Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BCEIORW Wordo: AFOOT

  • "hey patrick, i know what's funnier than 24 - 25!"

    Well, we're officially on the last day of another year. Seems like this one has flown by, with a lot of highs and a lot of lows.

    ~bartender, just a beer?

    This year has been great in a lot of ways for me, and not so great in others. We lost some people in our family (and a close friend) this year that I loved and were close to me, and my wife and I have both dealt with health issues of our own this year. Those were some of the biggest lows of the year.

    Of course, balanced among those lows, were the highs. We've continued to do our homesteading stuff, I've continued to build software and websites and help clients with their own projects. My wife and I have begun working on a new little platformer video game that I'm excited to get out by summer of 2025. It's been a lot of fun, and continues to be as we build it up. I'm excited to play the final product and share it with family and friends and see what they think about it.

• Medical

  • Reason 666 Why US Health Care Is So Fucked: The Testing Obsession!

    Day after Christmas, known as Boxing Day to folks in the British Commonwealth, I called my cardiologist's office to report some issues I'd had during the previous week.

    1. After riding a stationary bike for 20-30 minutes last Saturday the 21st, I started feeling like I was going to have a heart attack. 2. That I am perpetually fatigued. Simple things like doing the dishes, cooking, and carrying in a couple bags of groceries are leaving me exhausted.

    So the receptionist dutifully notes down my issues. "We'll have our triage person get back to you." An hour or so later, I get a call from someone in scheduling. "Your doctor says you need to go to the hospital." Of course, I'm thinking this is complete and utter bullshit, because that day I was feeling just fine. Same for the day before. But we (GF and I) talked ourselves into going to the ER anyway.

• Technology and Free Software

  • My digital 2024

    It is that time of the year again, when we publish our lists and reviews of the year.

    Looking back on 2024, here are some highlights.

    SPF, DMARC and DKIM

    It becomes harder to send email from your own email server.

    At the beginning of 2024 I set up SPF, DMARC and DKIM, to prevent most of my email ending up in spam-folders. As is so often the case, it looked more scary than it really was.

    My SMTP server was sendmail, running in a jail on the small FreeBSD server in our home network.

    Later in 2024 I had to end the self-hosting of the internet services from within our home network, and migrated the services, including the SMTP server, to an external Debian machine. I installed Postfix on it, and made that work with the same certificates.

  • Default Apps 2024

    All the favorite people I follow online have posted their "default apps" 2024 posts. So, under unspoken peer pressure, I decided to do the same.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Posts from October to December 2024

      These are my social media posts from the last three months. I keep them here to reflect on them and also to not lose them. Social media networks come and go and are not under my control, but my domain is here to stay.

    • Google News RSS isn't really RSS

      This is a shame since I do find news aggregation quite useful. If I want to read technology articles, I want to go to a single place and get a consolidated list of stories across multiple sites. That's what Yahoo News was doing. Its death has led me to look for different ways to power the news aggregator for NewsWaffle.

      The obvious answer is Google News.