Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • ROOPLOCH 2024 phlog

    After reading the announcement of the ROOPLOCH 2024, I started thinking about a way to parpicitate. Just walking with a laptop into the garden and write some text on it is hardly a challenge and I actually do that from time to time.

    I thought about using my old Palm TX. The Palm was easely found in a drawer in a cabinet on the attic. Of course, the battery was exhausted. It took more time to find the charger. I connected the charger and let it alone for a few hours.

  • past, present, and towns

    I live in Farmington, Missouri. I grew up in St Louis, also Jefferson County (between the two), N St Louis, etc. I know the area fairly well. No hesitation saying that.

    Farmington is nice. Incredibly nice.

    Where am I going to go with this? I don't know.

    I thought of St Louis (it's once booming commercial districts, crowded streets, full parking lots) and Jefferson County (less businesses, more rural (like Farmington present day), but peaceful. And how now, St Louis (South County, North County) are storefronts, lease signs in the window. The city, less crime than in the 80s/90s, more businesses, but highs and lows throughout.

  • Weird music

    A few times I've been told, about some or other music I was listening to, that it was 'weird'. That's an interesting compliment, one would say, a weird one :-) It always puzzled me when somebody would say something like that. What makes music "weird"? Whenever someone has come and described some music as "weird", it immediately goes into my list of favorites. More weird music, more!

  • My Experience Going Vegan Day 6

  • spy sun

    an orb? a supernatural presence? no, the glowing sphere of the sun's rays projected onto my tapestry

• Technology and Free Software

  • Self Hosting #1 - My server died

    I am hosting a bunch of different self-hosted services that I more or less use. Nothing really critical, sometimes it's just for the fun of installing and trying a new tool. I also have a few services I use a lot, like FreshRSS or Shaarli. But self-hosting comes with its lot of hurdles.

    I have been doing that since 2012. Back then I was even hosting my email server - a word of advice: don't do that. For that I had a small dedicated server with a French provider, for about €20/mo. In 12 years the price hasn't moved that much, but neither did the hardware.

  • Site Reliability Engineering - Part 4: Onboarding for On-Call Engineers

    Welcome to Part 4 of my Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) series. I'm currently working as a Site Reliability Engineer, and I’m here to share what SRE is all about in this blog series.

  • Projects I financially support

    Sponsoring free and open-source projects, even for personal use, is important to ensure the sustainability, security, and continuous improvement of the software. It supports developers who often maintain these projects without compensation, helping them provide updates, new features, and security patches. By contributing, you recognize their efforts, foster a culture of innovation, and benefit from perks like early access or support, all while ensuring the long-term viability of the tools you rely on.

  • PowerPC e6500: The Road Not Taken

    NXP has been heading for the exits from the PowerPC business for many years. The microcontroller-class e200 still ekes out some relevance in the automotive sector, and sees occasional new silicon, but the big Freescale/NXP cores of yesteryear are essentially dead. NXP's network processor lineup has moved almost entirely to ARM.

    The final generation of these cores, though, is noteworthy for its unconventional design. The PowerPC e6500 is a unique fused design vaguely reminiscent of AMD's Bulldozer, but with a very different implementation. Used in large network processors like the 12-core (or 24-core, depending on one's perspective) QorIQ T4240, the e6500 represents a road not taken for multithreaded architectures.