Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CDYNOSI Wordo: DOWRY

  • How I clean jewelry

    I learned to clean jewelry a couple of years ago and I think it is such a useful skill to have if you are blessed to have one or two pieces of fine jewelry that you wear frequently. Like the obvious example that most women who get married have an expensive diamond ring. Or even if you only wear costume jewelry but want to brighten it up a little bit, I've done this on my inexpensive jewelry too with good results.

  • Hello!

    It has been quite a while since I last came here. I started drinking again, like not in an alcoholic way but like drinks with friends. I left it for no reason and started it for no reason.

  • Introductions, hello, hello!

    Been looking through the window for a while, but I figure that's creepy and I should just head on inside and grab a drink with the rest of yous :)

  • Naiad

    I've been on Naiad for approximately forty days and forty nights now, enough to see Thalassa looming through the sky twice, and I must admit that more than anything else, I miss my cat. My "office" is adjacent to the greenhouse and atmospherically controlled at a temperature much more to my liking than when I'm strolling among the flora. Humidity has never been my bag, having grown up in a parched wasteland. There are some scabs of youth one can never quite pick away.

  • Five good things

    I'm sharing five good things from this past week. I missed last week because my sister and I made dinner for our ladies' Bible Study on Friday, a big project but a lot of fun. We made a beloved meal from college days, Thai peanut chicken wraps. And Caesar salad, which I fondly remember Melissa asking for every year on her birthday when we were kids.

  • Fuck depression

    I don't want the tug of war in the morning, I don't need the burden of duty fighting my broken brain over getting out of bed, but it is back - the awfully, completely terrifying mouth full of teeth is back.

  • getting to know the somnia tarot

• Photos

  • 2024 Week 17/18: Thoughts and Photos

    The mainline Internet was once a mere set of tools and connections to access information on computers that were not yours. The openness and increasing ease of such access through the 1990s and early 2000s led to people adopting the Internet in droves. Then, about fifteen to twenty years ago, the Internet began to change. Today, the machinery of the modern Web is designed to try to control access as much as possible. Content is hidden behind restrictive APIs, account requirements, hefty paywalls, and pervasive tracking. One reason I love Gemini is that it is designed from the ground up to make information as easy to access as possible, and extensions to make it more difficult are explicity disallowed.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Smashing Windows

    It finally happened. Windows 11 annoyed me so much that I completely removed it from all my systems. I've always kept it around in dual-boot for work purposes...

    [...]

    I like to run my systems light; I have no tolerance for apps that serve no useful purpose to me. I tired to remove a whole bunch of pre-installed bloat from Windows, and they'd just come right on back; despite setting registry keys to values that are supposed to prevent the re-install, they'd appear like clockwork on every reboot.

    I'm not surprised; it's the way the world has gone. The Web has been doing it for years, thus Operating Systems-as-a-Service was sure to follow.

  • My Enduring Love Affair with Linux: A Journey Through Open Source

    My fascination with Linux began in the hazy days of the 90s, a time when dial-up connections screeched and computer labs were battlegrounds for nerds and enthusiasts. Back then, Linux felt like a hidden world, a sprawling codebase brimming with potential. It took until 2004, however, for me to finally conquer the elusive task – installing a fully functional Linux system.

    That first successful installation, etched in my memory as Ubuntu 7.04, was a revelation. Here was a system that, for the first time, allowed me to connect to the vast well of online knowledge. Stuck on a configuration issue? No problem, the Linux community was just a forum post away. This newfound ability to troubleshoot and delve deeper ignited a passion for understanding the inner workings of my computer.

  • British operating systems, part one

    By some weird coincidence Ralf from The Sysop Tale Phlog installed RISC OS 5.30 on the very same day as I did, while writing about it on one local IT news server. About a year ago I dedicated for RISC OS my old Raspberry Pi 2B, for which I didn't have any relevant use anymore and since then I am amazed by this nice operating system, in fact the one and only true ARM operating system, which was designed with ARM in mind back in 1980s.

  • Atari System V Release 4.0

    I spent the weekend in the Moravian city of Olomouc, where I attended Atariada 2024[1], the largest local meetup of users, developers, and fans of Atari computers. As for the 8-bit scene, there is for me nothing better than Sinclair: ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Z88 - you name it. I even love the Sinclair QL, which was 68k-based (68008 to be precise) but that platform never even started, not here in the middle of Europe. On the other hand Atari ST and compatibles, that's a totally different story; that was a big thing in the 1990s, and it is no surprise that Atariada is a larger event than any other single-brand oriented convention here in the Czech Republic.

  • My hardware setup for 2024

    Some things change, some don't.

    It's been more than three years since I wrote about my hardware setup and even if a significant part of my daily driver hardware changed, the core remains stable.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re-discovering Gemini

      I first spun-up my Gemini server in 2021. It was new, exciting, there was lots to discover. As with anything, enough time passes that life gets in the way, and my Gemspace presence drifted into nothingness. Well, I'm back and happy to say Gemspace has really grown. There's Station and Antenna, and a whole heap of other new capsules that I've bookmarked. And this time feels different. I'm not living off the dopamine-high of it being new and cool; it being here at all is enough for me.

    • Diverging Values and the Scroll Protocol [Ed: Microsofter trying to EEE Gemini]

      I have been disatisfied with Gemini for a while. It's not because it's terrible, but because it doesn't meet what I think its full potential is, and excuses are often made for this. There is a diverging of values between what I wished Gemini to be vs. what Gemini has developed into. I am going to do the unspeakable and post a former Node.JS developer's talk on Platform Values, where he explains how the values of Node.JS in the beginning changed around 2012-2014 to become more aligned to the values of JavaScript. Originally, Node.JS was focused on performance, simplicity, and approachability, but over time the community moved toward JavaScript's values of velocity, expressiveness, and approachability, and this resulted in many core developers leaving the project.

    • Bongusta update, April 2024

      After about a year I made an update of Bongusta: I removed all phlogs that didn't have a single post in last twelve months and I also added some new phlogs.

  • Programming

    • Sixty years of BASIC

      According to multiple sources, the BASIC programming language is 60 today. For me, it was the very first programming language I ever saw and even today it's together with Python, SQL and C# the language I use most.

    • Emacs as a Shell: Part 1 (publ. 2024-05-06)

      I've been reading various Internet documents lately on this subject, and exploring it in my own processes. So I feel like I want to share my ruminations.

      [...]

      With ideas 1 and 2, typically the goal is to get a good terminal emulator running in Emacs and then proceed to interact with the system through the bash shell. More and more, I feel that this approach is misguided. Emacs provides a much nicer and more powerful interface to the system than bash, or any other command line shell, due to the Emacs interface itself — e.g., all the great tools we have for launching commands and completions with keyboard shortcuts — and also the built-in elisp engine.

    • Recho

      This is a shell function that works like echo, except it echoes all the arguments in random order.

    • Random Prayer (publ. 2024-05-05)

      Our pastor has encouraged us to pray through our church membership list, using our church phone directory, which is available to members only. The idea is to pray for one church member or church family per day in the directory, so there aren't any church members you forget to pray for. A nice side benefit is it helps me to get familiar with all the names of the church members, including those I don't spend a lot of time with.

      [...]

      This is easy to do using shell-command and a call to the "sort" program.