Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Oxford Half 2024

    Race went surprisingly well. Chip time was 1:33:30, which is amazing given how much training I did (not much) and how fit I am (not particularly). I suppose it’s reasonable to say that this is my baseline pace. I pinky promise to do more events—and training—next year!

• Politics and World Events

  • Differences between activists, politicians, and iconoclasts

    I am writing this as a kind of caution for those who put misguided expectations on the future President Kamala Harris, and to help readers understand how the world of politics works, versus how the activist spaces work.

    From day one, President Harris will face challenges and difficult spaces to navigate. The honeymoon period after winning the presidency through an unprecedented coalition will be very brief. Many Republicans who endorse her today will quickly distance themselves from her and go back to their normal Republican selves. The progressives may quickly find themselves dismayed by “Copmala Harris” militarizing the southern border and rapidly increasing the deportation capacity. She will have an unenviable job of keeping the nation together, governing the nation working with hostile, obstructionist Republicans (who may gain a majority in at least one of the chambers of Congress) so that they won’t hold the government and country hostage over petty culture-war issues such as DEI and LGBTQ rights.

• Technology and Free Software

  • OpenBSD 7.6 on the StarFive VisionFive2

    For a good while my StarFive VisionFive2 (a RISC-V 64bit SBC, designed to run Linux) has been sitting on a shelf unused. I've got a plan for it, but it involves running OpenBSD and that's been a little bit of a challenge on this hardware. So today, I spent a few hours today to get this up and running.

  • Copy-from-remote trick 📋

    You probably know that printing escape sequences on a terminal can set the colours. I just found out that you can also use them to set your local clipboard contents with text from a remote machine.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • So I Read the Netnews Specs

      Two things in the internet world have always fascinated me: newsgroups and mailinglists. I didn't grow up in the BBS world of the 1990s, but the idea of distributed messaging among multiple different hosts led me to experiment with a lot of different federated/distributed protocols and networks. Mailinglists, on the other hand, take an already ubiquitous network, email, that is not nearly as held down by binary sharing, copyright infringements, illegal activity, and bad public perception, and creates a well-working, but not perfect, forum system out of this network for working with git patches, QAs, announcements, etc. The two environments couldn't be more different.

    • Us the geminauts, outcasts

      Although those thoughts were from a time and space, around when I was born, by a highschooler, it didn't make them resonate less.

    • passive-time update

      welp. i slid back into lots of silly passive tv time, including watching whole-show reactions. it started really well! the first few days i tracked my passive internet time it hovered solidly around 2h per day. but then things got busy, i had lots to do and i stopped tracking. and worse - i allowed myself to put stuff on in the background for activities at home, as i could see the internet wasn't actually keeping me from doing things that needed to be done. but now there are fewer things to do, or they're less urgent, or i just need to rest from the frenzy of the last week or two. and, well... youtube is the default again.