Gary Wong

I'm Gary, and I've been on the web one way or another for over quarter of a century, but I'm new to social media.

I've lived in #Aotearoa #NewZealand and #USA, and visited various other places. For most of my life I've been a #SystemsProgrammer at a university.

Have trouble fitting thoughts to 500 characters, so omit many words, sorry.

Public Key

npub1rtxgjeegm2qu5cyqtpedmcuh2a75cp794pj5f78ry00yqje25t2qtg463a

NIP-05 Address

gtw_at_mastodon.nz@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsp4nyfvu5d4qw2vzq9sukauwt4wl2vqlz6se2ylr3j8hjqfv4294qpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgqgkwaehxw309aex2mrp0yh8qunfd4skctnwv46q98mfyu

Publishing to

relay.nostr.band

relay.primal.net

Author Public Key

npub1rtxgjeegm2qu5cyqtpedmcuh2a75cp794pj5f78ry00yqje25t2qtg463a

Show more details

Last Notes

2024-09-29 03:57:25

- reply

@npub1cg3…3u5d Oh, funny you should say that, I actually run #sxmo (on #postmarketOS) on it when it's not booted into the #buildroot hack thing. I like #sxmo, though it's not exactly what I want.
(Another contender in the close-but-not-quite category is #GNU #Guix System... an excellent general purpose system, but not quite what I would like on a phone.)

2024-09-29 03:57:25

- reply

2024-09-29 03:04:40

Last month I fell over on my way down a mountain, wrecking my old #phone. I ordered a #PinePhone to replace it.
Since it arrived, I've patched and compiled and flashed a custom #U-Boot loader, #Linux kernel, #GNU system, #TheModemDistro modem firmware, #buildroot configuration, etc. etc., and now have a (just) working phone.
(...no, I can't justify my approach. I usually rely on people having sufficient good taste not to ask why, or sufficient intuition to avoid me entirely.)

2024-09-29 03:04:40

2024-08-31 19:06:43

- reply

@npub1xfh…awf9 To be frank I find that attitude a little bit narrow-minded... I suggest they consider occasionally accepting a little bit of very very hard rock, for variety.

2024-07-29 14:00:36

- reply

@npub1h84…nc6k Oh, the chagrin! They're probably not caring about racing, either!

2024-07-27 02:48:55

- reply

@npub1xfh…awf9 Phew, I'm relieved to hear the situation didn't turn violin't.

2024-07-11 05:17:20

#Sunset from 3200 metres (10600 feet) above sea level.
https://mastodon.nz/system/media_attachments/files/112/766/143/480/196/947/original/1e00270208549fe4.jpeg

2024-06-24 03:41:04

I like #camping...
...but I'm not thrilled about having to extrapolate a few decades into the future to interpret the food expiry dates. If I really wanted to contemplate the likelihood of me surviving longer than my lunch, I'd have run for #PrimeMinister of the #UK.
https://mastodon.nz/system/media_attachments/files/112/669/474/825/874/549/original/ad6563a52dba26bd.jpeg
https://mastodon.nz/system/media_attachments/files/112/669/475/805/512/121/original/9a846a317a741432.jpeg

2024-06-14 05:13:54

- reply

@npub12gw…tn96 Couldn't agree more!

2024-06-14 05:02:52

- reply

@npub12gw…tn96 It could be used in rather rare scenarios (it would be for old-style multi-screen setups, without Xinerama/xrandr, e.g., with DISPLAY=:0.1).
Yes, xrdb can set SCREEN_RESOURCES (see the "-screen" option).

2024-05-30 14:21:26

- reply

@npub1tvx…4myx Very nice... hope to exchange cards with you one day!

2024-05-05 13:21:52

- reply

@npub18nw…hnsh Congratulations! 😀
I've also worked them twice, but on different bands (17 m and 15 m for me).

2024-05-03 23:42:49

- reply

@npub1esh…5fqz Duh, silly me! I've heard several stations calling 3D2CCC recently, but assumed the 3D2 prefix was Fiji. I would have paid more attention if I'd known earlier!

2024-05-03 03:54:25

- reply

@npub1tvx…4myx Excellent! Is that the one above the the (tr)uSDX in the first photo on your QRZ page?
By coincidence, I used the IRF510 partly because I had some left over from an HF power amp project!

2024-04-19 01:12:41

- reply

@npub1x3w…daly ...and, children, that was what the 20th century was like.

2024-04-03 23:18:30

- reply

@npub1zu8…0z5k Excellent!!

