Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • A New Year

    Happy new year, one and all. I hope your holidays were safe and fun. If memory serves me, this is my 9th year phlogging on modern gopher. It's fascinating how quickly that time seems to have gone. I mean in general, of course. Looking back at life always feels that way, I believe.

  • "Welcome to the midnight, it's time"

    It's night. I have no wristwatch nor clocks around, but I guess it's 11pm, somehow I feel it. I'm walking indefinitely through this place. How could I describe this place? It's not exactly a city, but it's urban... There's no one around. There are things scattered on the ground. The only light is the dim moonlight, but I can see many different things, things that are broken and thrown out, such as soda cans, discarded wrappings, broken electronics and metal parts. A pollution signaling previous humane activity.

  • 🎄 The Annual Christmas Tree Burn ☃

    We have a New Year's Eve tradition: we burn last year's Christmas tree in our fire pit. In this way, we send off the old year and welcome in the new. We have a few friends over and my wife, who loves to bake, produces tons of cookies and brownies and all kinds of things.

    Starting last year, one of our friends started bringing their family's tree over, as well, so we get to burn multiple trees.

    Of course, this involves keeping the tree for an entire year-plus to give it a chance to dry out. We're lucky enough to have room to do this for a tree, or sometimes more if I get them from the neighbors.

    And when these things go up, they *go up*. The fire department isn't kidding when they say don't let these dry up in your house. A modest noble fir will produce a tower of flames.

  • Colour me

    I need to get some coloured things to my new place dealt with. I want blue things in my bedroom, orange and gray things in my living room, and yellow and green things in my kitchen.

    The bedroom is pretty barren for now, but a blue carpet helps it a bit. The pre-installed curtain is dark blue, so that's nice. The room itself is pale white. It does contrast pretty well on the blue, I just need more blue.

    The living room has my orange sofa and some grey items around it. They work together nicely. Copper and steel, if we take the steampunk way of thinking.

    But my kitchen. It is pale with white surfaces. I need to find pale yellow (or pale green) curtains. My friend found me a beautiful Dutch enameled tile made in the 1800s, which is green and yellow, but which I haven't found a good spot for. I have a citrus poster to hang up with greens and yellows (and oranges) if I had a frame and a hook. I also have a little painted card another friend painted me with a bunch of green in it, I need another hook to hang that one up too. The only things that fit my kitchen colour scheme here are my houseplants, which need a space of their own somewhere else than on my dinner table, and a golden sheaf of barley I keep in a vase.

  • 2025 - New Year, New Look

    I wanted to make things feel a little fresh, so for folks looking at this page via the web (HTTP/S), you will probably notice that I changed up the look of the site. I like designs that don't go out of their way to hide things. For instance, there were A LOT of transluscent devices back in the late 90s and early 2000. In celebration of that, I wanted to set up my website to look like the gemtext file it actually is based on.

    Initially, I wanted to make the link lines fully accurate to the gemtext spec, but I ran into a slight visual issue in the index page of /journal/. Unfortunately because all of the link text starts with a date and has the full title, the lines would get too cluttered. As a result, for now, I am hiding the links behind the link text as web links tend to do. Maybe later on I'll decide that the clutter is a fine enough tradeoff for tech transparency.

  • Dev Log 5 - Implementing Tarot Spreads

    I'm a bit farther than this post implies, but I figured I'd give an update explaining that I have arbitrary tarot spreads working! At least for now, I have 13 different tarot spreads represented.

  • 3 January 2025 - I Will Fear No Evil in a Metropolis of Many Hearts

    You need to forgive the semi incoherent vibe of this gemlog post - it is full of a lot of half-processed observations, and incomplete reflections on my experienes in South Africa to date.

    As a foreigner, South Africa is never what you think it is. You can't arrive here and correctly interpret what you see through a European lens, or an American lens, or an Australian lens. Even if you have been here a while, you will find that your understanding of the dynamics of the place continues to evolve, sometimes radically. Hell, as far as I can tell, even as as a South African, South Africa is never what you think it is. This is a compartmentalised, stratified and unhomogenised country, despite the abolition of formal apertheid. And between the layers exists a knotted connective tissue of transactions, agendas, perceptions and mythologies that slide and chafe against each other like jungle vines while the place grows and convolves and evolves.

• Technology and Free Software

  • A more bingeable XKCD interface 🤖 ⚗️😆

    However it was pretty barebones. Later that year I added a index with titles, but it still wasn't the best experience. So today I did a little work improve the CGI that power the mirror. N

  • Internet/Gemini

    • My first contribution to Geminispace

      I am thrilled to finally start making my own contributions (content/information wise) to Geminispace. I have been lurking since early 2023 after discovering the protocol and decided that one of my goals for 2025 is to engage more with Geminispace and everything else that is Gemini protocol related. I believe that the Gemini protocol and by extension Geminispace is important, especially in the times that we are currently living in, and more than just a toy or hobby (project). T

    • "A Colossal Wreck, Boundless and Bare": A Living Eulogy for Literary Twitter

      I saw this boosted in my Bluesky feed late in December, a eulogy for the Twitter-that-was, from writer Hannah Cohen. To be clear, this isn't a eulogy for Twitter as the general platform - that Twitter, the Twitter of big accounts and Blue Wave accounts and Presidential reply guys, is a big, shambling, shitty thing.

      But communities formed in the cracks, like the little ecosystems of tidepools in the ocean. Cohen writes about the joy of discovering a community with no barriers but participation.

  • Programming

    • Security Hoop

      Here we need the "proc" (fork) allow so downloads still work, but "exec" is not allowed. This makes it a bit harder for attackers to run arbitrary programs. An attacker can still read various files, but there are also unveil restrictions that very much reduce the access of w3m to the filesystem. An attacker could make DNS and internet connections, though fixing that would require a different browser design that better isolates the "get stuff from the internet" parts from the "try to parse the hairball that is HTML" code, probably via imsg_init(3) on OpenBSD, or differently complicated to download to a directory with one process and to parse it with another. That way, a HTML security issue would have a more difficult time in getting out to the interwebs. However, with pledge and unveil and not doing much in any given w3m instance (so an attacker cannot rummage around in w3m's memory looking for goodies from other pages visited) the security is a bit better than the default, which allows w3m to read all files and run all programs, come what may.

    • It's more like computer security theater than actual security

      What I find annoying is the lack of any type of attack as an example. It's always “data from da Intarwebs bad!” without regard to how it's bad. The author just assumes that hackers out there have some magical way of executing code on their computer just by the very act of downloading a file. The assumption that some special sequence of HTML can open a network connection to some control server in Moscow or Beijing or Washington, DC (District of Columbia) and siphon off critical data is just … I don't know, insane to me. Javascript, yes, I can see that happening. But HTML?

      And then I recall the time that Microsoft added code to their programs to scan JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) images for code and automatically execute it, and okay, I can see why maybe the cargo cult security mumbo-jumbo exists.