Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • week 32 recap

    a slow week this time. feeling overwhelmed, many big things are in progress, heat and mosquitoes meant bad sleeping, there are random pains and aches. all that translates to some emotional disregulation as well, there was a big sad episode about our last pet.

  • Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost (G)

  • Buy It for Life

    I like to buy things that will last a long time. Not only is it an more environmentally-responsible thing to do by reducing waste, but I save money in the long run if I can avoid buying a replacement for as long as possible. To that end, I like to follow buy-it-for-life (BIFL) groups online.

    In recent years, however, I've found it increasingly difficult to trust the recommendations of such groups. Nothing has changed in the groups themselves, but many brands who used to be paragons of quality are rapidly getting worse--and thus the groups' recommendations are no longer as valid as they once were. Some of the biggest offenders on this front are home appliances, vehicles, and clothing.

  • creekbound critters and smokes in the night

    I was standing on my balcony, next to the drainage "creek", a concrete thing running to the *actual* creek 100 yards from my apartment - during rain I watch the mini river flow to the "main" waterway, so entertaining it is damn near a feature of this residence.

• Technology and Free Software

  • HackTheBox and Hispagatos

    Greetings to all in alt.2600.madrid, hispagatos.talk, alt.2600, and es.comp.hackers Usenet newsgroups, HTTP, Gemini and Matrix.

    We are excited to announce that our hacker collective, "Hispagatos," has begun participating in this season's HackTheBox competition.

  • Site Timeline

    Because I really like the idea of a blogging timeline, here's mine. I have to admit that I regard my site more as a gemini/gopher/finger server, which you can see through the page layout. Nevertheless I'm trying to make this site as accessible for the WWW and the IndyWeb as possible.

  • My Site Is Now Available Offline

    Back in January of this year, I wrote a journal post titled "Site Update - Offline Accessibility" where I slightly touched on something I wanted for my site, a ZIP file of all of the contents of my site that could be navigated with a web browser or gemini browser like Lagrange.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Assorted updates on a Sunday evening

      I'm still working on the write up of my Finnish bike tour which, somehow, ended already a month ago. Fair warning, it's looking on track to be my longest gemlog/phlog post ever.

      Last week I went ahead with my previously mentioned circumlunar hostname shenanigans. It didn't go as smoothly as I hoped, mostly due to problems on my VPS provider's end where one of the two machines which were "swapping identities" couldn't be reimaged without an error. Things seem mostly sorted out now. The Zaibatsu has been rebuilt from scratch for what I hope is the last time (it's on KVM virtualisation now, not OpenVPN, so I can do OS upgrades in place now). This has been my first encounter with Debian 12 (I still haven't bothered doing my ThinkPad yet). Apparently we're not allowed to use `pip` to install Python stuff like a normal person anymore. Modern dependency management is such a ridiculous edifice, but whatever, it's genuinely not worth the energy to rant about it. I still have one more bit of server wrangling planned for this year, combining a personal webserver and a personal mail server running on separate VPSes to one, as part of my "Blazing Star" to reduce my computing footprint and costs. I'm not looking forward to it, but want it done, so I'll have to bite the bullet soon.

  • Programming

    • Serving bare git on the web

      In the old days, I used `cgit` to render my git repositories on the web. It's simple to set up since it's a CGI script. This is ideal for URLs that get very few hits. When nobody is requesting the URL, the CGI script isn't running and no resources are being used. When a URL is requested, however, the CGI script loads, the interpreter loads, the libraries load, the script executes… It's an expensive end-point! And you know how it is. The web is full of leeches and bad bots, crawlers and idiots. Having an expensive end-point means it needs protection.