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--> So a good while ago I added a fun curl version of my site, meant for viewing in the terminal. Try running these commands! curl nytpu.com/gemlog/2026-03-18 # or curl nytpu.com (sorry Windows users, not my fault that ANSI escape codes are disabled-by-default in cmd.exe . And not my fault that in Powershell you have to use curl.exe instead of curl because Powershell inexplicably aliases that to…
--> For reasons I don't even remember, I was reading about the details of the ELF executable format , and stumbled across the program interpreter functionality used for dynamic linking. Immediately I was struck by one of the more cursed and yet simultaneously pedestrian ideas I've had, but we'll get back to that. For those unacquainted (because who is?), the ELF standard specifies a PT_INTERP type…
--> I wrote a very long reply to someone on the Comp.Lang.Ada Usenet newsgroup about handling text encoding in Ada, which is important information for modern programs and is very poorly documented; so I figured I should duplicate the reply here for posterity. I was replying to this post, archived here. It has an amusing large collection of quotes of people talking about the issues with text…
--> This is a follow-up to my previous post on some reverse-engineering I did for the Nintendo e-Reader. And a more distant follow-up to my other page documenting the e-Reader. As I wrote at the end of my previous post, I left a bunch of loose threads in my reverse-engineering because I just didn't feel like continuing unless I have something specific to research lol. However, if I'm leaving some…
--> So recently I've been doing a bit more reverse engineering of the Nintendo e-Reader for the GBA. The really really cool RetroDotCards project released late last month and I've been having a great time playing the games; and it's inspired me to dig into a few aspects of the e-Reader again (and make some previous research actually discoverable). In case you didn't see it and are interested, I've…
--> I've just had a sudden realization about how people view fiction that I think might be one of the biggest gulfs between how normal people and people like critics or even just normal film/TV/book nerds view media. And is one of the few drivers behind why most new big-budget stuff now is just remakes and sequels and such. Note that for the sake of giving examples and to avoid distasteful but…
--> I finished reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking a few weeks ago, and decided it would be nice to annotate a few quotes I bookmarked and clean up some notes I wrote. Especially since it's rare for me to be left with really memorable quotes or lingering thoughts on a book (that I feel are worth sharing). Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules…
--> A reply to Dmitry Non's post “Common Lisp is a Dumpster” This post was originally just going to be an email but got out of hand in scope so I published it here lol. I'd recommend reading Dmitry's post, there's good points and some interesting obscure stuff mentioned in there. Intro and Outro I think that it’s too old and got a lot of baggage that’s not of any use to someone like me. It feels…
--> I've had the code snippets and a few paragraphs of this post in my drafts for over a year with no accompanying writing, because I don't really have an actual point I'm making. It's just a mildly annoying observation I've made and then wrote a macro to mostly resolve it, and I explicitly am not asking some official solution (something new Lispers are prone to do). But I guess I'll post it…
--> For some reason I'm wondering if in a movie or other professional production , if a character looking into the camera is as bad now as it was previously. From some editors I've talked to and discussions I've read online, the general line of thought is that an actor spiking the camera instantly and irrevocably ruins (that part of) the shot, and it must not under any circumstances be used…
--> I've been playing around with Rust macros a bit recently, and have been slightly annoyed when taking them in comparison with Lisp. To be clear, it including real macros rather than C-style textual macros (or no macros at all) is a real win for Rust, it's just annoying when taken in contrast with Lisp . Primarily, they're just too difficult to write due to Rust not having homoiconic syntax.…
--> I've been sorta sad lately about not doing any real programming. The problem really is that I don't have any itches that I could scratch by writing a new program. I've pretty much scratched them all, with e.g. gemroff and my custom site generator. Of course, I still do have plenty of itches. Just that all of them now are completely outside of my programming ability, such as my ideal archiving…
--> As a loosely-related addendum to my previous post on Ada. Quoting the relevant context from that post that this elaborates on: I also need to touch on one of Ada's design philosophies, which is to avoid dynamic allocation unless actually necessary for safety reasons, since it doesn't have a borrow checker for fully-safe allocation like Rust does 1 . The key problem is that when you use one…