2024-03-25 13:51:30

Happy #Tolkien Reading Day! (And anniversary of the fall of Barad-dûr.)
Today I will reread The Shadow of the Past, including my favourite #quote in all #fantasy: "[Gollum/Sméagol] deserves [death]! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

2024-03-19 00:43:25

- reply

@npub1axm…dsle It did control the water once it was reattached... the fatal flaw in my instinctive plan was me noticing the handle must be attached BEFORE I could make and drink the coffee I needed to cope with it all.

2024-03-16 14:17:59

- reply

@npub15tj…6d8p If you were a Greek god wanting to punish a mortal for narcissism, perhaps you'd send them for eternity to a place where each day, the narcissist would observe two random strangers, interacting with each other through mutual compassion alone. For the next 24 hours, the narcissist would be left in bewildered anguish, trying to decide WHICH of the two strangers "must have" just brutally exploited the other.
Mr. Armstrong, feeling goodwill is "totally foreign", suggests he's there already.

2024-03-16 02:51:33

- reply

@npub1f3n…e887 I am routinely dismayed how badly everything ends up working when searching for digital books via the university library site, and routinely pleased how well everything works when searching independent archives.
Let's look for a chapter of Aaron Swartz's "The Boy Who..." on libgen.is... because we can.

2024-03-15 02:35:37

- reply

@npub1xfh…awf9 Wow, very nice! I'm afraid I'm on my third microwave oven in this house (the little plastic wheels on the previous turntable eventually eroded the paint beneath, so the bare case started to rust in the steamy environment, and after the oven started arcing over the gap, I eventually gave up and replaced it).
I wonder how much work your old cavity magnetron has done... if it's been running often enough, it could have oscillated well beyond 3,000,000,000,000,000,000 cycles by now.

2024-03-10 16:14:24

- reply

@npub1jlv…ctnj The 10,000,000,000 transistor computer I complained about is a Raspberry Pi 2 (8,589,934,592 transistors in its DRAM cells, many millions more in its CPUs, GPU, etc.) It's true (if very one-sided) that it often struggles with ads on web pages.
To be more fair, that computer can also run Stockfish on advanced levels, and (although people quibble over details) can beat any human in a chess game. Not bad for something the price of two movie tickets, and which can run on a little battery!

2024-03-09 01:52:59

- reply

@npub17cz…utc6 But if we consider Boolean circuits ("induced subcircuits" of a universal directed acyclic graph of Boolean operations), then I guess almost all sufficiently large Boolean circuits perform enough computation that you could attach them to a tape reader/writer to construct a universal Turing machine? And by Rice's theorem, almost all such circuits exhibit undecidable behaviour...
Someone must've thought of that, but I don't know a name for it ("Rado circuit" gives no search hits).

2024-03-09 01:46:52

- reply

@npub17cz…utc6 Hmmm, that's a fascinating question! I'd never considered it before, but presumably any circuit is an "induced subcircuit" of a universal circuit, just as any countable graph is an induced subgraph of the Rado graph?
In the analogue case (where we imagine connecting real physical components), perhaps that doesn't help much, since I'm guessing you get "useless" results such as almost all sufficiently large circuits result in short circuits and metastability...

2024-03-09 01:29:24

- reply

@npub1ja0…7ugn "Here's to progress: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems!"

2024-03-08 04:59:43

- reply

@npub1mh6…cnmj Same for me! I suspect my copy is still lying around my parents' house somewhere.
I learned from that, and also a purple paperback book about the 6502 whose name I can't remember right now, but I borrowed it over and over again from the public library until it finally sank in.

2024-03-08 03:59:15

With 1 #transistor, I can make an inverter, a switch, or a not-very-good amplifier.
With 2 transistors, I can make a differential amplifier, a cascode, or a latch.
With 3 transistors, I can make a fairly good (Wilson) current mirror, or a Lorenz chaotic system.
20,000 transistors made a #computer that navigated spacecraft to the Moon and back.
But 10,000,000,000 transistors make a computer that's brought to its knees if it tries to interpret the Javascript used to load one #ad on a web page.

2024-02-10 05:57:40

Oof... another shipment of #hamradio #QSL cards arrived from the bureau. It feels like I only just responded to the previous batch (I try to handle them fairly quickly, since it gets harder to face a backlog). But I've run out of my cards and will need to order more from the printer, so there'll be a delay this time.
To QSO is human, to QSL divine!
https://mastodon.nz/system/media_attachments/files/111/905/621/035/901/754/original/c0f1495d1012ecd2.jpeg
https://mastodon.nz/system/media_attachments/files/111/905/621/529/946/502/original/e53b87b41f8bfd0e.jpeg