Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Refreshing Rain 2025-05-02 and 2025-05-03

    The boys and I are out in the yard, about two hours after a light rain. The air is fresh and feels moist and cool in my nose. The smell in the air reminds me of hay bales, from my childhood, with a slightly musty scent. But there is also a hint of some spicy aroma — maybe from the Lodgepole Pine, or the spruce trees...?

    In our little garden, about 25 or 30 Rhubarb buds have popped up. Some have partially unfolded — still very wrinkly — to about 3 inches long.

  • Forth, permacomputing and astronomy (by ~sfelicio)

    Last week I was pretty stressed. I used the holiday on Thursday and my day off on Friday to get some rest. I have been reading some very interesting things about Forth, about permacomputing and collapse computing, old computer architectures, the demoscene, the great waste of resources and life in modern computing, what to do about it.

    I'll leave some interesting links at the end here.

    In the back of my mind, I'm trying to figure out how to apply these ideas to my context. In scientific computing we definitely think of a computer cluster as a "calculation factory": you feed it with the resources it needs, it gets your calculations done as fast as possible, end. Better have it constantly working if you are to be efficient. Better get the latest hardware. Better make your calculations big if you want to be impressive. There is hardware vendor lock-in and planned obsolescence. Software is often proprietary, making some results only reproducible by rich labs. I could go on and on, but I want to be more specific.

  • Piers Anthony’s A Spell for Chamelion

    Another book from my childhood, (the entire series took me well into my adulthood to finish it,) is A Spell for Chameleon. It’s part of Piers Anthony’s Xanth trilogy. Only as I started typing that did I remember it began as a trilogy. I reread it yesterday because like necroscope I was curious what I’d think of it now versus reading it as a child.

    Potential spoilers.

    The story covers a seemingly non-magical main character named Bink through a magical land on a mission to figure out what his magical talent is so that he wont be exiled from the land of Xanth because that’s what they did to anyone born without a demonstrable magical talent. Everyone has a ceremony after their (18th?) birthday to demonstrate their magical talent in front of the king, after which they become a citizen of Xanth. Unless they don’t have a talent. In which case they are exiled to Mundania. The story begins just before his exile, covers his journey through Xanth, then his exile, and his return to Xanth,

  • Elderberry

    Hey, long time no see.

    I work at a place somewhat lost in classic "peri-urban" France, that is we're clearly out of town but for some reason people still live around here. Busy roads and chemical-sprayed crops. Since a few weeks, Romanians have settled around in the wood patch next to our building. At first it was like this one family squatting an abandoned house and we became aware of their presence because their attempt to get access to electricity caused outages at our place. I went there, told them not to fuck with a specific button in our electric cabinet (which is like a hundred meter from the building for some reason) and everyone went back to their stuff. At first my bosses were worried that they would steal our electricity but it turns out they plugged themselves right before our electric meter so it's not on us so they don't care.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Quick Jot

    The poster generated for my last video upload was just a black image, since the first frame is black. Here is the alt text the AI generated for it... 😂

  • Switching from iOS to GrapheneOS

    a black and white photo of a mountain in front of a dark sky with white clouds[1]

    [...]

    On the mobile side of things, I kept using my ageing _iPhone_ as it was working well enough, but the shackles that _Apple_ puts on their devices (especially outside the EU) started to get annoying. Especially so if one doesn't use any other _Apple_ devices any longer, where the golden handcuffs otherwise at least in theory should make everything work seamlessly.

    Long story short, I now replaced my _iPhone_ with a _Pixel_, as I wanted to be able to drive it with GrapheneOS[1] to not replace one megacorp with another one (yes, the irony of having to buy a phone from _Google_ to get rid of all _Google_ services isn't lost on me).

  • Should You Use the Command line?

    A large part of Linux might seem daunting to a novice user because it involves the command line. Unlike Windows or MacOS where the graphical interface is intertwined with the operating system itself, Linux's GUI is simply another package that is installed. The system can function just the same without it because at its core it relies on something called "tty" to communicate with the user. Essentially ttys are virtual emulations of an old device called teletype which was used as one of the first input/output mechanism for computers. Although originally users communicated with computers primarily through text, we have come to replace this with a more appealing visual interface as it was easier to learn and navigate.

    This course of events merits little explanation because using the tty required a reasonable grasp of commands and how the system itself functioned. The general public would not have been particularly enticed by the necessity of having to learn commands and syntax just so that they could use these machines. Most operating systems, as a result, have come to entirely replace this mechanism with a visual interface, making tty, even if it existed in certain systems, only a vestige of the past. Linux, on the other hand, still retained this part of history. One of the first things you would see when you install a minimal Linux distribution is just a black screen with a blinking white cursor, patiently waiting for you to programmatically express your will. Graphical interfaces are installed on top of this but you could still communicate with your system even in the absence of such mediation just like how you would 60 years ago.

  • searching for this stuff kind of sucks

    After apcupsd turned my computer off and it came back up, I was getting:

    knotd[8431]: error: [thebackupbox.net.] zone event 'load' failed (missing active KSK or ZSK)

    in my error logs.

    My first thought was that the file was missing, or that the permissions were wrong. There /was/ a lot of wrong permissions on those files, but changing them didn't help anything.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Flickr Download Updates

      I saw via one of the poets I follow on Bluesky that Flickr will be making some updates in mid-May to disallow downloads of original- and large-sized images from free accounts. According to them (and honestly, I believe it), this is to prevent abuse of the service as a kind of free cloud storage.

      I'm a little sad, though, because I still use Flickr: I do a little small press publishing and sometimes use Flickr for the cover images when I find something I like and the license permits. Hopefully this will still work? We'll see. Flickr feels like the flickering screen of an older internet. It's still there; so's Angelfire and Tripod, somehow. The rest of it gone, traces of it still there in the Wayback Machine but maddeningly incomplete.

    • Working on New GMI to HTML Setup

      I saw via one of the poets I follow on Bluesky that Flickr will be making some updates in mid-May to disallow downloads of original- and large-sized images from free accounts. According to them (and honestly, I believe it), this is to prevent abuse of the service as a kind of free cloud storage.