Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Relieving versus Elevating

    One of the things I pray for so much for myself and others (and likewise recommend others to pray for) is relief. It's an interesting word, where the etymology of it comes from Latin "relevare", "to raise, to lift up, to lighten", but specifically in the sense of burdens or troubles, which provides the notion of providing assistance or alleviating distress. On the other hand, while this might seem superficially similar in etymology to elevation (literally to lift something up or to raise something), there's an important difference, which also plays out in what one might pray for.

    Within a spiritist context, one commonly engages with various spirits of the dead, their own spirit guides, or other spirits of the world to educate them and elevate them into "higher states", for whatever that might mean for a specific spiritual context. Although it's common to pray or work for this in such a context, I think I prefer the framing of offering relief to spirits rather than helping them "elevate", especially since I also think that the process of elevating spirits is also made possible by simply helping give them ease and relief to ease them of what weighs them down, too.

  • #readinglog october 22, 2024: angels, repentance, and survival

    I have for the past year or so been seriously working on converting to Judaism, and whenever I set out to immerse myself in something I am compelled to do a lot of reading about it. Of course I have also been incredibly burnt out, so I haven't gotten much reading done until recently. I wanted to do something special for the high holy days, though, and it's gotten me on a little bit of a roll.

    I finished both People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn and On Repentance and Repair by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on the day after Yom Kippur. Both felt topical for the season; the latter I'd especially wanted to read during the holidays.

  • friends, and actual-friends

    in life, I lack them

    not totally, thankfully. Neighbor S, and B are F.R.I.E.N.D.S (fogive the show logo-like writing)

    they are always there, always in my corner

    there are colleauges, who will always only be friends - proximate known-ness. I amongst them, them amongst me, they amongst each other. More will not come of that.

    And online friends, which I consider online "life" itself - "irl" is afk for me (Away From Keyboard). E-mail, IRC, convos on forums/chats - true, daily support and conversation.

  • Preparing Chinese tea for beginners

    This is a continuation of 2021-07-12 Preparing Japanese green tea for beginners. This page is about the Chinese and Taiwanese tea I often drink: loose leaf oolong tea and pu'er tea (fermented tea) in a brick (round disks about as big as two hands next to each other. That would be tea costing around CHF 30/50g or CHF 220/375g.

  • Emacs Tip: EWW Readable View

    I want to highlight some perhaps overlooked functionality of EWW, the Emacs Web browser. The functionality I am referring to is the Readable view.

    EWW is not a good browser for Web Apps, as it doesn't handle JavaScript and dynamic content and all that. But it is a very nice Web browser if you just want to read a normal Web page, i.e., an HTML page with cleartext content, like many blog posts and such like.

    Or, at least it would be, except usually when you visit a page in EWW, you'll first have to scroll through 18 screens worth of menu links and banners and such that EWW has tried to translate for you into plain text content. This is where the Readable functionality comes in.

  • Talk to me about 90's kid leisure time existential crises

    I've linked above what I had meant to include here but it's too long for a single post. Let me know what you think and where you've found something to enjoy simply for yourself without the expectation of gain or enrichment. How do you have fun as an adult amidst a stream of real life concerns? Help me regain my lost sense of interest in people on the internet and let's shout into the void together.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Securing backups using S3 storage

    In this blog post, you will learn how to make secure backups using Restic and a S3 compatible object storage.

    Backups are incredibly important, you may lose important files that only existed on your computer, you may lose access to some encrypted accounts or drives, when you need backups, you need them to be reliable and secure.

  • Securing backups using S3 storage