Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BCDEUNH Wordo: BELTS

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AGHINRY Wordo: CABLE

  • Shapeshifter

    I picked up my three and a half year old daughter from school. At school she was a baby when she played with a girl whose name she doesn't know.

    In the car, she barked a magic word Dr. Faustus said to summon Mephistopholes. I obliged her by gibbering "bleagh-bleagh-bleagh...." She banished me with the other magic word, then summoned me again, the strategy Faust used to tire the devil and bend it to his will.

    At her friend's house, she grabbed a sled and took off running to the big hill. She was speeding down it before anyone could stop her. What a fun thing to repeat.

  • And so the story

    I'm a stonemason by trade. I worked the same project since the birth of my firstborn.

  • Coming home

    Being scared of who I am creates these dark paths which haven't happened yet. Because I'm afraid I am a bad person, I am afraid that I will do bad things in the future.

    If I look logically at my life, I see clearly that I am not a bad person, I've never been, and will probably never be. I have a pure heart and I am aware of my own and other suffering and very sensitive to all that.

• Technology and Free Software

  • HIT AND MIPS

    As noted in earlier ramblings about my router running OpenWRT, with the upgrade to OpenWRT 23 I decided to give up on new versions. In fact the decision turns out to have been made for me because release notes for the OpenWrt 24 release candidates reveal that my router's board family been removed from their build targets. My main incentive for upgrading was security, but thinking about it I don't think an old Linux kernel that's not running any internet-facing services is at risk of getting hacked from the internet anyway. If they can get through the firewall then that's basically a backdoor at the heart of Linux - even after the horror of the XZ SSH backdoor I still don't think something that fundamental could slip through.

    But the annoying thing about computer security is that if you try to ignore it, like a jealous cartoon robot it'll start sabotaging everything you do just to get attention. I don't install the Web interface to OpenWrt, so no worries about any encryption sillyness it uses, but of course by default the command-line access is by SSH and some day newer SSH clients will get all elitist and refuse to talk to SSH servers as old as the Dropbear in OpenWrt 23. Telnet is a fine unencrypted alternative that I use everywhere else on my home network for this reason, but OpenWrt don't package a Telnet server.

  • referral links are bad

    As a general rule, I hate advertisements. Maybe it comes with growing up around the Internet when the ads were either easily-avoided banners at the top of a page or because ad creators/directors can't make anything worthwhile anymore. Maybe it's because all movie trailers spoil everything in 30 seconds to 2 minutes.

    Whatever the case, I don't like seeing ads. It's almost a visceral reaction. If it's the rare TV show I'm watching on TV (weird sentence a few decades ago), I will mute the ads until the show gets back on. It's a far cry from when cable was the overwhelming norm for TV viewing.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Domain Change and Preparations for 2025

      **Important:** The new domain for auragem is now auragem.ddns.net. The previous domain name completely disappeared from my freedns account (for some unknown reason). While I have gotten the auragem server back up and running with the new domain, the misfin server will not be accessible for a while as I change over my misfin certificate. Note that auragem will always be available over a Tor Onion Service:

    • static-site generation with pandoc, fennel, and make

      I'm experimenting with a potential ssg set up using pandoc to process source files (eg, markdown), fennel for html templating using a rudimentary hiccup-like library, and makefiles to glue it all together.

    • Recent messages on Boundless Expeditions

      "Boundless Expeditions" is the newsletter of Infinitus Ministries and I write and publish sermons, among other occasional materials.