--> DISCLAIMER: I'm not a dentist or dental professional of any sort, you should do whatever they recommend rather than following what I spent five minutes guesstimating XD. A while ago I noticed that fluoride mouthwash has less than 25% the fluoride that toothpaste has in it, and have been wondering if that means it's less effective than using fluoridated toothpaste. I think for maximum effiacy…
--> Random thoughts dump, not particularly organized or trying to make a specific point. No spoilers for anything other than themes that get revealed in like episode 2, and the general concept of the videos containing hidden secrets. Finished watching Petscop (only 7 years late lol), and… hmm. Overall I enjoyed it and it had a great atmosphere, but am pretty dissatisfied. In terms of telling a…
--> I have a handful of Lisp programs running on a personal server, as well as some scripts on my desktop computer; and it's gotten me curious how people typically deploy Common Lisp programs. This is mostly written from the context of a FOSS project, or I suppose a proprietary project that's only used internally so source code is available. As far as I can see, these are the main four options: 1.…
--> This post available in the Pure, OG ROOPHLOCH form on Gopher, as well as on Gemini and the Web (all as per the usual): gopher://nytpu.com/0/gemlog/2024-09-05 gemini://nytpu.com/gemlog/2024-09-05 http://nytpu.com/gemlog/2024-09-05 ROOPHLOCH announcement post & information (Gopher) ROOPHLOCH announcement post & information (Gemini) Every year I've seen it, I always end up forgetting about…
--> Something I find really irritating about the modern culture of film photography is that even though the final result is art, the process is pretty objectively a science—it's literally just a mix of chemistry, optics, sensitometry, and (in color film) colorimetry—and yet the vast majority of resources are very hand-wavy and heavily cargo culty about a random photographer thought this this…
--> Section added for Orpheus Ascending August 29, 2024. Main Game 100% completion time: 26 hours 54 minutes Just finished The Talos Principle 2 ! Overall I liked it but there was a lot more I didn't like than in the first game. I'd still highly recommend it though, at the very least because there's always a major dearth in nice Portal like 3D puzzle games. Overall, at the very least they went for…
--> I wrote the top part of this post and then got sidetracked writing the entire bottom part, but I didn't want to throw out all of it out so I just left it in despite it being essentially unrelated XD. It can be safely ignored. What I find to be the most interesting parts of history is learning how normal people actually lived at a given place and time; but unfortunately it seems to be…
--> I definitely do not need a new DSLR, but sometimes I look at them just to see if there's any interesting models. But wow, Nikon has completely ruined their interesting midrange cameras (a market segment Canon never really cared about either, why I got a Nikon in the first place IIRC). Like, I absolutely love my D7200, it's basically a prosumer camera if you don't need a full-frame sensor . But…
--> There's a webapp I've had a vague idea about making for a long time, and earlier today I was thinking about not having posted on Gemini for a while; so I figured I might as well braindump about the idea and flesh it out some more. Do I expect anyone to make anything even somewhat resembling what I describe here? Hell no! (there's already a dearth of even basic bookmarking utilities like…
--> In response to: “Books vs Internet” by Sandra at Idiomdrottning Even if you're looking at the good parts of the internet, I feel like there's one key difference between a book and a website: books go into much more detail and depth. Like, you can make a website with a book's level of detail and depth, but even in the historical style of personal sites on personal interests it'd be rather rare…
--> Just finished migrating my capule and website to a new server, as well as deploying a number of planned changes! Most of the changes are just making it easier for me to work on my capsule and administrate the server, but there are some nice new things for people other than me too. gemini://nytpu.com/ https://nytpu.com/ Both capsule and website fully support IPv6 Website fully redesigned (with…
--> As time goes on, I more and more strongly refuse to believe the line about there being no such thing as natural talent at something. Both from seeing other people, as well as from my own experiences at trying things. Don't get me wrong, I do believe that nearly anyone can learn a skill to an equivalent level of anyone else with enough dedication and practice (to trot out a cliché), and I'm…
--> A few weeks ago, I saw someone posting on the Fediverse about their experiments with extremely minimalist syntax highlighting (i.e. little to no highlighting at all, other than maybe comments and strings), and had mentioned a few Vim plugins for it. Pinned the plugin tab in my browser because I've been wanting to look into something like that for a while, but didn't get around to it until a…
