Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The final top gear/grand tour episode

    It's been 22 years since I as a young lad took up watching Top Gear. It might only have been 20 or 19 years for me, but regardless, I was still a teenager.

    I said the nostalgia was layered on thick, but to me Top Gear was also more than a show. It's like the other major hits, Friends, Big Bang Theory, Desperate Housewives and so on, they aren't great because of the content per se, but because of the people.

    It's the same reason the networks tried and failed at creating subsequent copies of these things, it's not the same.

  • ALLEN DAM

    A hot day yesterday, and forecast rain today. Not ideal for exploring the dam I plotted a route to last weekend. So I decided to go on Friday instead, with an 18degC forecast and light winds being perfect for some quiet bushwalking.

    Allen/Allenvale Dam/Reservoir (naming for these places is traditionally inconsistent) is among the last dam within comfortable day-trip range that I haven't visited yet. The Web provides every suggestion that it's not accessible to the public, but since it's in a national park with lots of walking tracks running between the innumberable waterfalls dotted around the coastal township of Lorne, the tracks cross the gated road to the reservoir and present a convenient backdoor route.

  • Greetings

    Hello all. I was ambling my way home after a beer or two, and happened to glance down the alleyway and saw the sign for the Midnight Pub. I strolled up, but was not sure whether to enter. I waited outside for a bit listening to some of the conversations. What I heard made me think it was my kind of place - so here I am.

  • My home

    I'm moving in a couple weeks. I wouldn't like to leave this place, but alas. The new place is very nice and it has its own, different pros and cons. I just gotta get my stuff gathered up. I'll have time.

    I need some new bookshelves. Somewhere to put all my board games and books and decorations more neatly than I now have them.

    I also need to make myself a proper music statiom in the living room. A chair and a note stand are decent enough when I actually get myself to practice for real, but I've spread myself out a lot in my living room.

  • I Regret to Inform You the Poets are Elsewhere: Purity and Cory Doctorow's Ulysses Pact

    Every so often, someone asks Cory Doctorow if he's going to sign up for Bluesky. I've seen a couple of these, and the answer is always no, with an asterisk: he isn't interested in new platforms unless he can exit without switching costs. Doctorow has a big following in the Fediverse: almost 60k followers (enormous, by Fedi standards - at time of writing, the 52nd most-followed account), and still posts on Twitter. Presumably his self-enforced rule is carefully constructed to exclude new services like Bluesky and Threads, and to allow him to keep posting on Twitter. Because if he's got platform concerns, I don't see how he reconciles that with continuing to post at a site owned by a fascist, that pushes violent posts, trolls, and fascist propaganda into people's feeds. But, I guess we each make our decision. I left last year and left behind a good chunk of my community, something that I haven't fully found elsewhere, and whose loss I've keenly felt for the last year and a half (more on that later).

• Technology and Free Software

  • HTB season ended and team was top 100 world wide!!!

    Hola! Happy Hacking to all hackers, DIY, Creators and tinkers out there. - Yes our team got into the top teams, most, I personally got to the top of the holo label, finishing all boxes, we did all boxes in a matter of hours or a 1-2 days for the insane ones, very good considering this used to take me weeks, but yes I have to admit this insame boxes were easier because they had non-intended ways that later on got patched after I did them.

  • Fast computer and magic

    As I wrote here some weeks ago I updated my MNT Reform 2 laptop with the latest RCORE CPU. So now I have a really fast ARM laptop. My own code runs here 2 times slower than it does on my OpenPOWER workstation with the POWER9 CPU. White slower, the reform also consumes many times less power (and it is way more portable than my desktop workstation, too!).

    Other things are black magic, though. The Reform 2 uses a system controller to start and to shutdown the machine, to report battery status and so on (as the OpenPOWER does). The Linux requires a kernel module to acces the system controller. I do have the thing and it used to work well before the upgrade. After that it sometimes works.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Smolnet Portal and SGI

      I remember times when I was able to do almost all on-line work on the IRIX. Internet banking, browsing, online shopping and so on. The IRIX 6.5 has been able to run the Netscape up tp 4.7, the Firefox up to 3.0.19 and the latest Lynx, among others. Some things required helpers like youtube_dl, some thing were unavailable at all (do you remember then ActiveX or the Flash?)

      But these times are gone. There is no recent SSL implementation available and even if if will be then many modern cyphers are too CPU-demanding so even my 250 MHz MIPS R10k CPU will not be able to handle them. So, no https:// at all.