Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • HCO3 ON GEMINI > TURTLES

    Photos of turtles in my home and travels.

  • HCO3 ON GEMINI > THE LIBRARY

    All files have been scanned for viruses and are believed in good-faith to be virus free. Keep in mind that much abandonware and historical software have been obtained from multiple sources, and it is impossible to know every hand they have been through. Open any file and install any software with caution.

  • Resisting a Food Temptation

    I wrote last week about some changes I'm trying to introduce to my diet. I've reduced the number of meals I eat per day from three to two. One of those meals, usually my lunch, consists almost entirely of protein and natural fats, like eggs and steak. I'm trying to increase my water intake, at least 120 ounces per day. It isn't always easy to turn down a tasty snack between meals, but I've certainly reduced them over this month.

    Avoiding the temptation of overly-sweet or ultra-processed foods has always been difficult for me. My highest-ever weight was about 256 pounds (116.1 kg): the result of three doughnuts for breakfast and 20 McDonald's chicken nuggets each day, combined with a sedentary IT job. While I've lost 30 pounds since that time and have largely managed to keep it off, breaking the 200 lb barrier has remained elusive, and my proclivity to stop at gas stations or convenience stores in the evenings and buy sweets for myself is largely to blame. Even worse, my wife also has a bit of a sweet tooth, and sometimes she can be quite an enabler--though she can control herself better than I can.

  • Wind

    I've always thought the wind to be a friend
    The sun's there in fair weather until its light comes to an end
    The breeze will remind me that time won't last forever
    There's only so many things we can still do together
    

  • Legacy Mortality and the Unseen Cost of Wealth

    There has been considerable discussion surrounding the recent murder of the UHC CEO, highlighting how, even if people don’t condone murder, many express a lack of empathy toward the incident. Some have even mocked or supported the event. A similar reaction was seen when a group of millionaires and billionaires lost their lives in the OceanGate submersible implosion during their expedition to view the Titanic wreck. These responses reveal a deep-seated resentment toward the ultra-wealthy, to the extent that their deaths—whether accidental or intentional—are being celebrated and, in some cases, justified.

    It's ironic that while humans, especially the wealthy, often strive to be remembered positively long after they're gone—frequently through acts of altruism—these efforts don't always guarantee a favorable legacy. In many cases, one might leave behind material wealth for future generations, yet the broader world may not remember them kindly and sometimes may even find relief in their absence. This outcome is undeniably poignant.

    We often believe that money can buy life by affording high-quality food or access to health and wellness care that may extend our years. And while this is true to some extent, death operates on its own terms, indifferent to wealth. It can strike without warning, leaving no time to use money as a shield.

  • A Dream of an Egg

    Every time I escape my own murder, I become more like a murderer.

    In the dream my mother splayed on a candlelit nest of pillows in darkness. She wore the same faded pink threadbare bathrobe that I remember her wearing when I was a child.

  • Day 3 of the cleanse

    Please note that this isn't fun. I have to run to the bathroom regularly, my energy is really low, and I'm a bit in some sort of existential crisis. I feel my body enjoy the cleanse but it's quite the process.

    Yesterday went well. I did not use any plant medecine. I actually didn't do much. I slept until 11 I wrote, I folded part of the tipi, that is now in my living room. I cleaned up the house, feed the fire and had a soup.

  • Clease day 4

    Last day of my cleanse.

    As I'm starting a new week I am ready to stop the cleanse. I didn't want to drink more castor oil this morning, which officially ended my cleanse.

    I want to be productive today and my energy level are quite low although I feel very good.

    Yesterday I went with a lentil soup, which was pretty much only red lentils boiled in broth, a bit of salt and pepper, and voila. Very simple still quite tasty.

  • Creative Moods

    I have never been an arty person. I struggle to draw, to play music and write prose. It is something which has frustrated me in many respects. With this lack of appreciation for 'standard creative arts,' I have found myself not keeping note books or regular practises. No wonder I struggle to 'git gud' at any of these!

  • tea, incense and ink

    incense, tea, ink bowl, cup, paper fire, water and pen

    all that is needed to fill the evening preparing the dream

    celebrating the sleep dislodging the mind leaving the body behind

  • Still figuring out how to want, thanks for asking

    I've been a bit down on music as a hobby the last couple of months. It's to the point that all of my instruments are cased and in the closet, rather than in their usual place out in the living room. I did this because I wanted to take some time away from it and see if I'd miss it.

    I've been reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, lately. I'm not far into it, but one of the things he talks about is how environment plays a huge role in our habits. He uses this to make the point that people with good "discipline" or "self-control" aren't actually all that special, they just set up their environments to have minimal distractions and place the habits they want to cultivate front-and-center.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Berkeley DB

    Berkeley DB (BDB) is old, though has the advantage of being fairly simple to use and is generally available by default (or easily installed via some ports or package system). The disadvantages are many, such as Subversion trying to use BDB instead of a filesystem-based database like they do now, or the lack of features as one can find in an also memory- or filesystem-based sqlite database. SQLite on the other hand is slightly more complicated, though likely is a better option especially if you have configuration management that handles bootstrapping the various database files with the appropriate schema. Humans are pretty good at skipping steps or forgetting to do things, so one may want a system that "just works" with as little meddling as possible.

  • Vertical tab

    One of the criticisms of my table idea was that it wasn't backwards compatible with existing gemini client implemintations and would look like a mess there. Given that there is not one but two chatacters dedicated to tabulation in ASCII, I decided to play with them a bit.

  • Fossify Gallery

    A basic on-device gallery app that lets you view, browse, organize and delete your photos entirely on your own phone, and open them in other apps for sharing. No tracking, no ads. Works as a file picker too, when you're already in another app and want to load a photo. Mostly replaces the offline use cases for Google Photos.

    There's a simple editor for cropping, rotating, markup and a few pre-defined filters. (IIRC the Simple Gallery app it was forked from had a few more adjustments it could do, but the Fossify project had some concerns about the license.) I'd like to use it to crop photos for iNaturalist, but there's currently a bug where it loses EXIF data when editing. Even when I want to remove GPS coordinates, I don't want to remove the time the photo was taken!

  • Getting started to write firewall rules

    This blog post is about designing firewall rules, not focusing on a specific operating system.

    The idea came after I made a mistake on my test network where I exposed LAN services to the Internet after setting up a VPN with a static IPv4 on it due to too simplistic firewall rules. While discussing this topic on Mastodon, some mentioned they never know where to start when writing firewall rules.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Lagrange (Gemini Client)

      When I was first experimenting with the Gemini Protocol, Lagrange quickly became my favorite Gemini client on the desktop. It's visually clean, it's fast, it runs well (and stable) on Linux, macOS and Windows, and the UI works the way you'd expect it to coming from using a web browser, down to details like middle-clicking to open a link in a new background tab.

  • Programming

    • Introducing Ploum's demo gwit sites

      Ploum reflected the other day upon the (im)permanence of the works that we publish on the Internet, and he also made a mention to gwit (thanks!). This reminded me that, after creating the two unofficial demo gwit sites from Ploum's blog in my previous post, the natural course of action for this gwit site should be to add introductions to those sites, much as I did a while ago with Matograine's site.