Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: HOZRSUP Wordo: POOLS

  • An Account of Witchcraft in the Kingdom of Scotland

    God, by his omnipotent power, has at all times and daily does take such care, and is so vigilant, for the wealth and preservation of his own, that thereby he disapproves of the wicked practices and evil intents of all, such as by any means whatsoever, that seek indirectly to conspire anything contrary to his holy will.

    Yes, and by the same power he has lately overthrown and hindered the intentions and wicked dealings of a great number of ungodly creatures, no better than Devils, who, suffering themselves to be allured and enticed by the Devil whom they serve, and to whom they were privately sworn, entered into the detestable Art of Witchcraft, which they studied and practiced for so long a time that in the end they had seduced by their sorcery a number of others to be as bad as themselves.

  • loneliness

    As I near forty, I've started to see friendships in a different light. When I was younger, connecting with people felt rather effortless. Friendships just happened, and I assumed they'd last, not a lifetime but at least as long as possible.

    We went through ups and downs together. And when they start to fade, it's difficult to restore them.

  • Zadie Smith on Life-Writing

    Last month, when I went west, I brought a few books with me. Sometimes I read a lot, sometimes not; it's always best to prepare for the former, even if I slide into the latter. I brought a couple books of poetry, and bought a couple more collections while I was there. But I also brought with me a larger book, Zadie Smith's book of essays, "Feel Free", which felt to me like good airplane reading (it was heavy, it was long, she is known to be Good).

    I was right. The essays are wide-ranging, covering Brexit, art, literary reviews, hip-hop, all kinds of things. If I'm not careful I can get sick on airplanes, and an hour before I fly, I take antiemetics I pick up when I visit the States. Usually that plus the takeoff knocks me out, coming to just before the descent. But on my trip, I stayed awake, sipping at my little cup of Coke, nibbling at airline pretzels (and the sandwich I packed before I left), working my way through Smith's wonderful writing.

  • On boomers and such

    Good morning, viet-pub!

    My wife and I are what I call "almost boomers".

    It depends on the criteria you use, I guess.

    To me, it's not so much about the year one was born, as whether they "made the cut" in terms of what I want to call "peak US civilization/society".

• Politics and World Events

  • Why I prefer Trump to Harris

    Very simple: in a world of assholes, I prefer a bigger asshole in charge to deal with other assholes, not a dizzwit littler asshole that can't speak clearly/coherently/extemporaneously about any topic except herself - as if any self-centric being couldn't do that.

    I understand about Trump being an asshole. Yep. No doubt. Big time.

    [...]

    And as for some of you, I imagine, let the cancelling begin! ;-)

• Technology and Free Software

  • Run a cron job, soon

    This may not be good advice; cron jobs may require a different environment than is set by a random user shell process (with who knows what set from who knows where), or may assume a different working directory.

    [...]

    A downside is that you need to remember to remove the test crontab entry; I never really felt the need to automate that part. With configuration management you could clobber the crontab file to what it should be (thus erasing any test entries) or to have a diff reported somewhere for review (that people may not get, read, nor understand). The test job runs at most once per year (unless a Daylight Savings Time repeat is there to ruin your day, or the system clock gets changed) so that's hopefully enough time to clean it up. Presumably when testing a cron job you're right there and can even have a todo item to remove the entry if your job is prone to interruptions and distractions.

  • RetroChallenge 2024 entry: Days XVII - XXVI

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Announcing gemxw, a Gemini crossword interface

      This turns out to be surprisingly playable. For now at least, the only crosswords available are The Guardian's, updated daily. Partially solved crosswords have their state saved after each change, and you can return to them at any time.