Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Librarians do not care (but, like, in the good way)

    The tl;dr is that libraries are great because they're low-stakes, compared to buying books. You don't need to spend your hard-earned cash on a book (or DVD or CD) you may or may not like; you only need to spend a little time choosing it from the shelf to peruse at your leisure.

    As a librarian, I love this and would like to underscore how true it is. I'd also like to present another way libraries are low-stakes:

    Librarians do not care. But, like, in the good way.

  • positive thinking or something

    hi so its been a bit since my last post but i might as well try to write a meta post about writing and hope it doesnt blow up in my face

    i tend to get stuck in loops very often about worrying how to do somethign the right way so like im trying to write this as quickly and without thinking about it as much as i can because i can do this because thats the topic of this one

    that positive thinking is good? like i may not be qualified to do this but just i need to put somethign out because i can do this and stuff so yeah if you take somethimg from this then good for yiou

  • Resurrection Sunday Sunrise Observations

    On Resurrection Sunday (Easter, 2025-04-20) we had a sunrise breakfast at our church. However, here in Fairbanks, Alaska the sun had already risen 3.5 hours earlier, at 5:55 am. I was able to get out for the sunrise as well. It was not an exciting sunrise, but there were some nice colors to see and a few other interesting details. I still do not have a reliable camera, so I have no photos this time.

    I stepped outside into the front yard at 5:17am, and the skies were partly cloudy with some wispy clouds off in various directions. Some orange glow was visible behind the trees to the NE which, moving toward my zenith, changed to white, then light blue, the a dull, dark blue. A slightly lighter dark blue was visible to the west.

  • Sunrise Observations: Fairbanks, AK, USA: 2025-04-21 (publ. 2025-04-22)

    On 2025-04-21 I was able to get out for a brief sunrise viewing. It was not a grand sunrise, and the colors did not last long, but I decided I would upload some brief notes anyway.

    At 5:39am I was parked at the beginning of the dike road south of the airport runway. Red was just beginning to show toward the NE, with one vivid, red glowing spot over the hills, and some pink-red along the lower edge of a nearby cloud, stretching out horizontally.

• Technology and Free Software

  • cgit ❤ Anubis

    With the recent AI hype, the web is becoming a more hostile place, and most people would like to have their "gitweb" instances protected from aggressive and pointless crawling. People who self-host cgit are usually not the same people who try to solve all bot problems with Cloudflare. Thankfully, there is a tool called "Anubis" developed by Xe Iaso. It works by sitting in the middle of your web server and the HTTP service you want to protect.

  • Digital housekeeping again: packaging and AI

    I have thirty years' worth of accumulated automation material in the form of scripts on my main Linux boxes. Every now and then I do some gardening / housekeeping to try to cut back the growth and organise the material.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Refactoring

      Since 2019, I've maintained a shell script that creates and manages a microjournaling file. I made it entirely for personal use, mimicking an esoteric use case for Twitter, and while I've shared the script on my capsule, I'm pretty sure nobody uses it except me.^

      I first posted the script to Gemini on 2021-11-03. At that time, it was minimally-developed and the code was very unpolished. It was also heavily tailored to my particular use case. 3 1/2 years and almost 100 releases later, I've greatly expanded the script's capabilities--it can now do everything from parsing command-line options to generating avatar files, to cross-posting to twtxt files, to merging divergent timeline files, and more. I daresay I'm pretty proud of what I built.