Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • A nice day

    First sunny day in a while. Living in the woods has its perks, but non-stop rain can be a real pain, especially if you have animals outside to tend to, with mud everywhere making outdoors chores quite miserable.

    But not today. Definitely looks like a brief anticipation of a long-awaited spring. Birds are singing, the air is warm and has a faint flower smell. A lot of insects are hard at work to make up for all the time lost in the past weeks. I'm sitting just outside my porch as I'm typing this, getting the last rays of this warm, pleasant sun and enjoying some well-earned rest.

  • London Soundtrack Festival

    I missed this year's festival but I am interested in soundtrack music and having it assessed and evaluated as a meaningful cultural artifact.

  • Book Review: Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr (2025)

    I recently finished reading "Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart" by Nicholas Carr (2025), and there was quite a bit in it that I wanted to unpack.

    I started reading it because I felt like I was seeing myself and everyone around me struggling with increasingly-fragmented views of the world. I found it to provide some important context for how I viewed technologies of connection.. and their effects on us.

    It's pure selfishness on my part -- I want to engineer a more intentional life for myself that lets me be more deliberate in my thought, my actions, and my feelings. It's too easy to coast on auto-pilot, letting the world's distractions pull me from feeling to feeling (zomg, did you see what Politician X did this morning?!?!). Particularly when those strong emotional feelings serve little purpose. Yes, I can get very angry about things I can't change. But if I really can't change them... what good does the anger do? I need to focus on things I CAN change. And not waste brain cycles and sanity on the things that I cannot.

  • Indiana bats

    The bats clustered together, two dozen. An ear twitched, one rocked. Tiny, inverted, their bodies all touching.

    Six in a little crevice. Another cluster of twenty. Three. Stunning.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: GIWNORK Wordo: TAPIS

  • close to the edge

• Technology and Free Software

  • Reading phlogs on a tablet is a joy

    I had to test something on Android. The only Android device I have available is an old Lenovo tablet. which for the occasion I took down from the attic.

    [...]

    Pocket Gopher opens with a list of bookmarks, and it is easy to add new bookmarks to it, either with the Plus-button on the bookmarks page, or with the bookmark-symbol when visiting a Gopher page.

    The tablet feels very lightweight, and of course the Gopher pages open quickly.

    The display of the Gopher pages is easy to the eyes, with a light, but not really white font on a dark background, links are light green.

    Even phlogs with very long lines are good to read, the app wraps the lines at around 80 chars.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Ye Old Dev Log

      I present you, a CAPTCHA for the geminispace: gmiCAPTCHA

      After multiple requests (actually none), I decided to build a CAPTCHA service for the Geminispace, and I call it gmiCAPTCHA.

      gmiCAPTCHA will ensure the most secure access to your content, avoiding robots to freely roam your capsule.