Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: EGLMOYT Wordo: VILER

• Technology and Free Software

  • Ten Years of Telidon

    essays about my extended project to recover and restore Telidon videotex, and given lengthy talks, such that there is little enough I could say here, that I haven't already said somewhere else.[1] But it doesn't seem right to let this anniversary pass entirely unremarked, either.

    January 2015 it was, when our University Archivist presented me with an interesting problem: our Art Gallery was planning a retrospective exhibition honoring the life's work of local artist, the late Glenn Howarth, and wanted to include examples of his early digital artworks alongside the paintings and drawings that made up the bulk of his ouevre. This wasn't quite as straightforward as it might sound, since nobody had seen any of these artworks in decades, but it was thought the digital files might be found on one or more of the over 200 floppy disks his estate had donated to the Archives some three years previously. Would I be able to help?

  • Updated to NixOS 24.11 (MfGames Writing Setup Flake)

    An occasional chores, we've updated the flake to be based off NixOS 24.11[1]. From our understanding, the flake input could always be changed but this sets up a nice default using the current, non-deprecated version of NixOS.

  • Moved Repository to MfGames (MfGames Writing Tools)

    It's been a few years and this project has moved homes a few times. We realized in the last day that we haven't been paying attention to where this project was housed compared to when we abandoned GitLab because of their enshittification.

  • Ollama - llama3.1 8B jailbroken

    Recently, I have discovered that there is a "jailbroken" version of llama3.1:8B Large Language Models for Ollama. If you are interested in experimenting with "AI" and want to do it locally on your computer without the prying eyes of companies or state institutions, then this might be something for you.

    I assume that you have already installed and configured Ollama. Instructions for this can be found on the internet.

  • read it later apps

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

    I recently switched my GUI browser to Vivaldi across all of my devices. turns out, 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.

  • My Comcast/home ISP-proof qBittorrent setup

    This setup consists of two Orange Pi 5 Plus devices. One of them I use as my NAS server, which we'll call nas-node. The other is an auxiliary that runs the qBittorrent Docker container, which we'll call aux-node.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Saariston Champion

      This post - the 300th in my phlog! Also the longest ever! - is a long overdue account of my experience riding the "Saariston Rengastie" route through the Finnish archipelago back in July of 2024. I wrote up the first four days of it later that July shortly after getting home, but then got distracted by other things and somehow it took me six months to finish it up! Thankfully I kept a brief pen-and-paper log of the tour which I could refer back to for details when finishing it off now.

      The Saariston Rengastie is Finland's most popular cyclotouring route. Most English language material on the route calls it the "Archipelago Trail", but I prefer the other name one sometimes sees of "Archipelago Ring Road". Not only is this a faithful translation of its Finnish name (and also the Swedish "Skärgårdens ringväg", Swedish being commonly spoken in the archipelago), it also makes it clear that the circuit is a loop. I completed the loop in the clockwise direction, starting and ending in Turku, the beautiful former capital city I was lucky enough to live and work in some years back, and which frankly still "feels like home" to my wife and I even though at this point we've now lived away from there for longer than we lived there (it sure doesn't feel that way). There are a few recognised shortcuts along the route, but I did the full thing, which is around 250 kilometres (155 miles). I split it up quite comfortably over five days. If you want to follow the journey along closely as you read, you might find it handy to refer to a map[1].

      Turku is the birthplace of a lot of things quite central to my identity as "Solderpunk", including Circumlunar Space, my short-lived aNONradio chiptune show "Half Hour of Power", the Gemini protocol, but most relevantly here my love of cycling and also my scratch-built bicycle "the Franken-Peugeot" (admittedly the bike has somewhat outgrown the "Franken" moniker, with many of its original co-op-scrounged parts having been replaced over the years and, goodness, it even has some Nitto bits on it now, pricey stuff artisanally forged in Tokyo by a 100 year old company for maximum street cred).

    • Saariston Champion

    • Prime Directive: Minimalism and Efficiency with Gemini Protocol

      Just a couple of weeks ago, I restarted my site (the one you are reading right now) with the goal of maintaining a minimalist approach—focusing on content rather than flashy styles or colorful themes. For the first time, I also decided to implement dual hosting, making the site available via HTTPS and the Gemini protocol.

      An idea that had been floating around in my mind for a few days was that, since the HTTPS version of the site was already quite basic in terms of styles and layout, why not serve the same content I use for Gemini? Yesterday morning, this idea came to life thanks to a small proxy tool called Kineto [1]. This tool acts as a proxy, allowing a single Gemini capsule to be served to regular web browsers.

  • Programming

    • Twisty Passages

      There are several ways passages can be drawn on a two dimensional grid. A first task might be to create a stub program that supports the display of such, with a means to step through the generation of a passage so that the steps can be more closely observed, animations constructed, etc.