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● 08.13.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 12/08/2023: Using the Librem 5 and Late Stage Music Player

Posted in News Roundup at 11:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

=> ↺ the marathon of the past months

• gee it’s been a while. i’ve been meaning to share my running progress on here more diligently than this. the past two months demanded a lot from me. i haven’t gotten to practice running a lot. even if i did, i don’t think i would’ve been able to track my progress and share my thoughts on it. but i’ll start off with some good news first.

• i started running because i wanted to run a small marathon at the end of june. it was 4.7k and i had about two months to prep as someone who never ran before. my goal was a pace below 6 mins per km. i absolutely crushed that goal. i finished with a final time of 25:17 which translates to 5:22 per km. that’s my fastest pace to date. i ended up in the top 20% with my final time which is still beyond me.

=> ↺ Old Friend, New Lover

• There is something in me that wants to grow a long beard and disappear into the forest. There is someone in me who wants to merge with another through some emotional transfer. Can these desires be cycled in synchrony with the realities?

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: ZDIRWYA Wordo: CLOWN

=> ↺ EDH 101

• I was talking to a guy on mtgzone who doesn’t like EDH.

• I used to have the same problem. It used to feel like it was full of invisible and unwritten rules that all contradicted each other. Getting bullied if cards are too strong or too weak.

• Casual EDH, that is: as you point out, competitive EDH doesn’t have the same problem.

Religion

=> ↺ August 13, 2023 – Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost (G)

• God in His holy place; God Who maketh men of one mind to dwell in a house: He shall give power and strength to His people. (Psalm) Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered: and let them that hate Him flee from before His face. Glory be to the Father. God in His holy place…

• [...]

• Almighty and everlasting God, Who in the abundance of Thy kindness art wont to go beyond our merits and our prayers: pour down Thy mercy on us: forgive us aught whereof our conscious is afraid, and grant us all we dare not ask in prayer. Through our Lord.

Technology and Free Software

=> ↺ So I built a HRNG – how do I know if it’s any good?

• Out of curiosity, and to use up some of my big bunch of quad op amps, I decided to build a hardware random number generator. It is comprised of 16 individual 12V-Zener-Diode noise generators, which feed into 8 comparators to generate 8 output bits at once. Those 8 bits can be sampled as a single byte by a microcontroller and then sent over UART to a PC. The principle is based on the Lampert circuit, where two uncorrelated noise sources are fed into a single comparator, to avoid biasing problems due to a shifting operating point in the Zener noise sources.

=> ↺ phones, queueing theory and a software project

• It seems evident to me that if everybody keeps buying a new phone every three years, there are going to be some problems. Running out of certain metals is one that’s on the horizon, and most people reading this will already be familiar with the growing global problem of e-waste. So I consider it more or less a responsibility to use my devices for as long as possible. In particular: I’m currently still using my first smartphone, an iPhone 5s that I got in 2015. Unfortunately, I’m seeing some signs that I might not be able to keep that up for much longer. By all accounts, iOS 12 has received its last update and will likely be designated end-of-life later this year, and with it the 5s. That electronic devices have an “end of life” is one of those things… if only it wasn’t the norm for software to always become bigger and more demanding.

=> ↺ Using the Librem 5 – Review

• I am an iOS developer for a Fortune 500 company. I taught myself and started developing iPhone apps in 2009. I later joined the mobile team of the company in 2010. So I have been using and programming the iPhone from the beginning. Apple opened up development and the AppStore for the iPhone in 2008.

• While I liked the iPhone for what it was, I remember telling my boss in 2010, “What I really want is an iPhone that I could plug into a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and it would give me a full OS X desktop” (later renamed macOS). He told me that the technology to use a phone as a full desktop exists, but that companies were not marketing it. I don’t remember if he said why, but I can imagine that it is because companies like Apple want to sell you both a Mac and a phone. There is no economic incentive to give you an “all in one” device.

=> ↺ Late Stage Music Player

• Granted I do not much listen to music these years—or too much if I’m obsessing over something like the second section of a Menuet, but that’s not really what most would call listening to music. If I want some background noise there is the “music player”

=> ↺ Thinkin’ About A Cyberdeck

• So this is a pie-in-the-sky project I’m not going to pursue for a long time (if I ever do), but I’m sure you could make a really neat cyberdeck in the style of ’80s microcomputers using an AVR. “But they’re microcontrollers not microprocessros, and Harvard architecture to boot!” you might say, but they can easily self-program though their “bootloader” mechanism. So the bootloader could be like a “system ROM” running BASIC or Forth or an assembler or whatever, and then the rest of flash could be dedicated to the user’s programs (which nicely get persisted through power cycles, unlike most microcomputers!). If you want to get really elaborate maybe have separate ATTiny’s abstracting the display and keyboard handling so the main AVR can deal exclusively with user code, but even the ATMega328 can probably handle all that just fine. And of course there’d have some way of storing programs and data outside of the internal flash, probably an SD card or CompactFlash.

=> ↺ Random generators on wiki pages

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Hai să campăm!

• This camping trip has been a lot of fun and a lot of work. It’s been forever since I’ve slept in a tent, and using Gemini over low-bandwidth connections just feels right.

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