Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — CDEPRUV Wordo: CURS

  • I First Walked Its Pitched Sidewalk

    My iterations in Pagan Park map the manner that my psyche has grown throughout the last 19 years. I believe I first walked its pitched sidewalk during the xmas season of 2005, a few months after my parents moved to Seminole from Fort Stockton. I have no prior recollection of being in the park before then. My parents took over my grandmother's house here, so I had been to Seminole before, of course, upon hundreds of occasions. However, as a child or even a teen, I'd never been allowed to *wander*. I was either in the house reading a book or listening to music or both or with my parents and some extra-solace locale.

  • New Motorcycle

    I've written before on this log about wanting to get a motorcycle. There are a lot of reasons why, ranging from the fun aspect to the economic and environmental impact of driving a car to and from work daily. A few weeks ago I took my Basic Riders Skills course offered by the BMV and passed the examination, so as of last week I have a valid motorcycle endorsement on my driver's license.

    Now, my original plan had been to buy a new bike. I was looking seriously at Royal Enfield, as the price is incredibly low for what you get. I'm also a huge fan of classic British motorcycles and the Enfield's, while made in India, trace their heritage back to Britain and have retained their classic styling. They're simple designs for the most part, which also appeals to me.

• Science

  • # Thoughts and things - a tinylog

    So, the global surface air temperature in april, 2024, was the warmest recorded according to Copernicus. This was the 11:th month in a row with the warmest measured temperature.

• Technology and Free Software

  • How do you keep your computers alive?

    If we care about the longterm health of our computers to reduce consumption and wasting of minerals and other elements, we can try to keep using our devices and our computers as long as possible. I've written about some areas relating to permacomputing in the past. Here I'll detail some of the steps I've taken to keep my main laptop "alive" as long as possible.

    For those interested in the details (not usually me!), my laptop is a Dell XPS 13 7390 (aka Linux Developer's Edition) from 2019 running Intel i7 at 4.7GHZ. Neofetch tells me it is running Intel Comet Lake UHD Graphics, which came with the laptop and is likely middle of the road, but I don't know. I don't think it's high end but it's not low end either. But what it is, is currently 5 1/2 years old.

  • Now simulcast to the Web and Geminispace!

  • Registered Computer Professionals

    In my country, forestry is a regulated profession. That means that there are specific legal requirements workers must meet to work in the industry. Namely, they must pass particular examinations and pay a certain membership fee to the relevant provincial organization.

    Registered professional foresters are expected to uphold the interests of not only their employers, but also the public and other RPFs. They're also required to undergo continued professional development and uphold a code of conduct.

  • amalgamation

    I figured the appropriate spot for a homespace was probably the same as the 2D homepage. So I started figuring out the best way to combine the two things into one page. Janusweb is kind of intended to be embedded in normal 2d pages this way anyway, but I wanted to be able to selectively enable it.

  • System76 serval: Pop!_OS vs. Fedora and NVIDIA drivers

    So, I got a System 76 Serval WS 17" for work a while ago. It came with Pop!_OS installed, which was ok, except it is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with a GNOME based desktop with System 76's own alterations. But the System 76 folks have been working on their own NEW desktop written in Rust, and haven't updated the operating system to a newer version. (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is out now.) And so Pop!_OS is not up to date when it comes to some software I use.

  • TLS (The Long Slog)

    I am in the middle of setting up our web application on a new hosting provider, Fly.io.

    The app has two types of WebSocket clients: users, who connect via a web browser, and remote sites, which connect via Ruby using the faye-websocket gem.

    I'd like to get the staging environment rolled out this week.

    The browser is connecting up fine. The sites should be working now, too, but let me just try it to be sure. You never know.

  • CP/M and Z80-machines, hiking and nature

    It's been a long time since I wrote anything here, so I think it is time to revive this space. What have I been up to for the last few months?

