to keep away from it, I got past, without waking up the scary abandoned-furnace-demon, fear pooling in my feet like a liquid.

• My destination: Unkle Kostya’s room at the end of the hallway. I considered him a friend — he had talked to me on several occasions, and I really liked his looks (resembling a mustachio’ed old-timey circus strongman from one of my books, but really, really old, maybe 50 or 76).

• I stood against the door in total silence, wondering if he had died in his sleep, like my grandpa.

• The weather has been extremely hot in the American Midwest this past week. Beginning in the previous weekend, temperatures have regularly reached 100 F (38 C) or higher. Our front lawn was due to be mowed in the middle of the week, and I went cycling the evening after; these. combined with my air show visit last weekend, meant that I began adjusting to the heat. My wife, however, was absolutely miserable.

• We wanted to put a couch in our basement den, but both of the sectionals we brought from our previous house were too big to fit through the 29-inch basement door. We had to buy a new couch with a modular design and removable legs in order to get it downstairs. After three months of waiting, the couch finally arrived on Monday.

• Part of our long-term plan is to get some land and build our own house(s) on it, in a manner that’s suitable for self-sustainable living. Building houses is hard work, of course, and the modern building industry is rather problematic, so I’ve been looking into “alternative” methods of building for a few years.

• The Centre for Alternative Technology is a bit of a hub for that in the UK, and I was signed up to both their “Natural Housebuilding” short course and “Green Building” MSc pre-pandemic and pre-baby. This year, things felt stable enough for me to get back to it, so a friend and I went on their “Building with Straw Bales” course last week. Five rather intensive days of theory and practice that left me feeling quite capable of.

• I’ll detail the main things I learned day by day, but there’s a canonical book if you want a reference manual, which I shall link to here as well.

• At one point I put a stick close to him, and then he retracted his head inside his body and puffed out his fake head, and after that remained stiff and motionless in that position. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to get a photo of that.

• I captured these recordings as well. Warning, large file size (49MB and 120MB). I made a brief effort to convert them to some more compact format but was losing a lot of image quality in the process. The first video is kind of blurry, but it gives a better exhibition of the interesting “walking” motion.

• I’m moving from a one bedroom apartment to a three bedroom apartment barely a kilometre away. I was supposed to get the keys to the new apartment on Friday 1/9 (that’s the first of September — stop putting the month first; you’re doing it wrong), and since I have my kids this weekend I’ve planned the move for Saturday 9/9 (the day is still before the month, even if you can’t tell). I’ve booked a truck and organised a few friends to help me.

• But as luck would have it I got the keys today at 15:30. And I just can’t wait for two weeks before starting. That’s just too long.

• I packed the car full and drove over. Then did that two more times. Then I parked the car at my old (current?) home and took my bike to the new flat and unpacked the few boxes I’d moved over there and re-assembled the furniture. And in just three hours I had moved a third of my belongings by myself. Because I don’t own much, and I don’t own a single thing that I can’t fit into my car and haven’t carried alone before.

• On Thursday I knew I’d be done the next day at the plant. So I changed my flight to leaving Friday at 1600. Well, before we were supposed to board, the pilot called maintenance. Maintenance never showed up so I missed my connecting flight in Houston. I had United buy me a ticket on American Airlines. I left the secure area of the Lubbock Airport, go my checked luggage, and rechecked in at the American Airlines counter. I had to pay $130 for my checked bags since I do not have status on that airline. I went back through security and waited.

• Today is the August bank holiday Monday for Wales, England and possibly Northern Ireland. Scotland has a bank holiday earlier in the month due to schools starting earlier in the year. This is why I think Northern Ireland might do the same as Scotland as their schools have similar term times. It is often a recipe for disaster thanks to rubbish weather and SO MUCH TRAFFIC. However, I decided to brave it this time and had the past week off work too.

• The first part involved being in Plymouth to see my parents and rest of the family. My parents were holding a party to celebrate their 40th Wedding Anniversary. That was fun in many a strange way and I did spend most of the night in the garage with the drinks. It was cooler and had fewer people hanging around. Always makes for a better time. Then it was my neice’s first birthday. She passed the ‘not a hulk’ test by not smashing her cake. Instead, she daubed herself in the cream and licked away. There was a bit of a face smashing into the cake but I think she just toppled over while trying to lick in fairness.

Technology and Free Software

• Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 sent me down a pretty unexpected rabbit hole this last weekend.

• I had just beaten the main game on PSP and unlocked a bunch of stuff, including one of the levels from Pro Skater 3 I had really enjoyed as a kid. But there were a lot more levels still locked and I realized that the game expected me to complete all the other difficulties to fully unlock everything.

• I didn’t think this was much of a problem, I’d just look up cheat codes (remember those?) and check out all the locked levels that way. But for reasons that only the game devs will ever know, it wouldn’t be that simple.

• I wasn’t expecting this to be so hard. I ordered an RK3588 based Orange Pi 5+ a while back as a development platform. It’s great. A good combination CPU and GPU power. As well as a very competitive price to performance ratio. I also bought a large heat sink for it. However it kept hitting thermal limit under heavy use. Yet, I wasn’t able to find a 5V fan that would fit on top of the heat sink. Even more so, I can’t find any documentation about the GPIO pins.

Internet/Gemini

• I have the bad habit to many tabs open in my browsers, on the Web and on Gemini. And by many I mean hundreds. Yes, seriously.

• I think I started this habit in the late 1990s while still being on dial-up. Pages loaded slowly and I rather clicked one promising link after the other on a SERP to load in a new tab in the background than to follow a link, navigate back, and follow another link.

• For various reasons, every once in a while I have to save all those tabs in bookmark folders to be able to close them and open them later again. Sometimes I forget to delete those bookmark folders and save the tabs again after a couple of weeks or months, depending on the circumstances.

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