Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Hello There!

    I got a little caught up playing with the CSS, but I think it's time to make a little introduction post.

    [...]

    I'm currently trying to discover and play on the personal smol web again after like a decade of being away. I'll go into my reasons another day.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BGIRNOK Wordo: SHYLY

  • Is this going to be a good year? 🏎🏁

    F1 in 2024 started off looking like a walkover for Verstappen, then got more interesting, then he won any way. In 2025 things should start off more even, so we might get an entertaining season. Teams probably won't have put a huge effort into this year's cars because they're concentrating on regulation changes for 2026, so the close racing from the second half of laat year should continue.

  • The Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs

    I first conciously heard The Magnetic Fields as part of the soundtrack for an episode of South Park. The episode was Tweek x Craig, Season 19, Episode 6. In the episode, the children of South Park are introduced to yaoi by an influx of Asian students. Pictures of Tweek and Craig kissing and being in a relationship start appearing, leading Tweek and Craig to wonder if they are gay. The song 'The Book of Love' plays while the town embraces having a gay couple and Cartman wonders about his own sexuality. It is a strange episode to describe but has a surprising amount of taste for the subject matter. Well worth watching!

  • Birbs

    One may on occasion observe crows taking turns hopping up to the ridge of a building, and launching themselves into the updraft caused by the wind pushing against the angle of the roof. The crows would hover for a moment or two, then swoop back down to the roof for another turn. This activity is woefully uneconomic.

  • Ineloquibilis

    There is a well-known phenomenon that happens to those who write, I don't know if it's called "blank page problem", "blinking text cursor problem" or something else. It's when you open your favorite writing application and spend hours staring at a blinking cursor (you know, the vertical bar that indicates the current position where the next character will be inserted if you decide to type any letter) inside a blank document/text field.

    It's not as if there were no ideas or thoughts going on within their minds, it's because they can't be translated into words... They could fully tap into their unconscious, a process called "stream-of-(un)consciousness", but it's easy said than done: try to describe the taste of chocolate without using "chocolate", "cacao", "sweet", "sweetener", "sugar", among similar terms, and you'll realize you simply can't do it.

  • time is nothing but not amenable

    our courting, like many a queer courtship, was undergirded by poetry. there was a moment of reading a poem while she was in the backseat of a car before we parted ways for a few days. after we started seeing each other, we would exchange texts in the days before we had established a label for one another, or even a regular and predictable rhythm, containing link after link. i like to tell myself that this is how it began: my fingertips deep in the words of elizabeth bishop, reading poem after poem about tending. these fingertips could not be on — or in — her. *tap, tap, tap. cut. paste. send.* it happened that one such poem by bishop was "the shampoo" [0]:

• Technology and Free Software

  • Checking the serial number of my X201

    I bought the laptop refurbished. the keyboard has been stickered to QWERTY. Most the refurbished laptops this company sells have originally AZERY keyboards. (The company is located in the south of the Netherlands, close to the Belgium border.)

    The `F' and the `J' key have lost their sticker, because of the use of the keyboard.

    Left of the `Z'-key (stickered version), is a key that is blanked out with a sticker, and left of that is the Left-Shift key.

    When more stickers are getting loose, it will become more clear what layout the keyboard originally had :)

  • Documenting a failure mode for NGOs making free software

    Let's say one accepts resources to build some software. These resources might include grant money and volunteer time. Explicitly or implicitly, the resources are intended for pursuing some specific objective. In the cases I'm thinking about, this is that the widespread availability of the software will advance some goal shared by the NGO and its donors.

  • Encrypted NixOS home server with passwordless reboot

    These are my notes on refurbishing a laptop with a broken screen hinge to a NixOS home server. A coworker recommended Colmena for managing NixOS on remote machines, so I decided to give it a try. I got confused by the Colmena manual, which expects NixOS to be already set up on the remote host but doesn't clearly show how to move the existing nix (remote) config inside Colmena.

  • I bet this comes with an automatic compacting bit-bucket for disposing of all that network noise

    And now I'm thinking, I'm in the wrong industry! What's wrong with separating rich-yet-stupid audiophiles from their money? It's just too bad that the market for Eberhard Faber Design Art Marker No. 255 [3] has, if you'll pardon the pun, dried up.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • (no) pleroma

      Tried to get a pleroma server going again. No success today. Do I need an own pleroma server? Let's just do gemini instead. Whatever. Uninstall elixir/erlang (whose ecosystem also seems to be complicated) to make room on the raspberry pi.

      I don't actually need a pleroma server.

      I was motivated to get my own pleroma server to get away from some annoying people in the global space of my instance, but that has been achieved by migrating to mastoart.social .