Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Actual Reality, or Whatever You "Call" It?

    I was recently invited to be one of the supervising adults at an overnight youth airsoft game; my son was attending, so it made sense. We have a couple airsoft guns already, but I thought it might be interesting to consider adding to the arsenal, so I headed down to the local Walmart to see what they had in stock. Those who are familiar with Walmart will know that the sporting goods section holds the BB guns and air rifles, and the toy section holds the Nerf stuff. Airsoft is between these two, so I checked in both sections--and found no airsoft.

    Standing in the BB gun section, I was ready to quit and leave, when a young employee wandered in pushing a cart full of product. To be thorough, I asked him if they had any airsoft guns. His reply was to pull out his corporate-issued digital device and search for "airsoft". He poked at the screen for far too long (seriously, I could have searched walmart.com with my poor metal-box-store phone reception and figured it out faster than he did), then looked up at the aisle numbers, and motioning to the BB guns / air rifles we were right in front of, he finally said:

    "This right here is what we're calling our airsoft section."

    Being the gruff literalist that I am, I challenged him on this statement.

    "These are BB guns, I've already looked at all of them. What you mean to say is that you have no airsoft guns. You don't even carry airsoft pellets. This right here is the BB gun section."

  • Moving Plants

    Last year, my wife and I visited EPCOT park at Walt Disney World. The park has a ride called "Living With the Land" that showcases research and innovations in sustainable agriculture. Visitors can purchase an additional in-depth tour called "Behind the Seeds," and decided to give it a try.

    One of the plants featured in the tour was a Mimosa pudica plant affectionately named Stanley. Native to South America, this plant is notable for having leaves that rapidly move when touched or shaken. Our tour guide demonstrated the effect quite dramatically by shaking Stanley's pot, and we witnessed all the plant's branches fold in within seconds.

• Politics and World Events

  • this won't end the way you think it will

    I'm thinking about the administration's tariff announcement. Specifically, I'm thinking about the conversations I'm likely to have with my students, many of whom are currently taking Economics as part of their graduation requirement. And everything I expect to hear takes me back to a single response: "This won't end the way you think it will."

    Here's the chain of thought through several overly simplistic Econ 101 principles, using an example I happen to know slightly more than usual about: blueberries.

    Currently, the world's largest blueberry-producing nation is Chile. Chile's rise to blueberry dominance is a relatively new phenomenon, however. For my entire childhood, the world's largest blueberry-producing governmental unit was Van Buren County, Michigan. Van Buren County, Michigan is still the world's #2 blueberry-producing governmental unit.

    For the purposes of this conversation, we're going to assume Michigan actually can retail fresh blueberries year-round. It can't, but accounting for seasonal differences in the hemispheres is more work than I want to do. So here we go.

  • 2025-04-05 Picture Page 🖼

    Randomly chosen images from Geminispace

• Technology and Free Software

  • Why I’m Saying No to Smartwatches

    (A reflection on how smartwatches breed distraction, invade privacy, and forsake the timeless elegance of a simple, traditional watch)

    In a world that craves real-time updates, it’s no surprise that the smartphone on your desk and the laptop in your bag now have company: the smartwatch on your wrist. The pitch is always the same—unmatched convenience, integrated health tracking, seamless connectivity. Yet, as sleek as these devices might appear, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re trading more than we’re gaining. Here’s why I’m giving smartwatches a hard pass.

  • RAID Hygiene

    Usually folks are neck deep in a disk array failure when they start asking for help. Something to do before any disks fail is to record the disk labels and partition details somewhere, ideally via a cron job (@reboot, for instance, and then maybe weekly?) and ideally so that this data is backed up somewhere else. The labels are really important, as if the array is in a bad state one or more drives may not report any label information, and then you may need to guess which drive is which. Also with the label information in hand, do check it at least three times before messing with the disks. Or, have someone else check and verify what you are doing. This is to reduce (but not eliminate) the odds that the wrong disk is pulled, an event that generally will make your life more exciting (loss of data, loss of job, etc). Excitement is not what one wants with RAID arrays.

  • f3s: Kubernetes with FreeBSD - Part 4: Rocky Linux Bhyve VMs

    This is the fourth blog post about the f3s series for self-hosting demands in a home lab. f3s? The "f" stands for FreeBSD, and the "3s" stands for k3s, the Kubernetes distribution used on FreeBSD-based physical machines.