Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ACDFLOS Wordo: DITCH

  • Another Death

    I was lucky I guess to experience so little death for much of my life. My granddad died when I was 10, but it didn't hit me. I didn't know him - didn't remember him, having travelled to England a couple of times when I was a baby, and then a toddler, these memories gone the way such memories are.

    Then a long gap, decades. Then my dog, then my other grandfather, complications around pneumonia and emphysema. A parade of friends: one of the guys from my teenage D&D group, cause unknown; a childhood friend, his congenital bum heart killing him in his sleep. Another friend, in a motorcycle accident. And then, last night, word from my mother, via one of my uncles, that one of my cousins has suddenly passed away.

• Technology and Free Software

  • 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 1)

    Twenty years ago, I had an epiphany: Linux was ready for the desktop.

    (*audience laughs*)

    I had been one of those teenagers invited everywhere to "fix" the computer. Neighbours, friends, family. Yes, that kind of nerdy teenager. You probably know what I mean. But I was tired of installing cracked antivirus and cleaning infested Microsoft Windows computers, their RAM full of malware, their CPU slowing to a crawl, with their little power LED begging me to alleviate their suffering.

    Tired of being an unpaid Microsoft support technician, I offered people to install Linux on their computer, with my full support, or to never talk with me about their computer any more.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Selfhosting: a retrospective

      So I like to be the DIY guy, at least when it comes to computing. To anyone here on geminispace, this shouldn't sound strange, as I suppose most geminauts to be at least a little sceptical about the "sink or swim" attitude of many internet services today. Pick your poison: OneDrive, GoogleDrive (better: TwoDrive), Drop-Box (shit, I dropped it!), EyeCloud... whatever. Filehosting really can be super simple. Nobody needs to carry around USB-Sticks anymore! At least not for your five files that you like to share to everybody. You can just link to your drive folder!

      Anyway. I don't feel comfortable storing all my private parts on another guy's computer. Why would I? I know how to do it myself! Albeit that my original motivation behind self-hosting wasn't that much of a paranoid one: more one of curiosity and spite towards the "you need an account on {Google,One}Drive to access this" attitude where I suddenly need to open up accounts that I never use, for services that are not interesting to me.

    • Introducing: Ósanwë

      Hello! This is a new instance of skyjake’s Bubble forum, of which the first and flagship instance is at bbs.geminispace.org. This instance Ósanwë is intended for careful and thoughtful discussion between people in an open, humble, and curious mindset.

      While skyjake's BBS is great for a wide variety of things, Ósanwë is meant to be a more focused space for serious (and seriously fun!) discussion as a means of collaborative learning.

      I plan to use this space to host discussions on topics that interest me. Feel free to do the same, provided you follow the code of conduct.