Gemini* and Gopher

• Technology and Free Software

  • Announcing OFFLFIRSOCH 2025

    Rejoice! It's time once again for the OFFLine-FIRst SOftware CHallenge. OFFLFIRSOCH 2025 marks the second ever installment of this relatively new community event. If it's not really your cup of tea, well, let this announcement perhaps also serve as your six month advance warning for ROOPHLOCH 2025, which will begin on the first of September.

    To participate in OFFLFIRSOCH, you should develop and share during the month of March a piece of software which could reasonably be considered "offline-first". No attempt at a precise definition of offline-first is offered. The idea is that we as a community recognise it when we see it, and there's really no incentive to attempt to bend the rules. Software which does not make any use of networking whatsoever obviously qualifies, but network-aware software may also do so, if it still retains the ability to be genuinely useful even if connectivity is intermittent and infrequent. There are no restrictions on what your software actually does, what language it's written in, what platform it runs on or even on the license it is released under. Just make it offline-first and announce it in a post to your phlog and/or gemlog with an (honest!) datestamp some time in March, and that's it. Email me a link to the announcement post and I will compile a list to share with everybody at the end of the month.

  • Announcing OFFLFIRSOCH 2025

  • gelatin

    For some reason I have been fixated on gelatin over the past month. There was a sale at one of the local Asian groceries for assorted fruit jelly cups. The jelly is like flavored gelatin with nata de coco, or coconut gel, suspended inside the jelly. The cups are plastic and single-serving with a plastic cover. There are about 22 cups in 1 plastic container, which is in the shape of a bear and can be used as a piggy bank afterwards. These are yummy and reminds me of Jell-O (tm) with fruit that I used to eat growing up. The only thing I didn't like was the waste. You slurp the jelly and then toss the single-serving plastic cup and cover. Reminded me of the waste that I used to see with the K-cups (Keurig) at work. Good thing reusable K-cups are available.

  • GNU/Linux is making Windows intolerable to me

    I smiled at "no sane business would build on top of Gemini," because my Gemini exposes my business brain for the bag-of-cats insanity that it is.

    That didn't feel like enough for a gemlog post (though really, who's to say? the point is that there are no rules), but it was on my mind nonetheless.

    Then, this morning, I got out my Windows machine.

    To explain: Thanks to an accident of happenstance called "my spouse died several years ago but his devices still work," I have three computers in the house. One is the big desktop monolith I use for work, video editing, and SRS Gaming (it's the only one that will run Starfield). One is my lightweight Acer Aspire, which I bought for writing on the go. And one is the chongus Acer gaming laptop we bought for my spouse, so we could use Pyware on the field.

  • Fixing a 27 year old bug that only now just got triggered

    I will, from time to time, look at various logs for errors. And when I looked at the error log for my web server, intermixed with errors I have no control over like this: [...]

  • Programming

    • How to Program Good

      Programming, as it exists today, is not a real engineering discipline. There may be real Software Engineers working for like NASA or something, but I've never met one. Most programmers seem to treat the practice more like arts and crafts.