--> Spoiler alert : I do directly discuss some things shown in the film, though it's a documentary film so what I talk about isn't going to damage the viewing experience in any way IMO. Written on a MacBook Pro while listening to 10 Years by an Unkindness. Listening to Kenny G (2021) is a very fascinating look at the extraordinarily polarizing musician Kenny G. I've had it on my watchlist since…
--> Part 1 Part 2 Part 3: You are here Written on a MacBook Pro while watching The only CDROM drive with a Turbo button! After writing the post for Part 2, I was pretty much out of ideas to do before putting it back together. The only things I could think of would be recapping the analog board (that I should do eventually but it currently seems in perfect condition) and cleaning the contacts on…
--> Part 1 Part 2: You are here Part 3 (Final) Written on a MacBook Pro while listening to Sardonicast . Continued from Part 1, linked above. So despite my prediction: Mouser is very fast to ship so luckily I think the parts will arrive first, followed by the keyboard & mouse, and I expect the Wombat will doddle since it's not made or shipped by Professional BigCorp. the keyboard & mouse arrived…
--> Part 1: You are here Part 2 Part 3 (Final) Written on a MacBook Pro while listening to Blondie's Autoamerican . Yesterday I got a free, partially functional Macintosh Classic II , courtesy of the Media Archaeology Lab . If you're willing to go to Boulder, Colorado to pick one up, they might still have some available! I didn't think to write any posts here about it until just now, so this story…
--> In which I discuss miscellaneous thoughts on making a cyberdeck. Written on an NEC PC-8201A while watching random youtube videos. 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…
--> In my now slightly outdated post about using NetMD devices with Linux, I included an appendix comparing LP2 and LP4 audio (as encoded by atracdenc) with MP3. I wanted to expand that into a full post with many more comparisons, since I'd always heard that the quality of ATRAC audio greatly depends on what encoded it, with decoding not having a significant effect—i.e. you can use a high-quality…
--> In which I discuss my thoughts on the Playdate console and the games I've played on it. Written on an MacBook Pro while listening to the Fistshark Marketing podcast. So after literally two years of shipping delays, my Playdate console finally arrived on 2023-01-13! I've had it over six months now and I figure I can give good thoughts on it, having played all the Season One games and a good…
--> Gemini isn't trying to solve the failures of the Web in the same way that PICO-8 isn't trying to solve the failures of AAA games Prefatory Matters First, the post by Daniel Stenberg, creator and primary maintainer/BDFL of the venerable cURL library & utility: Daniel Stenberg: The Gemini Protocol Seen by This HTTP Client Person Fediverse thread with my initial thoughts (and Tomasino's) And the…
--> Last week or so I finally sat down and wrote my pretty ideal binding macro for Common Lisp—basically a rite of passage for any Lisper given all the other ones I've stumbled across. I just fully rewrote it yesterday after using it in some real code and cleaning it up a bit; so I guess I should actually tell people about it in case anyone ends up interested in it since I really like it so far.…
--> In which I discuss noted differences between coffee and tea drinkers. Written on an NEC PC-8201A while listening to Dizzy Up the Girl by the Goo Goo Dolls. I remain convinced that coffee drinkers don't actually like coffee and only drink it for the caffine. I've tried really nice coffee brewed fancily and while it's marginally better it's still bitter and awful. Versus drinking loose leaf tea…
--> In which I discuss my thoughts on the video game SOMA (2015). Written on a MacBook Pro while listenting to nothing XD I should try finishingS SOMA (2015). I really adore the story and the general atmosphere of it; but it's the only game I stopped playing because it scared me too much. It's very well executed but the scariness isn't exclusively because of that, it's more the weird biomechanical…
--> In which I discuss recent repairs and upgrades I've done for several of my devices. Written on a MacBook Pro while listening to the Bugsnax Original Soundtrack by Seth Parker. For the past several years I've been using a 45 W MacBook Air charger for my Macbook Pro, because the real 85 W MacBook Pro charger I had got burnt out from a power surge or something at a previous school; new ones cost…
--> Hey look, somebody much smarter than I am wrote a detailed blog post about a random toot I wrote in thirty seconds with no thought: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/CAsAbstractMachine P.S. they're fully correct, I'm not gonna pull the can't capture nuance in 200 characters excuse because tilde.zone has a 5000 character limit, but whatever. That is all.
