Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Red Bull musical chairs 🏁

    We're two races into the new season of F1 (one fun race in the rain and one dull one in the dry) and we've learned that only two bad performances are enough for Red Bull to drop a new driver. Ouch.

• Politics and World Events

  • (useless factoids) Lineage of Portland area credit unions

    Lately, credit unions are all over the place. There's one even inside Fred Meyer (OnPoint took over the spaces vacated by Chase Bank in 2021 -- a legacy of a long-standing relationship between Fred Meyer and former Washington Mutual Bank). For the most part, credit unions today act like a community bank, rather than a consumer financial cooperative for specific kinds of people.

    Until about 25 to 30 years ago, every credit union had membership eligibility connected to one's employer or some other affiliations. Then some of them began narrowly-defined "community charters," opening membership to those who live, work, or worship within a specific neighborhood, city, or county. Along with this trend, many credit unions rebranded themselves, distancing themselves from their origins (Rivermark Community Credit Union used to be called Safeway Northwest Central Credit Union, as it was a credit union for Safeway employees).

  • Don't visit the USA

    When people talk about minimal laptop installs, burner phones, and the mess of US border crossings, I wonder where they habe been the last twenty years. A dude from work flew to the states to work for HP as a student, got turned back at the airport and put on a flight back. He got to make one family call, his dad called HP, they called some lawyers and by the time they go there he was already on a plane. And those were the good days, before 9/11, Homeland Security and all that.

    Have you seen the forms they have you sign on the Visa Waiver program? The border agents have total discretion over you. Those are not "passenger rights" but "small mercies". And that was long before Trump. It's terrible fuckery now, but it wasn't great before that. Not travelling to the states? I've told people at the office that I won't be going to the states for work ever since 9/11. The last time I went happily was, uh, when The Phantom Menace came out?

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Returning to the WWW

      . I was just too lazy to write a blogpost, lol. Kind of ironic, isn't it? I put so much time into raw-dogging C networking to have a nice, landlocked blogging framework that takes less than 5MB of RAM, to just then be fed up with blogging. But hey! I'm writing this blog post now =) (It just took... three months?)

      What can I say, I kind of built many gimmicks into gmlghd. For example: trying to access URLs that do not exist will (when configured) redirect you to some other site, instead of just screaming 404 at you.

    • Revive your old Tinylog - Or create a new one

      I want to bring some awareness to the Tinylog protocol in the hope that more people will have one and actually use it. It's such a nice protocol but only few people are using them regularly - at least at the moment.