Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The chicken boy

    For starters, this has nothing to do with the chicken report, it's just a happy coincidence. Chicken report coming soon, by the way. Sometimes events just seem to happen to succeed each other in just a way that it looks like magic, which causes you to stop and wonder, is there a sense behind all of this? Did something work to trigger something else, and then something else? It is wonderful how a consultation can turn things around in such a way that everything seems to fall into place. Spamming my intentions, on every corner, yields a result, but not the result that I was quite hoping for, in the end, it turned out to be better, perhaps I was indeed aiming for this result, but I just didn't know. If indeed the future influences the past, then everything I did I did in order to reach this point. Whether there is actually any real intention behind all of this or I am just interpreting what is essentially chaos, things happened and suddenly I am thrown out of a cave and into a world that seems a lot nicer than that which I am used to. I am not fully out of the cave, yet. I keep looking back into it, I am sure many more times will the pattern repeat and I will maybe go through the motions, but the motions seem different each time. Am I just narrating the plot of the latest Netflix series? I seriously hope not, I would need to go back before dinner and try to write this all over again. It's hopeless, nothing would turn out the same, but the main event has already happened and I am left wondering, was all of that real? Did I really get out at all? Maybe I am just inspired right now, and tomorrow I will look for chicken the way I always do.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — NCEGIKB Wordo: CAVED

  • General Election Toolkit - Edan's Capsule

    Earlier today, Rishi Sunak announced that the next general election in the UK will be held far sooner than expected, on 4th July. Now, since this is the first election in which I will be able to vote, and in which I have a platform other than Twitter (good riddance) to share my content on, I feel I should share some resources that helped me to make sense of my country's convoluted electoral system. I hope that you find them as helful as I did.

• Technology and Free Software

  • what's your favorite keyboard?

    I just got a Ultimate Hacking Keyboard V2 and I'm loving it so far!

    What's your favorite one you've used?

  • on archival

    archival is weird. it feels weird. for one it's not terribly useful. I rarely actually access my archives; indeed, the format they're stored in makes it extremely inconvenient to do so. that's at least partially intentional. I know full well that the past is merely an illusion, a creation myth for the present. but ultimately memory is an uphill battle against the universe, and it always ends in defeat. memory is only useful insofar as it informs and shapes the present, but otherwise it's just that, memory. a tiny subset of the present which we perceive as a reconstruction of the past. now that may not be *entirely* true -- it IS possible for the past to come back, ever so briefly, usually as a result of smell or sound. I posit that that IS in fact more or less a literal trip through time (as far as subjective human experience is concerned anyway), but also that it is necessarily short lived and either immediately slips away through the cracks and vanishes forever, or simply becomes a natural part of mundanity, and loses all its ties to the past. back when I was a little kid I thought this was what everyone meant by 'nostalgia' -- now I'm not so sure anymore.

  • Software issues already

    Looks like gmisub isn't happy with me. My subscriptions feed has stopped updating - it's already late so tomorrow I'll try to figure out why.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • SFTP, VoIP, serialization

      The quest for working file download over SFTP keeps going on: the custom globbing worked, and I added caching for directory listings, since it seemed simpler than a dedicated thread (especially given that multiple and dynamic remote servers may be used in the future). But then noticed memory leakage. Spent some time poking GHC RTS options, simplifying cache invalidation (making it simply time-based, rather than renewing on the second hit for the same task), employing deepseq and strict-concurrency packages (with the latter leading to high CPU load and delays; the former doing that as well, if it is used where it is not really needed), to use threaded runtime, to call cleanup of the curl handles manually, and profiling (only found that the memory seems to be mostly in ByteString chunks, though if the leakage is in bindings, in curl itself, or the libraries it uses, it would not have shown up in GHC's profiling); nothing helped. Then rewrote it to use libssh2 bindings instead, at least to make it clear whether the issue is in curl (bindings) or somewhere else, and it kept leaking. Adjusted it to use remote globbing over SSH instead of plain directory listing and caching, it still leaked. Wrote a small standalone test program, to remove all the rest, and eventually even skipped file downloads or directory listing; it kept leaking. Today discovered that there is a memory leak in libssh2 bindings (particularly in (de)initialization functions), fixed it, submitted a PR, hopefully it will be merged soon. So apparently it is simply a coincidence that both curl bindings (or the library itself) and libssh2 bindings leak memory. Speaking of PRs and coincidences, I have also submitted a typo fix for the curl bindings, but apparently just as SSHFS, that project is not actively maintained. Quite a mess, but there is a hope that it will not leak anymore with the today's fix.

    • More Search Engine Updates! Scrollspace Index, Page Renamings, Spartan Links List

      AuraGem Search has had a most recently found domains/capsules list for quite a while. It actually lists all of the found domains from most recently found to least recent. This used to be called the "List of Capsules" but I have renamed it to "Recently Discovered Capsules" to emphasize its ordering.