--> In which I discuss miniseries as an art form in comparison with feature films and television shows; and then digress into contrasting films and television in general. Written on a MacBook Pro in Neovim while listening to the Bugsnax Original Soundtrack (2021) by Seth Parker. So the other day on Fedi I posted a random poll that came to mind, but it ended up really getting my thoughts going: Are…
--> In which I discuss the history of close_notify in the Gemini commuity and assuade some fears. In response to: nervuri: “Many capsules don't send TLS close_notify” reidrac: “Re: Many capsules don't send TLS close_notify” Written on an NEC PC-8201A, while listening to Carrie & Lowell (2015) by Sufjan Stevens. close_notify has been a surprisingly big topic on Gemini since it was brought up on the…
--> In which I share my thoughts and complaints on the new 0.5x version of Dwarf Fortress , with an extra addendum helping new players get started with the game. Written on a 2015 Macbook Pro (running Linux), naturally while listening to the new Dwarf Fortress Soundtrack . (IDK I've seen a lot of phlogs do this and I want to be cool and hip). Dwarf Fortress (now the retronymically named classic…
--> The second new program I've been working on for a while and finished this month, I'm announcing the release of the Gemroff markup language! https://git.sr.ht/~nytpu/gemroff It's both an Ada library and a CLI utility for parsing and rendering Gemroff markup to a variety of formats, currently: Gemtext HTML Plaintext TTY (plaintext with added VT100 escape sequences for terminal viewing) Per the…
--> Okay now that I've finished the bulk of Lasso, I'm currently pondering what features I absolutely want in a smallnet client I'd like to write. I've assembled an incomplete list, more for my reference than for anybody else. (although I'd love somebody backing me up that they want features like these as well!) Must support: variable-width text, because I cannot comfortably read fixed-width prose…
--> lasso.nytpu.com (only on Gemini, no web mirror) I'm announcing the release of my new service for Gemini, Lasso! It's a bookmarking service oriented akin to Wallabag or Pocket; that's oriented towards bookmarking articles, gemlog posts, and other primarily written material (perfect for Gemini!). It also archives bookmarked articles to help mitigate link rot—I know for me personally, there's…
--> The #1 reason I hear to discourage people from using rolling-release Linux distributions is that they're unstable and will constantly break. However, I'd like to present an anecdote here about how I've had more issues with Debian in terms of updates breaking things than I ever have had on Artix (an systemd-less Arch derivative). And no, I don't mean rolling releases only caused minor issues…
--> So I just beat Untitled Goose Game . Actually beat it this time, when I last played (when it came out) I did the regular New Game+ tasks but didn't do the timed tasks because a few of them are insanely difficult and annoying. This time, the back garden timed tasks were still a real bitch but I actually persevered! A clip from Untitled Goose Game, of the goose wearing a blue ribbon around its…
--> Today in IRC (#lisp in libera.chat) there was an interesting question posed: are plists or alists older? or were both always used? So I decided to go dig in the Lisp 1 Programmer's Manual (1960) and the Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual (1962). I'm sure there's lots of computing history buried in those pages, from how real programming on the IBM 704 is done to how they made a full-featured…
--> A response to ~tfurrows' post “A Nielsen Buck” (That's right, I'm responding to a Phlog post on Gemini because I'm <del>that much of an asshole</del> that cool) I remember getting some time in the past few years a mailer from the big G that was something similar. It was actually worse though, it was something to the tune of plugging a thing into your router and it MITMs your traffic (or at…
--> I'm not a movie reviewer so I'm mostly just gonna be rambling about what I thought about the film. It's my capsule I can do what I want, I'm trying to stop making every post be professional quality when I just feel like casually writing. ⁂ So I just saw Everything Everywhere All at Once today, and I really enjoyed it. I meant to see it a few weeks ago when it got a wide release but never got…