Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BDIRTYU Wordo: STRAW

  • Moondogs and Snakedancing

    I am sitting in my chair. It is 19 November 2024, and the time is 3:57 PM EST. The sun is shining through my eastern window onto the wall to my left, forming an offcentered square. Its shape is highly irregular and it is shifting constantly, with the edges shimmering and seeming to sway slightly to and fro. I can feel that the sun is an amazing, powerful light, and that the atmosphere is like water, pushing on and distorting this beam until it looks like it is cast from a candlelight. For a moment the square settled into a regular shape, with the edges showing themselves naturally to be a bit blurred, but consistent. This didn't last, and forces beyond my reckoning once again begun to badger this light. The square now is lightly flickering in intensity, and there seems to be a sort of marbling to the luminosity passing across the surface. I know it is meant to snow tonight, and I wonder if there are large amounts of ice crystals in the sky causing these distortions.

  • Today in My Country

    In the morning the weather its so warm and shiny, but after afternoon, thunder and lightning,also rain ☔ always come.

  • week 47 - busybusy

    what a week. very busy. also i stopped keeping logs so... i hope i can remember what happened based on the long-form journal that hosts an entire collection of random junk.

  • Being a Student

    A student's role is to learn from a teacher, and to do so to the best of their ability. If they don't trust the teacher, then they shouldn't be their student, sure, but beyond that, the teacher should always—always—be given the benefit of the doubt. If the student disagrees with the teacher, they should assume that they are wrong before simply disagreeing with the teacher or thinking the teacher is wrong. If you think that 2 + 2 = 5 and your teacher says "nope", then what you feel isn't going to be correct, no matter how you feel about it. There are times, of course, when the teacher is actually wrong, but those times are ideally only pressed when the student proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that such is the case. No teacher is infallible, of course, as we are all human, but that doesn't mean that they'll be as wrong as their students, or wrong as often—that's why they're a teacher!

• Technology and Free Software

  • I was gifted an RG35xxSP

    It has two sd card slots, one for booting and one for holding ROMs and other files. The system comes with a pre-installed sd-card image with more ROMs preinstalled than I could ever play. The hardware is around 1GB ram, 4 cores, and a 640x480 display. It kind of makes me want to put a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W in the same form factor.

  • But Do I Really Need This? - Digital Downsizing

    Probably about a month or 2 ago, I received a scam email claiming to be my email host, Zoho, saying my email hosting subscription was about to run out and I needed to pay to continue using them as a host. When I saw that email, I thought to myself "That's weird, I have the free plan" but then I remembered that my IMAP support was grandfathered in. The email looked quite convincing and while I didn't fall for it, I almost did. The only thing that prevented me from falling for it was the fact that the email client I use, Mutt, doesn't handle HTML emails, so I had to save the HTML content to a file and open that in a graphical web browser, taking up some time and giving me time to process what was going on.

    After getting that scam email, I realized that it was completely under Zoho's control when they would stop IMAP support for grandfathered free accounts. They haven't announced anything saying they'd stop support, but about 2 weeks ago, they changed the imap and smtp sendpoints for the grandfathered accounts.

  • Week Notes 3

    This is something I got into this week on a total whim. I’ve been working my way through the “starting point” labs on Hack The Box where they give you different challenges to hack into a virtual server that’s been set up for you. The ones I’m going through are still pretty guided and do a good job of walking you through the various tools and approaches you can use to get a foothold on a machine. It’s been a lot of fun to learn about a tech field I’m not as familiar with and I’m looking forward to giving some of the more puzzle-y challenges a try later on.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • minor capsule changes and some rambling

      I now add a created stamp to each page, and I’ve modified the last updated logic to not write the last updated if it’s the same as the created date. In doing so I noticed that even though it’s been only two years or so, my Python coding style has changed a bit. I hope for the better. I’ve also noticed that it’s kind of nice to use the Gemtext pages as the browsing format for my notes stored locally.

      Obviously Gemtext looks nice as a format for viewing text, but this is something more. There’s minimal transformation to go from the Markdown I write in to the page that gets displayed, but it still feels a bit more pleasant than reading the Markdown. I think this tiny bit of transformation is created a few unexpected effects in my brain space.