Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Kitten Kawaii

    This is a fun little project that was designed to highlight how you can convert a React library to the Kitten framework but I enjoyed just playing around with the combinations.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: FILUSTM Wordo: MOTTO

  • The King of Elfland’s Daughter

    Reading fantasy fiction today, it’s very obvious just how much of an influence J.R.R. Tolkien had on the genre. There are elves, dwarves, world building, and magical shenanigans as far as the eye can see. This is fine. I’m all for it when it suits me. However, I’ve been wanting to read some fantasy from before his time to see what it was like and get an idea if maybe some of these may have influenced him. To get things started, I decided to give The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany a go. It was actually quite pleasant and very different from Tolkien. If anything, it was easier to see the impact he had on C.S. Lewis’ work (which he admits himself).

  • The Quiet Era

    the lights. the sounds. the sparks. the talk.

    tamper it down

    relax

    at home. a flickering laptop screen.

    a dimly lit phone screen

  • The Cosmos of Kansas, and the Wonderful Life of Oz

    Dorothy, in plain old boring Kansas. Black and white film, unhappy with her upbringing. Toto is her only friend, refuge in the world. Until that world, the tornado, strikes her house, then she gets drifted to another land. The world of fierce demands, of natural intensity - beckoning her ("more must be").

    So, she arrives in Oz. Where everything is NOT boring. The symbolism is that of merely opposites in the movie (and originally book). Fields of repetition? Glorious fields of technicolor flowers. Aimless grass and non-eventful interruption? A yellow brick road. A blank horizon? A glorious palace shining with promise.

• Science

  • Metric basics

    A meter is around a yard, more or less, so ten foot is around three meters. A meter was originally defined as one ten-thousandth of the distance between the equator to the pole, so 1/40000 of the Earth’s circumference. With the garbled measuring powers they had back then, that is not saying much.

    Each kilometer is a thousand meters. Five kilometers is around three miles, and ten kilometers is around six miles. Going the other way, ten miles is a little over sixteen kilometers.

    Going small, this is so dumb but we have both centimeters (one-hundredth of a meter) and millimeters (one-thousandth of a meter) and yes, confusion between those two have messed up many a project. Two inches are approximately five cm which is also fifty mm.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Aerc surprised me

    I've never been particularly happy with CLI or TUI email options. Aerc might just finally change that.

    My TUI email journey has basically been: every couple of years, try and get a [neo]mutt setup I'm happy with, only to fall back to in-browser gmail after a few months at the most, when something in the rube-goldberg machine I've invariably constructed, breaks.

    Some time in the late oughts I tried sup, a promising try built in ruby and which sported gmail-like threading by default. But it was slow, and never really did well with the HTML email that's just a constant of modern (and even late-oughts) life.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Setting up my own Gemini Capsule with Docker.

      I couldnt find any prebuilt Molly-Brown Containers so i had to build one myself. Thanks to the help of MinimalistWolf on Reddit i got an Example Dockerfile which i had to edit a bit to fit my needs.

    • Setting up Fluentd to monitor my Gemini capsule

      Fluentd is a data collector and unification tool which helps me map the data from Molly-Brown's Error and Access logs to Prometheus and Grafana.

  • Programming

    • ⚔️ The quest for the definitive editor ⚔️

      After one year and a half I can say that I finished my first and biggest "coding" project. What is left are details, which are important because details make the difference, but the inner structure and modules have been finished, and in many cases even refactored!

    • How to run valgrind on a CGI program in C

      There was still one bug left with mod_blog [1]—it would crash with a memory corruption error (thanks to checking in glibc [2] when doing a POST. I only found the bug because I was using the old web interface to make sure I had the right credentials when testing the PUT method [3]. How long had the bug existed? At least six years—it's been seven sine I last used the web interface (I checked).