Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🌲 Gray Skies in the Forest 🌨

    It's been rainier than usual in Central Oregon the last couple weeks, which is generally a good thing for the high desert... as long as it's snowing up high, which I think it is.

    But that didn't stop me and Theo from getting out on our usual 5 km walk. And this time we just went cross country for the fun of it.

    This walk took us through some areas that are fenced off (to vehicles) for restoration, and the rain had filled them with actual ponds for a change, something that's rarely seen here at that size. Little ponds, sure. But these were bona fide.

  • End of Christmas 🎄🚫

    It's Twelfth Night, so I took the Christmas tree down and stopped the new year resolution generator.

    We had a little snow last night, so I'm counting that as a White Christmas, even if only just.

  • daily contentment

    perhaps contrary to the main goal of the year (creating memorable experiences big and small) i've realized i've been progressively becoming more and more content with daily life. i used to long for that special interest/hyperfixation that could take me for weeks or months or years if i was lucky. everything becomes inspiring and interesting through the lens of The Thing. how am i to live this dreary life without A Thing to color it and make it sparkle? i haven't had A Thing in so long... years!

• Technology and Free Software

  • read it later apps

    I've finally got around to doing something (TM) about Omnivore (a read-it-later app) shutting down.

    since switching my GUI browser to Vivaldi across all of my devices, its built-in reading list feature would be enough for my needs. saved articles could potentially be read offline too.

    however, I had always planned to switch to wallabag if something happens to omnivore, and so I still gave it a chance. I could self-host it, but I first tried one of the community-hosted instances.

    it's usable. there are good client apps for both iOS and android, I can easily send new articles via the "share" function on any browser. but something just did not feel right. for one, it didn't seem possible to customize the reading experience. Wallabag pulls the entire article and provides a built-in interface for reading the saved links. I had hoped it could replace Vivaldi's built-in reader mode, except the reading experience was sub-par.

  • Installing virt-manager in debian

    virt-manager is GUI for running virtual machines in qemu similar to virtual box and vmware. The virtual machines are independent of the virt-manager GUI, so closing the GUI leaves the VM running in background.

  • New Leaves and Fresh Starts

  • New Leaves and Fresh Starts

    Here we go again. It's 2025 and the internet/blogosphere/phlogosphere is full of declarations of change and renewal. This is not to disparage these honest attempts at personal growth, but as I get older it's hard not to notice the regularity of this pattern and start to despair that true change is impossible. This is probably less to do with other people and instead mostly a projection of my own frustration at yet another year closing with so many things unfinished.

    Why do I feel the need to finish things? Particularly things that I ostensibly do for my own enjoyment? I think this is an important question. "Achieving targets" is something that is lauded above almost everything else in corporate environments, which I think most people who have an ounce of humanity left would class as utterly toxic and antithetical to personal happiness. Outside of my obligations to my job and family, what's wrong with simply doing the things that make me happy while they continue to do so, and moving on once they stop being fun?

  • fossil sync error

    After writing here again and trying to commit to the fossil repo I'm using for the phlogs I saw an error pop up for every sync. The remote repo is on my RPi running NetBSD 9.3 and I recently did a pkgin upgrade which also upgraded apache.

    The error has been fixed back in April 2024, but as frequently as I am updating things nowdays I just now realized it. A quick search showed that it has been caused by an update of apache (but they are handling things still according to specs) and of course fossil that was not prepared for this. Root cause: Content-Length was missing in the answer from apache, but the fossil client always expected it to be present.

  • Export decrypted messages from entire mailbox

    My email is stored on an IMAP server, and I read the mail with Emacs Gnus. One of the IMAP folders contains only GPG-encrypted messages. Although sometimes the subject can help to find a message, it is quite hard to search for a specific message.

    To make it easier to sift through the messages, I wanted to export the full mailbox to an unencrypted format.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Personal update

      It has been a while. I haven't come to write anything here on my gemini capsule because of my studies: I started studying mathematics at Aalto university. I have focused on my studies and social life, not writing these nerdy glog posts.

      The mathematics I study is quite engineer-y, or at least it has been this far. What matters is being able to calculate things, not being able to understand them.

    • Symlinks and Stuff

      One way to do this is to make user directories within the gemini tree, give the user permissions to that directory, and to make a symlink from the user's home directory over to the gemini tree for easy access. Let's say cousin Clem needs access.

    • My network-wide bullshit-blocking setup

      I intend on eventually making this fault-tolerant by using another device as a failover with keepalived. Where and what that other device will be is to be determined. I have Blocky configured to use the strict strategy for the upstreams setting, so after a timeout of the topmost server it will fallback to the next one, which is Quad9. An idea I have is to setup a cheap VPS on Vultr and run a public DNS resolver on it, but Quad9 is fine for now. Using a completely self-hosted recursive DNS resolver is fairly important to me, but as long as it's not going through Google or my ISP it is fine.

      I have the Orange Pi 5 Plus Tailnet IP address configured to be my Tailnet's global nameserver. So every device on my Tailnet that uses MagicDNS will be using Blocky and Unbound.

    • Tradeoffs

      There are trade-offs. The least bad option is to use w3m for most web browsing, given that the alternatives are worse: too bloated, too annoying, the cost too high to implement something less bad, etc. Security is not the only axis or parameter under consideration, and the context also matters. Same story for those better-than-C platforms (hypothetical, failed in the market, or otherwise) with formal verification and granular security baked in from day negative something: might be nice, but those are not viable for me at the moment.