Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Bullet Club War Dogs vs. United Empire (NJPW 02/11/2024)

    What is the miracle of life? Is it childbirth, is it human emotion, the fact that we are able to think as beautiful, complex beings, and have been able to spread coherent thought and idea for millennia upon end?

    Or is it actually 64 minutes of self flagellation with a Bushiroad main event that markets itself as WarGames?

    Insane people say the latter, I say the former, and everyone who says the latter is wrong.

  • Physical albums I own

    It's a growin'! These are a mix of CDs, vinyl, and tapes.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Analog Computing, Ngspice

    I finally was able to place that parts order. I've got some multipliers on the way, as well as enough parts to make some comparators and a reference voltage module. My wife donated a big cookie tin, and I was planning to mount some banana socket and potentiometers on that.

    I'm doing envelope savings also toward purchasing an Analog Thing computer. But it may be several months yet before I have enough money saved up, with the system currently selling at about $500.

  • Modern Unix terminal emulators and VMS 5.5-2, emacs, and EDIT/TPU

    Many modern terminal emulators don't really emulate the VT series above VT100 correctly, even when the terminal emulator reports itself as a VT200 or better. Xterm seems to emulate the later DEC terminals the best, with SET TERM/INQ setting the terminal type to VT400_Series. That works fine with EDIT/TPU, but unfortunately emacs 18.55 doesn't know what a VT400 is. KDE's Konsole reports as a VT200_Series, but EDIT/TPU shows a lot of garbage (uninterpreted escape codes), so you should explicitly set it to VT100. Foot, a terminal emulator many people use with Sway, a Wayland compositor, has the same problem. Gnome-terminal reports as a VT102, which works with both emacs and EDIT/TPU. And, unfortunately, VMS 5.5-2 doesn't know what a VT525 is, so you can't get color. Not that current Unix terminfo/termcap know what a VT525 is either.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • 🖥 Self Host All The Things - Redux

      I love Ogi, they’re easily the best ISP that I’ve ever had. My fat-pipe has been rock solid from the day it was installed, so I wasn’t too bothered when they emailed to say there might be some outage, due to work in my area. In the end, there wasn’t, but I noticed that my IP changed. No biggy?

      What I hadn’t noticed was that I was now being port-filtered. That took a little while to work out, and tbh, I probably wouldn’t have noticed at all, if it wasn’t for the fact that the Firebat died during the same week. I couldn’t get the new server to actually serve web pages, which lead me down the rabbit hole…

      So, I phoned Ogi, and this is why I rate them so much: I got through to a human being. I didn’t have to go through a script, I literally just said: “Hey, I know you’ve made some changes around my area, but I think you’ve just started port-filtering me. Is there any chance you could stop that? Or just open a few ports for me?”

    • picodex & picodex dual

      haven't made a gemini blog post for 2 years. wow... i'm really not much of a blogger, none-the-less my gemini server is still here and very rarely i do check some recent blog posts on antenna.

      since then i got a great new job, went to china again with my wife and son, and we had another baby girl. i have two very young children now. the past two years seem like they've gone very fast. i didn't mean to talk about my personal life, but it's just amazing that a lot has happened since then.

      what i really wanted to write about was my thoughts on my 2 biggest hobby programming achievements from the past 2 years.

    • the girl i used to be

      Today, for some reason, I'm thinking about all the people who cannot find me online now if they try.

      I've deleted all my social media accounts and every blog that ever existed under my real name. My professional site URL now points to a three-page Neocities site containing my portfolio, my resume, and an intro page explaining what the first two are. Everything on the portfolio and resume is professional stuff that can be found with a Google search from sources who aren't me, none of whom offer contact info for me. Both use the name I've done all my professional publishing under, which is a variant of my actual legal name but not identical to it.

    • Self hosted: mox e-mail Server

      E-Mail is one of the oldest, most foundational services on the Internet. Still crucial in terms of identity and authentication (think "password reset"). Risky to host as it is a very vulnerable and a high profile target for attackers/spammers. Complicated due to multiple protocols and a plethora of standards involved. If you ponder self hosting a mail server: Do as I do and give "mox" a try!