Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • russia is eternally cold

    When I was a child, they used to call me the "sad robot." I lived in South America, in a place full of smooth, rounded mountains without sharp peaks that could puncture balloons and dreams. Later on, as an adult, I moved to Europe, specifically to Moscow, Russia. And I can tell you that Russia is eternally cold. I found a job at a furniture company in the accounting department. But South America never left my mind. It was there that I sought a temporary refuge, to take a break from the depressing and oppressive world where each of us had to endure as a salaried office worker.

  • from time to time

    From time to time, we heard the sound of a snake slithering above our heads. We would have died of thirst, had it not been so consistently hot that sweat was constantly running down our skin and into our pockets, allowing us to simply sip that nutritious substance in large gulps to feel instantly fortified and fit. Meanwhile, the vegetation surrounding us was becoming progressively thicker and more compact. Fifteen kilos of berries ripened, fell, and burst on the ground, dissolving into a kind of fetid, sticky must that clung to broken branches, broccoli carcasses, coconut flakes, lizard skins, walnut shells, dead leaves petrified by the crystals of a milky sap, thorns, thistles, and burrs, feathers, dew, and other such materials, transforming the living things with which that mass fused into an even more impenetrable compound than ever.

  • burned out

    I feel exhausted, burned out. The workload just keeps piling up, and there’s less and less time to rest. What keeps me going are these little escapes to the smolweb.

  "Today I ready through the above post and appreciated the reference to time pieces that are not dependant on either the Internet or an electronic device." gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~nristen/gemlog/20241101.gmi

  • Re: Wide Technology

    Today I ready through the above post and appreciated the reference to time pieces that are not dependant on either the Internet or an electronic device.

    I have started collecting hand tools (wood saws, mauls for splitting firewood). I am looking for a hand powered wood auger/drill. I recently read about a wood saw with Japanese origins that cuts when pulled rather than pushed which supposedly is more accurate than traditional saws.

    Currently, the only time reference that I use is my phone. Many years ago before I carried a phone everywhere, I wore a digital watch but stopped when the skin on my wrist would breakout from the contact of the watch. The idea of carrying a mechanical wind up watch is very appealing and even more so to use a sundial to set it by (I never did like Daylight Savings). A mechanical watch would also be immune to any possible EMPs and would continue to work even if batteries were not available.

  • The gigantic crocodiles

    told by my 3-year-old daughter on drive to hospital to teach basic life support to new hires transcribed on GPD Win 1 after she went to sleep I have to pray a lot for my baby dinosaurs. They just keep getting killed all the time. Killed and eaten. The problem is the gigantic crocodiles.

• Technology and Free Software

  • CHANGELOG 2024-11-01

    On the HTTP version of the site images will now be automatically inlined into the page, rather than requiring the user to click a link. See Happy Trees [0] for an example.

    I was able to do this as a result of work I've done on my custom Caddy plugins [1]. I added a new HTTP middleware plugin which does the gemtext->HTML conversion, and as a result I have much greater control over how the HTML rendering happens than I did before.

    Using this new plugin I am able render gemtext links in HTML using an arbitrary template. For this site the template I'm using does the work of injecting a gemini gateway for `gemini://` links, as well as inlining images.

  • Emacs Bookmarks: Cheap File Metadata

    Something I've been exploring lately is using Emacs bookmarks as a file metadata system. The basic idea is that Emacs bookmarks allow annotations to be attached to them, and so I can create bookmarks for files, and attach annotations to the bookmarks giving some additional information about them. Here are some example use cases from my life:

    (1) Attaching additional model or part numbers to a data sheet file that I have downloaded, since the file name by itself might not be descriptive enough when doing a search through my data sheet file directory.

    (2) Attaching summary information or notes about source code files without changing the source code itself.

    With the added bookmark+ functionality, it is possible to view all file annotations in one buffer, along with the file names, and search through them. So that is kind of like a metadata search.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Sir-Photch becomes shtrophic

      Happy belated halloween everyone. I am one day late!

      This is just a quick note that I am changing my nickname across the interwebz. And this includes geminispace.

    • Smooth migration

      To prepare for the migration of my website, Gopher burrow and Prosody Jabber-server from my home network to a external VM, I created a Debian virtual machine on my FreeBSD laptop and wrote some scripts that do most of the work.

      The scripts install some packages and create the config files.