Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Unnecessary weight lifted

  • This Wolf Howls Again

    delighted to be here on the Pub.

    some of you might have seen my little gemlog at wolfinthewoods@pollux.casa

    sadly...

  • Combating Malaise

    I'm currently unemployed so I have a lot of free time on my hands. After finally getting called to the bar I took some time off to relax and reset after the gruelling multi-year process.

    During this break, I did really well to update my resume, continue to read material that would be helpful for a future job, and most importantly, I started a meditation practice and solid exercise routine. I was in the best shape of my life and feeling really good.

    I just completed the final interview for a new job and am waiting to hear back on whether I got it. However, in addition to this new development in my career, many of my good habits have ceased to be a part of my routine and I'm mired in malaise.

  • Julian released! and another trip to Alicante!

    Hola! Happy Hacking to all hackers, DIY, Creators and tinkers out there. I just got back from visiting my friends in Alicante, my friend "Not" AKA Chimo was spinning funk/hiphop/rap... at a place called Jendrix, I went out Friday with "Ken" aka "elkenUno", "Sara" aka "SuperPulpito" and other elements ;) we had a lot of fun that night. Then Saturday is when my friend was spinning, we had dinner,

    [...]

    Like most people I was happy that Assange was finally liberated, even tho he had to plea guilty to one of the charges, I think we can all understand he has done way more than his share for software/digital freedom.

• Politics and World Events

  • Leaving Iraq

    Almost two years ago my coworker invited me to her house for arabic coffee. A year ago she was badly hurt in a car accident. Now she's returning to work. I saw her after a manditory training us nurses had to do. I finally went to her house for coffee!

    We always liked each other. We both had unusual lives in the past, but live pretty ordinary lives now. I knew her husband was killed before she left Iraq, but didn't know how extraordinary a life she lived. She knew I was tortured and interrogated for leadership in anti-imperialist protest in George W. Bush's post-9/11 USA, but not much else.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Hello, world!

    Sometimes old conventions are more timeless than aged, I suppose.

    It's been a while since I started anything like a new website for myself in earnest, after maintaining my "The Digital Ambler" blog for so long. I've tried to develop something else more personal twice or thrice over the years, but something I've realized about myself (especially with more communication happening over Discord chats) that I only have so many words to use for myself. Still, Geminispace has been something I've been meaning to get into for a while now, and after finding smol.pub, I decided to hop on and give it a whirl. If nothing else, I can at least use this as a sort of base while I figure this out and see how I feel about keeping up with it. I've always had a fondness for text-only interfaces, and the simplicity of old-style websites has always made my heart warm and full; Gemini seems to hit all those sweet spots for me, while also being something of a challenge to disabuse myself of some unfortunate habits picked up from other online media.

  • art and the digital

    1. finding fandom communities as in-built audiences and subject matter guaranteed to land well. lots of opportunity for experimenting. didn't need to have "anything to say" or to make it profound (not that it can't be, there's just less pressure). love for the source material and other creators overpowered the dissatisfaction with being "not skilled enough" and got me to work. so, it did more than art school, i guess!

    2. giving in and buying an ipad a few years back. i held off for so long, not wanting to feed the apple beast and succumb to its over-hyped "design" and planned obsolescence. but the ability to make fully finished art pieces - not just sketches - anywhere, anytime, lowered the barrier to entry (to start art-ing, what with the executive functions flailing). however i feel, i have all my tools available to me at all times... (that combined with point 1 was a true art renaissance for me).

  • Promises, Promises

    SURE we're going to be able to tie all of our apps together seamlessly. IFTTT ... oops iCloud calendar is a noGo. Hours later, ToDoist is kind of running (1-way sync). It's going to screw Jean up but I can't maintain 2.

  • finally, more zines on here

    I've added the single-page and foldable versions of Wandering Wayfarers, which is a 32-page minizine that has all the critters from my Bevy Of Beasties posts + 60 short npc descriptions.

    I also added Raspberry Ruminations, which isn't any kind of rpg or fiction zine; it's about a raspberry bush trying to grow at a bus stop. But just trust me, there's a point there.

  • Keyboards

    I have been writing about keyboard here before, but I did miss the opportunity to write about my latest adventure in keyboard space. To recap the previous ones, I started with Planck (40%, 12x4 ortholinear), and then moved over to Gherkin (30%, 10x3 ortholinear). After that Planck felt kind of big so I could not move back. Gherkin has been my daily driver mostly for the last 2-3 years now. I do some mistakes, but all and all it is very comfortable due to not requiring me to move my hands much at all.

    In October last year I thought I really had to try a split layout to make sure I was not in a local maximum. I went for a Corne layout which is two mirrored halves, each 3 by 6 keys, plus three additional thumb keys, so a total of 42 keys. I think it still counts as a 30% keyboard though. I could not use my Gherkin layout unmodified of course, but the new Corne layout was heavily inspired by it, only the thumb keys provided some dedicated modifiers and a backspace key (such luxury!).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Moving slowly and breaking things

      It has been brought to my attention that the new Gemini network transport protocol specification which was announced at the end of March this year, version 0.24.0, introduced a compatibility-breaking change relative to the much older version 0.16.1, and there is at least one URL in the wild serving response headers which are permitted by the 0.24.0 spec but cannot be parsed by some well known and widely used Gemini implementations. Specifically, in the latest version of the specification, status codes beginning with 4, 5 or 6 now have explicitly optional "errormsg" components (formally known as <META>), and the BNF formulation is clear that when no error message is included, no space is required between the status code and the CRLF. Some existing code, including code of my own, assumes and relies upon the unconditional presence of a space character. The need to change code to handle the new kind of response header was not mentioned in the corresponding news post, which did otherwise attempt to explicitly enumerate all changes which would be required to maintain spec compliance. This has lead to some uncertainty as to whether or not the space was supposed to be made optional or whether this was a mistake.