Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Strategies to perpetuate conflict for personal gain

    In any ongoing conflict involving significant numbers of people, there are individuals and groups whose power and influence derives from the very _existence_ of the conflict, and/or from repeatedly pressing buttons related to the values, beliefs, concerns, and fears of certain communities. Such people have a vested interest in ensuring that the conflict continues, and in ways conducive to allowing simple messaging that provokes strong emotions, but not complex or critical thought.

  • Journal Update 27: New Onions!

    This entry does not constitute a return to writing. I'm still taking a step back¹ from writing. I'm only writing this entry because I have to make an important announcement.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CIKMOSR Wordo: SURGE

  • Frames Of Reference- Chapter 27

    Downtown Pueblo is in a state of general disarray, as I imagine all metropolitan areas are the nation over. Trash cans have been dislodged, near the I-25 intersection traffic is backed up for miles, so wisely I decide to cut through an alley and avoid it. Sheila’s car handles very differently, the transmission is picky and the acceleration takes some getting used to. I breathe, all while the pus oozes out in little drops and I resist the urge to mess with it.

    I glance in the rearview mirror- Nadene is sullen, reserved, has been through more tonight than most people ever are, but there’s a fixed quality to her stare which leads me to believe she’s likely coming down off a doe of hickory, still noticing every single fiber of the seat beneath her, every cell in every LED grid we pass. That can’t be any good.

  • Frames Of Reference- Chapter 28

    We’re driving toward the downtown bus depot, Nadene and me, it’s around noon and sunny, she’s packed all her belongings and has reserved a first-class ticket on a Greyhound. She insisted upon that- not to be driven up towards Denver, says she doesn’t like airplanes. Says she’d rather chart the real America than the clean sterile one- the insides of barns, the burrows of prairie dogs, all the gullies and streams and sparse delineations.

  • Homebuilding

    I've spent a few months helping a crew build a house so that I can learn to build my own one day. The most important thing I've learned is how ridiculous it is to build the conventional North American home.

    The owner of this house I'm building has a sawmill and lots of big, straight oaks on his land. Despite having the ability to provide his own lumber from his back yard, the lumber industry has lobbied hard enough to convince the state that no board that has not been stamped by an engineer should make its way into a home. The cost of paying a specialist to come out and inspect every board would drive the cost far above the cost of using regular old spruce-pine-fir lumber from the big box store. So here we are in the false economy of importing soft, flimsy, warped wood from far away that frequently spliters or snaps when a nail is driven through it rather than using extremely local hardwood that is a much better fit for the job.

  • Whatever that was

    So I noticed I was barely breathing. Didn't mind at first.

    Then I noticed I was feeling way too hot for the actual temperature. The air I was breathing wasn't enough. Felt weird but OK.

    And now I notice my hands shaking, my abs twitching for no reason, every muscle tense and attention reallocation firing so fast I can't even think of a phrase.

  • A case for public school Bible (and more) curriculum

    The recent decree by Oklahoma's head of public education directing (and compelling) every public school in the state to teach the Bible has raised a lot of outcry and controversies. Many of the predictive objections relate to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and the emergence of "Christian" Nationalism. Other problems include: How can untrained school teachers, many of them perhaps unfamiliar with the scriptures beyond an average layperson's understanding, actually teach the Bible? What kind of Bible is it -- Protestant, Jewish, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or even Latter-Day Saints to include the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Prices? Can it be genuinely non-sectarian and promote any specific religious affiliation or viewpoint above others? In a state like Oklahoma where church affiliation is a big part of its culture, how do they prevent teachers from injecting their own denominational and theological biases into classroom instruction? Why is it that the Republicans are eager to compel public school educators to teach the Bible while they hypocritically object to teachers having to teach LGBTQ history or SOGI curriculums because of supposed religious freedom?

• Technology and Free Software

  • Ssh apps

    I setup an ssh kiosk in open access like a webpage, the password is empty and there are no keys.

  • notesbash: A notes management TUI written in Bash

    notesbash, the note-taking program running in the terminal written in bash is about to have it first stable release. Before we release it, we would be happy to receive feedback and suggestions for improvement from anyone interested! Either here as a comment under this post or preferably as issues on Codeberg.

  • Random Weird Things

    Every so often, I come across random, weird, and unexpected things on the internet. I thought it would be neat to share them here from time to time. As a start, here are ten of them.

  • RCS surprise

    Another trick, or kluge, is to rewrite the login to the account the cron jobs or whatever will run as. Note that there's a literal tab within the sed command, not a bunch of spaces before "root". (You did look at the file with a hex viewer to confirm what all the bytes are, right?)

  • WireGuard and Linux network namespaces

    By default, if you connect WireGuard tunnel, its "allowedIps" field will be used as a route with a higher priority than your current default route. It is not always ideal to have everything routed through a VPN, so you will create a dedicated network namespace that uses the VPN as a default route, without affecting all other software.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • 👻 Serving Gemtext Files From Caddy

      I've decided that I'm going to put the domani project to the side for now. It's not worth the effort of developing a web server in rust from scratch when existing webserver projects exist which do 80% of what I need, and which I could easily contribute to or extend to obtain the trailing 20%.