Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 1.6 eyed or so

    The door opens, letting in a gust of fresh or rather cold air and a man. Someone had coined the phrase "a dude turning sixty and wondering if this is it, or not" for him. It created a few chuckles at the time. The man walks up to the bar, where ~bartender is busy about something.

  • The Case of Mistaken Identity Part

    Ms. Stoliz glided past Holmes as though there had been a choreographed waltz for which neither of them had music. A slight breach of the decorum of societal protocol was the way in which Ms. Stoliz did not immediately assume her seat. Rather, she stood in the seating area near a chair-- which one assumed, as her hand rested on it, that her proximity suggested she was to be seated. Instead, she stood there in that posture, and waited for Holmes to take his gangling-long strides to convey himself to the seating area.

  • It's a Leap Year!

    That's the post.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Emacs: Centered, Stable Cursor View (publ. 2024-02-29)

    There are two thing I don't like about how Emacs handles the cursor by default:

    (1) The cursor moves all over the place vertically as you next-line, scroll up, and such like. (2) As you move vertically, the placement of the cursor tends to move all over the place horizontally. This is because it is trying to maintain a goal cursor position but also has to stay within the limits of the number of characters in each line.

  • Daywalking Burdock’s Valley

    Four variants, speeds times hours. The “30” prefix means three miles per hour (90/30 in old school) and the “20” prefix means two miles oer hour (60/20). The 08 suffix means eight hours per day and the 10 suffix means ten hours per day. For 120/40 speed, just use a 20 map but walk two hexes.

    For example, if you walk for eight hours every day with speed 90/30, use the dabab-30x08.png map. One hex per day.

    We’re still gonna use the normal small hex map for exploring new areas or looking for bandits but this is gonna be great for when we just wanna go between Arden Vul and Bilsham which we do all the time and I’m kinda sick of fiddling with fine-grained hexes when the fun is whether or not we run into anyone. I even forgot to roll night-time encounter’s today’s session because I was so bogged down with counting hexes for the 50th time.

  • Raspberry Pi Incus Cluster

    I have build up an Incus cluster with 4 Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) in a nice metal case. I build it mostly for tinkering with it. Let's see if it gets a serious purpose. For my NAS, SyncThing and other servers I have a Lenovo ThinkCentre M900 Tiny I7-6700T Proxmox host. I had 3 spare RPi4s and as the prices dropped with the arrival of the Pi5 I bought another RPi4 to complete my build.

    [...]

    I chose Raspberry Pi OS with Incus as a system container and virtual machine manager contrary to LXD which is now owned by Canonical and I don't like to be bound to corporate interests. I don't want to need to buy a "Pro" version in future or what Canonical comes up with. LXD and Incus will diverge for sure but I think Incus is my best bet.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Invitation to MAIL ART exchange

      To all artists interested in mail art exchange. Please circulate among artists who might be interested. Send me an email with your post address, and I'll try to send you a piece of mail art.

      Mail art had its heyday in the 1970's when postal services were more reliable and not competing with electronic communication. The Fluxus movement in particular favoured the mundane letter and postcard media.

    • Hello World

      Hello small net, I’m ~deimos. ~bartender, I’d like a coffee with ⅓ eggnog and some sugar.

      I’m in my late twenties, married, German and I’m doing vocational training to become a sysadmin. In my free time I sometimes do boxing, play board games or go for walks. Besides that I like to re-watch anime or slowly play through my Steam library. I found the name “Deimos” when I was 14 or so and thought “dread” - the translation from Old Greek sounds cool and edgy. Any coincidence with with the cosmos is accidental.

    • Some thoughts about indyweb

      I was wandering weather something like this could be done on Gemini. I know people use to reply to other people's posts on their own gemlogs and capsules, but is there some way to implement webmentions (I guess gemmentions in that case) and other tools for replies? I read also that people use the cosmos aggregator to check if someone has replied to some of their posts. Does anyone know if there are any established procedures?

    • February 2024 Blog update

      Last month I started some updates on my blog to join the IndieWeb… And that put me in a path of many changes and updates to my blog. I found the joy of my internet beginning with many small tweaks and improvement. I also want to make my website more and more my central place on the web and thus the "source of truth" in term of content I'm publishing on it and elsewhere.

  • Software Releases/Announcements

    • New Aya v0.5.0 Soon

      Well, now that my surgery is out of the way, I've been slowly easing back into my programmin projects, and Aya (my Gemini server, which hosts this site) is first up on my list.

      The biggest addition is probably going to be a new alternative CGI specification that I call "Aya UnixSocket CGI" (UCGI or AUCGI). This is quite similar to FastCGI[1] in that you start Aya, start separate daemons that handle UCGI requests, and then use Unix domain sockets to communicate between the two. Though this makes things a bit more complicated, the benefit is[2] higher overall throughput since a new process isn't created for each CGI request. The current specification for this is linked below, though keep in mind this isn't finalized yet until Aya v0.5.0 is out, and is still going to be considered experimental even after that.

  • Programming

    • Energy System Revisited

      There can be wrinkles with an energy system, notably to not run any new agents (until the next go-round) and also if two agents move at the same time, and the first kills the other, does the other still get to move? These issues can be worked around in various ways; like, maybe new agents that are spawned go onto a "new agents" list, and that list gets merged with the main list the next time around. Also agents could be collected, and those that run at the same instant could all be run through, possibly after sorting them somehow (rolling for initiative), or like in other games applying the results after everything act that instant.

      C is notably lacking in "push agents to a list" and that sort of thing, so an alternative is the tricky use of "alive" and "newbie" flags: agents only are considered for action if they are alive. Next, all agents with zero energy have their update function run, but only if they are alive XOR newbie. After all agents have been gone through, the newbie flag is cleared, so that the next time around those previous newbies will be considered, have their energy number checked and decreased, etc.

      [...]

      Including a "screw you, future me" comment as I suspect that sucker won't have a clue what is going on with the code. Probably this needs some like tests for all the different edge cases.

    • A small template engine for C

      Let’s say, just for a moment, that you’re mad enough to write a web application in C.

      (I’m probably beyond salvation at this point, but I like C, it’s my favourite programming language, and I like to hack on fun things in my limited spare time.)