Gemini Links 12/01/2025: No Country For Old Men, Burned Homes, and "Planet P is Clean"
Contents
-
Gemini* and Gopher
-
Personal/Opinions
-
No Country For Old Men
First book of the year but I started it over the Christmas period. No Country For Old Men is by Cormac McCarthy and has been made into a film by the Coen Brothers. I saw the film before realising there was a book and greatly enjoyed the film. Well, it is hard to not enjoy a Coen brothers film,
The story is set in 1980s Texas, close to the Mexican border. A drug deal goes wrong and a chancer stumbles across the aftermath. He finds the cash and runs off. We now follow the law, the chancer and a strange mysterious character who is certainly not one for the lawful life. The book and film follow these characters as they try to either catch up with one another or avoid one another.
-
LA fires D5
Found out that 4 of my friend's houses burned down. :'( Unfair.
-
If, only
If wishing you were intelligent was a sign of intelligence, would it be stupid not to; or would the stupid just not? Is this the wave/particle duality of blight?
I suppose the information one holds supersedes any direct experience; if I knew this (about intelligence) for a fact, it wouldn't matter what I did - any significance (by way of veracity) it might (even truly) have held collapses under the weight of its mere possession. Is this the wave/particle duality of knowledge?
-
Five Random Things That a Sylvan Likes
As the represtative of Sylvans, I figured I'd mention a few random things I like.
I might write about some of these individually. I love music, and the Witcher series is awesome. I get a lot done in Python. But C++ is just a super-fun programming language.
-
Boring
Sleep on the couch filled with mescal the air is warm I am boring.
Not entertained by the anime I walk downstairs play the fiddle.
The massage mat still on the ground for the first time in a few months.
-
-
Entertainment
-
"Planet P is Clean"
I don't know how many times I've seen Starship Troopers. Too many. It's arguably a pretty crap movie, but it has its moments. Who doesn't like big bugs spewing colourful plasma, after all?
Watched it again today and noticed something that I've somehow missed all these years.
-
My typical setup in Fantasy Grounds D&D 5E
-
-
Technology and Free Software
-
Disk space
It's that time of the year again. How to get back disk space?
Open the Files application and empty the trash. (How to do this from the command line?)
-
a very neovim weekend
I spent some time this weekend creating an init.lua from scratch in order to find the holes in my understanding. This is partly because I was trying to prepare notes to share with friends and partly because I know Neovim can do more than what I was asking of it.
I was pretty sure I knew how to get the Lazy add-on working in order to be able to fetch other add-ons, so I started there. And that went smoothly enough. So then I started pulling in pieces of my previous configuration, very small pieces, so I could see how they worked. I had some trouble getting the language server protocol (LSP) stuff working. I did get it in the end by way of the nvim-lspconfig add-on. Along with Telescope, tree-sitter, a markdown renderer, and marksman.
-
I downloaded the ACKS II Kickstarter PDFs finally
I finally got around to downloading the Adventurer, Conqueror, King System, Imperial Imprint (ACKS II) PDFs from the Kickstarter, and I have been very pleased with what I found on a quick scan.
-
vintage digital cameras pt. 3
out of the three recent purchases of 22+ year old cameras, the last camera i'll be posting about is also the first of the three i purchased, the olympus e-1. this camera has had more of a boost in popularity than the others i've purchased, due to the kodak ccd sensor contained within.
note to any readers: the first several following paragraphs are going to be me rambling on about the buying experience and potential risks taken when buying used gear. consider it to be me venting any left-over frustrations.
the one i bought happened before mercari restructured[/reverted] their buyer fees a few days after 2025 began. the one i found was listed at $180, offered the seller $150, and the seller agreed to this offer. now, $150 with ~$14 in shipping and ~$14 in sales tax would be a decent deal, with current olympus e-1 prices, for what looked to be a mint condition camera. _but_ if anyone's not familiar, mercari's old fee structure was along the lines of "hey, let's just have the buyer pay for all the fees that the seller would normally take care of." so i ended up paying $20 in 'service' and 'payment processing' fees. and iirc, these are percentage-based, which means the fees are rather astronomical if one were looking to buy a more pricey item, like $800 or $1000+.
-
Internet/Gemini
-
New Capsule Generator: 💎 Stargem
For the last couple of days, I've been working on polishing and improving a collection of Python 🐍 scripts I've been using to publish my site. After getting all the basics working as I wanted, it was time to refactor them into a proper command-line tool with subcommands, flags, and more. The result is 💎 Stargem, a “Static Capsule Generator.” While I still need to polish a few details and document it properly, it's more than ready for personal use. I am planning on publishing to PyPi once I get it properly documented and the code is in a better shape.
-
Still working on it, but here it is anyway
Since I got back into gemini I've been tweaking my writing workflow and this morning I finished extracting my python scripts from my capsule into a proper python command line. Still working on it, but here it is anyway tool
-
Online again, sort ofOnline again, sort of
Moved house. The raspberry pi was disconnected and thrown in a box for a while.
When I plugged it back my server (agate) was not working. I must have uninstalled rust to make space for a pleroma server, or something stupid.
Trying to cargo install agate always caused it to hang for hours.
Now I installed a different server software called gem (C). This was extremely easy to build and configure! In my day job I'm used to doing things the old-fashioned way with C, make, and cmake.
But, it doesnt come with a convenient systemctl file. Right now my command line is holding the whole thing up while I learn how to write one.
-
-
Programming
-
keyd is aweseome, but…
I was able to make a binding for my caps lock key so that pressing it would be an escape key, but holding it was a super modifier. It was days before I realized it was interfering with the disable touchpad while typing thing. I have mouse= in vim so the random mouse activity didn’t have much of an affect while using the terminal, but it made it nearly impossible to use any web site where I had to type. So I’ve had to disable it for now.
-
-
-