Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The sad song of the Joker

    Watching the Joker tonight.

    He sings on the phone

    an English version

    of a French song...

  • The stress of life and taking care of yourself

    I know there is a lot of stuff we don't talk about, suicide, death in general and the fact that we hate our lives.

    I have on several occasions just wanted to get off the proverbial train that is life. Today at the doctors office I even saw one of those motivational posters, talking about that you can always get off the train... I am not sure the nurse practitioner read through that poster. 😂

    The thing I found out, as I age, is that people do not like their lives, at all. The made up responsibilities of the governments being a big chunk of it, mandatory shit, that is mostly imaginary.

    On top we have the stress of the every day things, a lot of additional responsibilities we have roped ourselves into, without meaning to. No wonder people want to get off the train?

  • Contingency Begets Complexity

    This script has an obvious limitation: if there are more than nine windows open on a single screen, multiple windows must overlap a single cell of the imaginary grid, and there is no way to specify which one of them is the intended target of a focus switch. When I wrote the first version of my script, I thought that this situation might actually arise in practice (spoiler: in four and a half years, this never happened, not even once), so I ought to put some code in to handle that contingency.

  • Unbecoming

    I look outside, my dreary eyes

    behold the gestalt state of all.

    From the loss of the flies,

    the form of the wind to drawl.

  • kittens, clubhouse, and starting slow

    I went to clubhouse at 8:20 AM. Needing to return a large item to Amazon, I hauled a large but light box the 1.1 mi there. 0.2 miles from Clubhouse, a small "mew" came from the street - a tiny black kitten with a bloody nose lay on the pavement, but sitting upright. I came close, picking it up slowly with one hand, hoping it was not badly injured. It wasn't. It "mewed" more and more, and as I walked and consoled, its claws and teeth came out at times, I tried to get it to a safe(r) place. Clawing it's way up my shoulder, and across the back of my shirt, I lean down and let it jump down safely. Not inured (at least not badly, from what I could tell), and it hunkered away towards a light post, perhaps hoping to climb it. I picked it up again, it clawed and bit more ferociously. I set it down, it ran quickly to the woods.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Re: Inspiration from the podiverse, about SSH

    I had a similar conversation the other day with some junior developers on my team. Our org is currently going through a SCM solution transition so we are migrating from multiple services down to one.

    My personal philosophy for SSH keys is that they are both unique to the client and are one use only. Note the "one use". This means if you have a cluster of servers that you maintain having a single key on your terminal to access them all is perfectly fine. However, if you also need a key to connect to your SCM then you'd create a brand new key. If you have a desktop terminal as well as a laptop that you use when you go roaming, both machines will have their own sets of keys for these tasks.

  • Asynchronous secure file transfer with nncp

    nncp (node to node copy) is a software to securely exchange data between peers. Is it command line only, it is written in Go and compiles on Linux and BSD systems (although it is only packaged for FreeBSD in BSDs).

    The website will do a better job than me to talk about the numerous features, but I will do my best to explain what you can do with it and how to use it.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Web Presence

      A few years ago on Twitter, I saw a fairly well-known writer pleading something to the effect of, "for the love of God, you need to make a website. Social media can't be the only way of getting in contact with you. You need your own space."

      And I've been thinking about this, not just in terms of Twitter's slow collapse (I've gained something like two hundred followers on BlueSky in the last few weeks, basically double what I had, so the exodus is real), but also just in terms of the practical importance of having space online that you control, and which is entirely yours. We've been conditioned to accept the web as a collection of offerings we can select from, rather than a network of created things we can add to, and I think the transition away from the latter is incredibly tragic.

  • Programming

    • Playing With Bezier

      I've been recently playing with bezier curves, and there is something truly beautiful in their simplicity. As I had never looked at them closely before, I had presumed the math involved was a little over my head. I am very pleased to be mistaken, and after just a little bit of reading I was able to put together an implementation in a handful of lines of OCaml: [...]