Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • UNCHARITABLE THOUGHTS

    The Australian of the Year for this year is a football player with Motor Neuron Disease who raised lots of money for an MND charity. That doesn't sound like a great choice to me, but the Australian of the Year thing never does in the first place. Best ignored, but the news always dominates radio and TV news on Australia Day so I never can.

    This time it got me thinking again about charity itself as a concept. It seems to me like a democracy that needs charity isn't working right. Although it also seems to me that, while legal, some charities will always exist even if they're not needed.

  • Give Me Money! (or generic scholarship questions/answers)

    “How do you plan to use your degree to further your career goals and life plans? Why did you choose the University of [redacted] to pursue this field of study?”

    I don't have any particular professional goals. I'd like to go to grad school for a master's if possible just to further my education. I just know I wanted to get more educated after watching my father pass away. You only live once. I know I won't regret trying to learn Greek. I chose philosophy because there is nothing I'd rather be learning than it if you asked me what if I was going to die soon. Philosophy is preparation for death on one popular view. Part of a public university is turn out informed citizens. I see it as training for life. Mental/intellectual stimulation is all that is afforded to some. I chose the University of [redacted] because I wanted to stay in state. I grew up in Yukon and graduated from Mustang High School. I was out of education for many years and went back to school at Redlands Community College in El Reno. For philosophy, there's OU, UCO, and OSU. I feel I've had more opportunities to meet people here than I would otherwise have had.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ACVITUD Wordo: KEBAB

  • Intent vs Results

    But right now we’ve built a society that makes it really difficult to do good deeds. The environment is wrecked by processes that are systematic emergent properties of our economy, manufacturing, and transportation. If we really have good intentions we need to change these processes on a larger scale. Ignorance can only claim a good heart until it’s wilful, stubborn, deliberate ignorance. Until that second in the garden.🍎

  • In space I am at home

    Dad likes to watch stars and go for runs down the rural route. Mom quit smoking when she was pregnant with me and didn't start again but dad did. He was always concerned with getting away, losing himself in the stars or the mountains or other peoples' business. He did weddings and funerals and visited sick people so he could get away from our bastard Pa, and here we were, across the empty parking lot from a country church cut out of a southern corn- field, dad looking at a million points of light in the sky.

    He was like Pa. Maybe if he hadn't run so far he would have been more different. I tried to see where he was pointed, him hunkered next to me with my wisp of thin white hair at the edge of the car- port in the middle of the summer night.

  • superjcup — superjcup introduction

    it is very dark and lonely here. that's obvious.

    i am superjcup, i have been a wrestling fan since 2016, and i am going to write a few match reviews, but document my experiences going to wrestling shows. i've been to one this year as of writing this (january 28th, 2025)

• Technology and Free Software

  • Neovim Telescope for Links

    tl;dr: I found a nifty plugin that makes it possible to use Telescope to insert file paths. It does it by way of Telescope actions and I couldn’t figure out how the hell to actually invoke the damn thing. Eventually I got it, and I prefer it now for making links in Markdown or just grabbing file paths.

  • Timey Wimey Watch Adventures

    During my life, I've used all sorts of different watches, from regular analog watches to modern smart ones. I stopped using analog watches a long time ago - I was never an "expert" watch reader capable of telling the precise hours minutes and seconds, but I used to consider myself a "normal" reader that could confidenly tell you the time rounded to 5 min intervals. When I started carrying around a mobile phone, specifically a smartphone, I decided to drop the watch. After all, I had a more reliable device that could do way more than just tell the time.

    Fast forward through several smartphones, I discovered a Kickstarter project called Pebble. It was a smartwatch with an e-ink display (I think), a battery that lasted several days, and the ability to fetch live data from the internet and deliver notifications for calls, messages, and apps. The initial model wasn't appealing to me, but they later released a nicer-looking one, the Pebble Steel. That's when I decided to give it a try. I remember enjoying it a lot - customizable watch faces, apps, notifications - you name it, heck I even remember starting to learn how to code my own watch face!.

  • I made a resolution to not travel much this year

    I made a resolution to not travel much this year. I made a similar resolution last year, but still up going to ICFP. This year it looks like I will also not fulfil my goal, but at least I won't be going on expensive transatlantic trips.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Silence

      I have been silent lately on the smallweb. Not because of problems or loss of interest, just because I do not really have anything to say or to scream into the void.

      Now it is gnawing a bit at me that I'm not posting. It may have several reasons and one of them is possibly the fact that I don't want the smallweb to die because nobody posts content.

      I know this self-imposed "duty" is fake and unnecessary and I don't even know if anyone ever reads things I write but it's just the idea I guess.

    • Journal Update 28: Writing Less

      I wrote that in "Taking a Step Back¹". A year on, it seems naïve to have thought that I would return to writing at the same pace as before. I'm not sure if that's what I meant there, but that's how I interpret it now. Since then, I've worked toward some of my goals and endured unexpected life changes along the way, both of which have contributed to a newfound clarity on the general, near-term direction I want my life to go.

      Working toward that new direction, I don't expect to return to writing at the pace or intensity I used to any time soon, and maybe never. So I'm going to stop including entry forewords about how I haven't "returned to writing" yet, and just write whenever I have the extra time and energy. My time and energy are currently highly variable, so expect no further updates about how frequently I will write, as I don't want to explain every time circumstances change.

  • Programming

    • Devlog 4

      Part of the authentication on the backend has been trying to work out what data to store in the token claims for the JWT. The Registration/Login/Logout actions all work as expected, and the tokens refresh as expected. However, there's more to a JWT than just being a validation string. I've spent some time reading up on JWT claims to see what else can be encoded there. I'm thinking that I probably need to store the user's UUID to more easily handle querying items for a specific user (e.g. for fetching a user's boards without them needing to navigate to a subcollection).

      Another thing I need to do here is more actively start caching information. Looking up certain values for each action could get quite expensive, so I'm looking at implementing some sort of temporary cache that persists to save time on repeated actions. I think I'll also look into other things I can lean on claims for because it seems to be a much more powerful tool than I'd anticipated.