Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AEPGLOF Wordo: WAILS

• Technology and Free Software

  • Two more digital Casios flying under the radar

    As much as I like my Casio GMW-B5000D, I find it almost unwearable in my 24/7 mode. That's because of its full-steel construction and corresponding weight of about 150 grams. This is the same reason I'm never going to buy the Casiotron reissue (TRN-50) which, by the way, contains virtually the same module inside. And the MRG-B5000D doesn't cost the amount of money that I'd be ready to give for merely a watch anytime soon. But an idea of a metal-core G-Shock with a proper screwback case that's not as heavy still couldn't escape me... until I found the GW-5000U.

  • Bad hypens break documentation?

    Short version: hyphen '-' 0x2d is good, dle '‐' 0x90 is bad on shell command lines.

    Longer version:

    The other day I tried to connect my trusty old Acer Travelmate running alpine linux to my access point. And since I don't do this often, I had to check the man pages. (Note: I do this by hand, calling ip, iwconfig, wpa_supplicant on the shell.) Open the man page, "man wpa_supplicant", search for the EXAMPLES section, copy the relevant line, possibly edit the name of the network interface ... and go:

    ``` wpa_supplicant ‐Dnl80211,wext ‐c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf ‐iwlan0 # BROKEN! ```

    except that this did not work. It told me the --help output without any excuse and returned 255 as return code.

  • My ideal operating system

    An underwater-basketweaving forum I’m on sometimes talks about technology topics. One question someone asked once was “What’s your ideal operating system?”.

    I’ve been chewing on that for a few days.

  • Invisibles

    I set ASCII by default in man(1) to help avoid fancy characters. Maybe the man pages are less pretty, but * for bullet works just as fine as •, which my vi helpfully shows as \xe2\x80\xa2. No, I don't do much with fancy characters in the terminal.

  • re: Emacs from Scratch

    But as it seems most people start with DoomEmacs or SpacEmacs to begin with. But because I had absolutely no idea about Emacs at all and wanted to learn from the ground up I chose to build up my Emacs from Scratch.

  • Update on homelab projects

    Guix is a no-go, because KDE Plasma is not an officially supported desktop environment on Guix yet. Nor does Tailscale have a reliable way to install and manage on Guix. Maybe when the Non-Guix maintainers decide toport Tailscale to their channel.

    I've decided to keep using Doom Emacs for now. Once I get my K3s cluster up and running and in working order, I will take time to pick apart my Doom Emacs config. This would involve finding the packages and configuration that are builtin to Doom Emacs, which I mostly take for granted -- aside from the ones I have defined in `packages.el`. I would have to find a way to conveniently manage packages without the `doom sync` and `doom upgrade` commands. But, for now, everything just works, and I'd like to keep it that way as I'm working on the K3s cluster.

  • 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 2)

    The first official Ubuntu release was 4.10. At that time, I happened to be the president of my University LUG: LouvainLiNux. LouvainLiNux was founded a few years before by Fabien Pinckaers, Anthony Lesuisse and Benjamin Henrion as an informal group of friends. After they graduated and left university, Fabien handled me all the archives, all the information and told me do continue the work while he was running his company that would, much later, becomes Odoo. With my friend Bertrand Rousseau, we decided to make Louvain-Li-Nux a formal and enduring organisation known as "KAP" (Kot-à-Projet). Frédéric Minne designed the logo by putting the student hat ("calotte") of Fabien on a penguin clipart.