Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • I Own A Firearm - Sort Of

    Today I received a firearm via a delivery service. It is a Gamo P900 IGT. For those who know something about these things will now be confused. They will be declaring that I know nothing as this is an air pistol. Under UK gun laws, this still counts as a fire arm, albeit one which does not involve a fire arms licence. This has some interesting effects on what you get charged with for crimes.

    If I walk on private land without permission from the landowner, I am committing a civil offence. The police cannot arrest me for trespassing but they can encourage me off the private land. However, should I have an air rifle with me then I would be committing a criminal offence - trespass with a firearm. It does not matter if the air rifle is not working, it still counts.

    To buy a firearm in the UK, sales must be face to face. You can buy online but only if the company delivers it. They cannot use a courier.

  • Failure

    Back from a couple of weeks leave and failure is on the mind. Not entirely my own, but my part in the failure of something larger.

    I have a student working on a thesis. A bright spark. Has done the work, and I'd very much like to have them back for a PhD - they have mentioned that the idea appeals previously. The just won't write though.

  • Sunrise Observations 2025-04-30

    Last Wednesday (2025-04-30) I was able to get out early to the dike road south of the airport runway.

  • Manual of self

    I had this idea for a while for reasons outside of communication and ended up deciding it's the best to do it for communication.

    To be completely honest if I have enough sympathy this wouldn't be a problem, but many of my communication issues comes from 1. me not getting other people and 2. other people not getting me, in other words talking to me sometimes would feel like talking to a wall, I realised that's an issue for a very very long time, but I ended up saying nothing about it because I was consistently discouraged because of people who assumes things about me even when I put up my best effort to explain exactly what is going on in my stupid head. Everytime it happens it makes me feel like all of my effort to communicate is going to be wasted, and I don't think I've ever told anyone about this until now.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Why no digital vegetarianism?

    Western societies accommodate various beliefs, particularly religious beliefs. Up to a point. The more long-standing the practices, the more they are respected, but this is not the only factor.

    A lot of religions have dietary restrictions, e.g., on pork or beef, and these have spread out to form a belief system that isn't in the accepted sense religious: vegetarianism. Vegetarianism has some social sanction (though notably in Britain it is almost exclusively restricted to the bourgeoisie): it is accommodated in schools and restaurants nowadays in the West. In some other parts of the world vegetarianism has a much longer and wider history.

  • My Proxmox Cluster

    My first node, "pve1" is a ThinkCentre M900 Tiny 4C/8T Intel machine with 32GB of DDR4 RAM. I connected my 4 Bay USB ZFS raidz with 4x 4TB Seagate IronWolf disks to it. I mapped its directories to my NAS container, which stores my Backups, private git repositories, my movie collection and general storage for GOG games, Ebooks, an Archive and things like that. So the ZFS storage pool (zdata) contains the following zfs folders: [...]

  • getting humankind a spiritual awakening (wait no not like that)

    A few days ago, I ordered a dog crate to use as a brooder now and as a hen hospital should one of the girls need to be quarantined in the future. Today, it arrived.

    The box says "Not Suitable for Children. For Pet Use Only."

    ...humans? Are you okay? Could you perhaps make an effort to send us better people?

    Consumer warnings and the Code of Federal Regulations have one thing in common: Reading them makes me fear that humanity is too long overdue for some kind of spiritual awakening. It doesn't even have to be spiritual. An extra dose of self-awareness would do.

    Case in point: LLMs are now convincing the please-convince-mes among us that LLMs are their source of spiritual awakening: [...]

  • Internet/Gemini

    • AI is sapping our strength

      Bug reports by AI are a denial of service attacks. Here's curl staff and curl maintainer fending of the slop: [...]