Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Saturday

    Two charity events. We has some serious luck at the first, winning, let's see, $360 in one drawing, and an extra free shot at the big drawing (which didn't pan out for us), then two $62 wins.

  • landlights

    photos from northumberland, wallington, cragside, seaton delaval, saltholme, fairburn ings

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ACNRTYU Wordo: WOOZY

  • Offline and New Injuries

    I'm typing this while fighting drowziness from the naproxen I took a bit ago. After falling in the bathroom a coupeld days ago, I'm still hurting, with my back and shoulders being fairly bruised from neck to hips. In protecting my head, I hit the lip of the shower stall, so I'm...sore, to say the least.

    That, coupled with people in my social circles being *highly* stressed out over political events here in the US, has kept me mostly offline. My own stress is at its limit, so I'm trying to relax with some reading and music, as well as a little bit of coding in my attempts to continue learning Perl and C. Not much is being done there, but enough that I'm happy with what I'm doing.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Operating the Temple System

    You know it is the future when you can can stand in the moss-covered corridors of a thousand-year-old temple -- until relatively recently hidden for centuries in the jungle -- and send photos of the experience to family and friends on two continents a quarter of the way around the globe, receiving their reactions in real time. The photos included trick-shots taken using techniques the tour guide had learned on YouTube. Gimmicky -- but in many ways a remarkable situation given what this country has been through in my lifetime.

    LTE Network coverage in Siem Reap and its surrounds matches the quality I've experienced in many western urban centres. I stood amid the ruins contemplating the lives and dreams of the Temple's builders and users, marvelling at the craftsmanship and the wear and tear of countless generations of footsteps, to the tune of a playlist of music curated from pretty-well every inhabited corner of the planet, compiled explicitly for the experience. The surreal but photorealistic cover art for the playlist was created on a whim, generated in seconds by an AI lurking in a machine room somewhere on the other side of the planet. If you had told me in high school about those almost mundane tech-assisted layers woven into my 2024 experience of Angkor Wat, I'm not sure I'd have fully believed you.

  • Why SeaweedFS?

    I got an email last week asking if I could explain why I set up a Seaweed server. It's been a while since I talked about it, mostly in hints in this post from 2022[1] and this post from 2024[2]. The request gives me an opportunity to expand on it, and to remind myself why I do it.