Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AYEGMTB Wordo: MIENS

  • Frustration

    I've been stressed out lately. I backdated two glog entries that I wrote prior to today when I didn't have the opportunity to ssh into this space.

    Part of it is aggravation of my commute. Part of it is aggravation with my end users not doing what they're obligated to do. I'm thinking a big part of it is that I'm a massive FSU football fan and they're on their way to yet another historic low point...1-6 right now with 5 games left and none of them seem like slam dunk wins. I've loved them since before I really understood football, and to be honest, being an FSU fan the past 10-11 months has been nothing but heartbreak and agony.

    I told some friend overseas about it. She asked why I didn't root for another team. It's hard to explain sports fandom to people who have no clue, but I basically told her real fans are fans even when the team is at its worst. It's just mind-blowing how simple mistakes happen every single time. The worst part is our defense is actually pretty decent. It's just that our offense is so horrendously bad that it wears out our decent/good defense or puts them in impossible situations. Good freaking luck stopping a team that starts with the football inside your 20...

  • Meh batteries

    The newer 10,000 mAh battery will charge at a respectable 20W — enough to actually charge the laptop slowly — but it taps out after only delivering half the power. Plus, sometimes when I’m charging my iPad with it, it’ll get confused and switch from “charge the iPad” to “get charged off the iPad” back and forth and back and forth every couple of seconds.

• Politics and World Events

  • Zen Language and Koans: Beyond the Limits of Words

    The issue of the limits of language is a central theme in mystical and philosophical traditions across various cultures and finds one of its most refined expressions in the practice of Zen. Within Zen, language is not merely a communicative tool but a conventional phenomenon whose inability to capture ultimate reality is continually emphasized. Although language is useful for describing and interacting with the world, it reveals its limitations when confronted with the experience of the self and reality, both conceived as fluid and interconnected. In this context, the practice of koans becomes a technique for transcending the boundaries of language, demonstrating how logical reasoning and conceptual naming are insufficient to grasp ultimate truth. This article explores the concept of "radical conventionality of language" in Zen and the role of koans as a tool for overcoming the limitations of thought and words.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Thoughts on open source software

    I'm probably more ancient Chinese than I am Stallman. Pretty much all my scripts are tailored to my workflow (not yours) and I therefore don't share my code. I think growing up as the Internet did made me wary of sharing information. I have criticized others (Greeks) in the past for being dreamers and not doers (as opposed to Romans). What is the point of knowledge and advanced technology if you don't share it? I'm probably being a hypocrite, but again, most of my scripts improve MY workflow, which may be very different than others. They are mostly modular and are somewhat dependent on each other. There's also the possibility that it's somewhat motivated out of pettiness: if I had to do all the work, why should you get all the reward? Perhaps it's just that I don't feel like my scripts are very important in the long run: anyone could have written a bash script. Whatever my reasons are for my reluctance for sharing code, I certainly don't vilify those who do share code nor those who don't.

  • Dot-Matrixing: The ImageWriter is still good!

    _the phlog backlog is real... employing some micro-phlogs to try and clear the phlog-jam..._

    What: I was recently inspired to dust off my old ImageWriter (I)

    Goal: Beige G4 hosting an lp share so my 9front boxes can print

    Status: Having difficulty getting the foomatic ImageWriter drivers properly on Tiger CUPS... IW prints great from OS 9 natively!

    Project priority: Low

  • Using a dedicated administration workstation for my infrastructure

  • Using a dedicated administration workstation for my infrastructure

    As I moved my infrastructure to a whole new architecture, I decided to only expose critical accesses to dedicated administration systems (I have just one). That workstation is dedicated to my infrastructure administration, it can only connect to my servers over a VPN and can not reach the Internet.

    This blog post explains why I am doing this, and gives a high level overview of the setup. Implementation details are not fascinating as it only requires basics firewall, HTTP proxy and VPN configuration.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Blazing Star updates and more

      I recently noticed with delight that zaibatsu.circumlunar.space phlogs are once again correctly being tracked by the Bongusta! aggregator. Thanks, logout! In other Gopherspace news, congratulations to the Free Thinker on five years of riding the Gopher[1]!

      I've been making another strong push lately toward finishing goals from "Operation Blazing Star"[2], now that we are (somehow!) in the final quarter of the year.

    • Blazing Star updates and more

    • hello smol world

      hello smol world <3 i love that this goes out on gemini, gopher, and http and has an rss feed ^-^ i will probably write smol notes here once in a while and use it as a little outpost for my main homepage.

    • Peoples use of decentralised irks me

      We need to have a chat about the abuse of this word, in relation to FOSS social media. Neither Mastodon, nor Nostr or any of the other services are decentralised, as they claim to be.

      Everyone needs an account, that is hosted on a central server, that you pull content from. Sure everyone can potentially host their own server, but that server will most likely be hosted on a VPS, with a centralised hosting provider, at a facility with government oversight.

    • Basic

      I was scrolling through YT comments (not the best pastime, I know), and it hit me again: so many people are just plain basic and casual. So many people just paraphrase/parrot the same thing. They write the same mundane, supportive or unsupportive drivel that you can find in at least 10 other "top" comments. Granted, I am not exempt from this. I've said things that are herd mentality before as well, but often I disagree or find flaws in arguments/people, for better or worse.

  • Announcements

    • ROOPHLOCH 2024 round up

      So long, September! The window for participation in ROOPHLOCH 2024 closed a few days ago. Sorry that this round up post is coming after a short delay. Unfortunately I was travelling for work on the 1st and 2nd of October, so this is the soonest I could get it out. Thanks, as always, to everybody who participated, which, as we'll soon see, was an awful lot of you! As in previous years I've prepared a page of links[1] to all participating posts I know of. If your post is missing, or you notice a broken link, please let me know!

      At the start of September I was a little afraid that the fact that my phlog was temporarily not being picked up by the Bongusta! gopherspace aggregator might mean that participation this year might be lower than usual, or that maybe there would be a strong imbalance between the number of Gopher and Gemini posts. Well, I needn't have worried! The sixth incarnation of ROOPHLOCH was absolutely positively the most successful year yet, and all records have been broken!

  • Programming

    • Comments

      Who doesn't like code comments, especially comments woefully out of date with what the code does, or play-by-play on what the code is doing.

      [...]

      A problem here is if too much of the code gets littered with XXX or whatever, in which case the tag now probably has too much noise for the signal, so there is a bit of art and skill in the appropriate use of tags, cleaning them up, whether a tag should instead reference a ticket number (or not), etc.