Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Re: Thoughts on ink, by bog body

    Bog body struck a note with their post "thoughts on ink" – I think we're on similar paths.

    Mostly I wanted to send a "thank you for writing this" to them, and a confirmation that I feel the same. @bogbody: I'd be happy to hear from you.

  • My Sick and Twisted Dream Worlds

    This afternoon, I dreamed that the Catholic Church canonized a living donkey as a saint. His name is Santísimo, which will be important later.

    Anyhow, there's this event that supposedly takes place in certain parts of Mexico called a donkey show. If you haven't heard of it, spectators essentially pay to watch a woman be fucked by a donkey. The donkey show is said to be an urban legend. I read on some website that it was a myth conjured up by gringos to paint Mexicans in a bad light. I can believe that, given everything I know about the sad history of these kinds of ethnic myths. I knew a guy who told me that he actually saw a donkey show, but after researching this subject,, I'm extremely willing to believe that he was pulling my leg. Regardless of whether or not the donkey show exists in reality, it did in my dream.

    The Pope made a proclamation. "If you want remittance of sins, you can get it by starring in a donkey show with Santísimo." Furthermore, your name will be recorded on a blockchain. For the non-geeks out there, that's basically an append-only ledger. Cryptocurrencies are also typically built on blockchains. Speaking of cryptocurrency, you don't just get forgiveness, you also get some free cryptocurrency! Contrary to what the Bible claimed, you really can serve both God and mammon!

    A few hours after I woke, I did a web search for Santísimo. Apparently, in Spanish, it can be an adjective or a noun. When used as an adjective, it means "most holy", and when used as a noun, it means "holy sacrament." It is used to refer to Christ in the Eucharist.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AUIKLME Wordo: SWIGS

  • home

    A new year. Going back home again after months of being away. Turns out I don't feel like that place is home anymore. ~bartender, a beer, please. Time to let it all go for a bit and just enjoy the view of a city that I got used to so quickly.

    Home, at least where it should be, doesn't feel the same anymore. I guess the dust did set in. The ambitions that built up over two decades finally decided to make them visible. The place doesn't feel hollow, but it is a shell over its former glory. Maybe it's the new horizons making the tree just outside the door look small. Maybe it can all go away with a spring cleaning. I'm not sure.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Dealing With the "Tetris Effect"

    So in December 2024, I participated in "December Adventure" (link to my post below). Since the 5th of December, I started reworking the Game Boy ROM for the Tarot Card Reader I hoped to get done soon.

    [...]

    I don't have the answer for what to do when you get the Tetris Effect. Taking breaks when allowed to tends to help me, although some projects or job positions just don't allow that due to their nature. I just want to finish the project I'm working on while also not being haunted by the Tetris Effect too badly.

    Without going too far into my IRL personal life, a particular factory job where I watched vegetables on a conveyor belt system to see if they were rotten caused me to have a really bad Tetris Effect for weeks after the job was done, just beacause I would see the same vegetable move on a conveyor belt every day for hours on end. Every time I shut my eyes, I would see that vegetable moving. There was no escape from the slowly moving vegetables... just as there was no escape from watching cards move into position and flip in my mind while sleeping.

  • Using GNU Emacs Key Bindings in GNU Midnight Commander's Mcedit

    I've been playing with the GNU Midnight Commander (mc) lately (I'm editing this post in mc). I've always had a soft spot for orthodox file managers [0] since my DOS days using Norton Commander, and mc has some great features, including remote editing, familiar to anyone who uses GNU Emacs' tramp mode. However, this feature only works with mc's internal editor (mcedit, which can also be used as a very capable standalone editor).

  • Rogue Level Generation

    In more detail there's a "new_level" function call that is run on level change. rogue, at least as of version 3.6.3 from 1981, does not have stairs, but rather has optional and non-optional level change teleporters, where the optional one is used with the ">" key and puts you somewhere on a new random level one level down, or you can also go up on the "stair", when you have the amulet, for a random level one level up. The non-optional level teleporter is a pit trap that drops you down a level, though you could optionally jump into one of those to escape a monster. new_level is called at random points during a game, and only then is the new level generated. This is in contrast to roguelikes that generate the entire dungeon in advance, or use a distinct random number generator for level generation such that different players playing the same random seed see the same dungeon, regardless of how or when they reach particular levels. In rogue, the level generation for a particular level depends on the RNG state at the time new_level is entered. Ancient systems lacked the memory to build the entire dungeon in advance, and competitive play where players all play the same seed and therefore may expect to see the same dungeon had not yet been invented?

  • Guides are Hard

    My recent log entry about NNCP file requests has renewed my motivation. Soon after posting it, I began rewriting my NNCP guide to include every feature and option the software has to offer. There are some important and useful aspects of NNCP that I left out of my previous guide, and I want to address that.

    The new guide will be split into multiple pages and sub-pages, so I needed a plan. What information would go into which page? NNCP's configuration is dense: how finely should I split it out? Does information about routing go into the page for transfer commands, or does it go into the page about configuration--or both? Should I explain concepts that external to NNCP but appear in its configuration, like multicasting or Yggdrasil? To what extent should I include my own tips and tricks?

  • Tunneling tunnels - masquerading wireguard

    I'm having a great time: It is late, and Tschunk is flowing though my veins. I'm definetly not going to put out any useful code anmore. What code? That's secret! The only thing I can say is that this blog will be available via the HTTP protocol, without me writing any content in HTML. At least I will have much hackathon-like code to review when I'm back from congress. If it is usable, I will of course publish it under the same license as: [...]

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Why I fell in love with the small web

      I am pretty sure someone already wrote something like this, but I still need to get this off my chest.

      Ever since I owned my first computer with internet access, I have been on IRC. It started with expeditions into the big, old networks like DALnet, where I met a lot of interesting and sometimes weird people. People who I, an insecure teenager in rural Germany, would never have met offline. With my first girlfriend, I had a "couple's channel", but we would soon invite other people from school and, again, those we met on IRC. This channel persisted for over 20 years. It survived the rise and fall of "social networks" and now consists of a group of people I call my friends, even though I never met some of them.

      IRC is an old technology that just will not die. It peaked in the mid 2000s, a time before smartphones. Since then, corporate technologies like WhatsApp, Slack and discord have taken over large swaths of the userbase. They did that by making decisions for the user: clients and servers are chosen for them. Anything beyond installing an app is considered a nuisance. IRC is not owned by anyone. It was developed at a publicly funded university and people are free to build client and server software to work with it. It is still active and new servers are started regularly. It provides fast and reliable text-based messaging and little beyond that.

    • Internet Archive Gopher Search Interface

      After my post on gopher resources [0], Ben Collver was nice enough to send me an email and point out his Internet Archive (IA) gopher search interface [1]. He has a post giving the details, including how to use it [2].

      I've played with it a bit, and it is really great as a substitute search. I use the IA a lot, and the gopher interface opens up the site to older clients - the IA has made the actual assets available via plain http from their backend servers, the only thing that was previously blocking older browsers from using the IA was their insistence on modern TLS for the web frontend.

    • Twitter jokes circa 2019

      I set up a Twitter account years ago, put some joke quotes from (sort of) famous creators, forgot the account existed, and then when reminded of it this evening when someone tried to log into it and I was notified. What a rollercoaster!

  • Programming

    • Smolwebtor.py

      Convierte gemtext a html simple