    To begin with, I've picked photography up again. The last few months it has been pretty hard to motivate myself to do anything creatively, but now that spring has finally come into bloom, my mood has returned and I find joy in it again. I recently took my old D90 out for a stroll. Unfortunately it jammed during the first few hours of use, and It seems that it is the shutter that is malfunctioning because of lack of use and lubrication. To get to the shutter, you'd need to quite extensively disassemble the camera it seems, so I've put it on the shelf for now. There are a few instructions on how you can lubricate the shutter without complete disassembly, but I have yet to try it.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Searching for a new place

      I had a capsule over at rawtext.club. Something happened? I don't know what. But it was down for days, and is now back with a message about rebuilding. Hmm.

      I've learned from previous total data loss incidents, and I'm fine. I might've lost a gemlog entry or two, but I should be okay, I've been backing things up very regularly. Everything's saved to a private git repo, but I'm wondering where to go from here. The easiest approach would be to find another tilde. Or maybe I go the self-hosting route, get a new memory card, put Raspbian on it, get my Pi working again, etc etc? I don't know. But I felt like I wanted to write about this outside of my usual social media haunts, the ones attached to my real name. So I'm writing about it here.

    • Farewell to Geminispace.info

      When I first launched Rob's Gemini Capsule, I was still very new to Geminispace. I didn't know who to follow or what kinds of capsules were out there. At that time, Antenna didn't exist yet, nor did Station, BBS, or most other aggregation services on Gemini.

      Geminispace.info filled in the gap for me. Kristall used the capsule as its default search engine. In a new digital space where I didn't know north from south, Geminispace.info led me to many interesting sites and posts, some of which I still return to today. Other Gemini search engines have gained popularity since then, from Kennedy to AuraGem. But Geminispace.info has always been my favorite, and Geminispace.info is the one I always return to.

    • AuraGem Search Was an Utter Failure

      What prompted me to write this article was the implication that AuraGem Search has gained popularity. As the person who wrote and manages AuraGem Search, I have a different perspective on this: AuraGem Search was an utter failure.

    • Web services I used and liked

      I think was when I made an Angelfire website, an online presence for my teenaged goth 'zine publishing concern. When I got in trouble for one of my 'zines, had to shred all the copies left in my inventory and replace my website with an apology page, I made a minimalist- styled website on nettrash.

    • I'm here, I'm glad you're there (they were St.GIGA)

      But precisely because St.GIGA had a listener base who were paying monthly fees and who had invested in expensive hardware which could *only* be used to listen to St.GIGA, they were able to operate the station in a way completely unlike any other radio station I've ever heard of. This thing sounds like it was so off-the-wall unconventional I can't believe it was a corporate product and not some kind of pirate station broadcast out of a squat by hippy art school drop-outs. For starters, there was a policy of "No Commercials, No DJs, No News Broadcasts, No Talk". From the perspective of 202x this is kind of hard to get too excited about, because there are plenty of internet radio stations which operate under basically this principle, but in the 90s that would have been pretty crazy stuff. What's weird even by today's standards was the scheduling of the different programs. There was no fixed schedule along the lines of "jazz from 10:00 until 12:00, then ambient from 12:00 until 13:00" or anything like. Instead, transitions between genres happened gradually with overlap, where one genre slowly became less frequent as the next became more, easing you through the transition. The transitions were, get this, synchronised with ocean tide tables, an idea they called "Tide of Sound". I figure the way this must have worked was something like that you hit the peak of one genre at high tide, and then the peak of the next one at the following low tide. High and low tides do not occur at exactly the same time from day to day, there are all sorts of complicated ebbs and flows to the cycles, and I get the impression St.GIGA actually followed this principle, so that even if you only listened during the same fixed window of time each day, over the course of a year you'd actually hear a range of different kinds of music. And I use "kinds of music" kind of loosely, as they also included high quality field recordings from natural environments all over the world, and sometimes even live sound from ocean shores! These nature recordings were often combined with poetry readings, sometimes with poems composed specifically for the show. It was as much ambient *sound* as music, but somehow cohesive.

    • I'm here, I'm glad you're there (they were St.GIGA)

      Maybe roughly two months ago now I learned about a 90s-through-early-00s Japanese satellite radio company called "St.GIGA". I no longer even remember how or from where, exactly. One of those serendipitous internet rabbit hole discoveries.

  • Programming

    • Old Math

      Or, unpacking some BASIC from some version of Oregon Trail (1971). For some 1971 will be extremely recent, but the context is computer games which have not got much history, yet.