Gemini* and Gopher

• Politics and World Events

  • 2025-05-07

    Well I'm still hanging in there. Since my country's president effectively decoupled imports from China with massive tariff rates, everyone in the country has kind of been waiting for the other shoe to drop.

    So far, the supply of goods has not changed much and you can easily go to Costco, Target, or Walmart to buy your fill of cheap chinese goods.

    The question is how long will that last?

• Technology and Free Software

  • I am not interested in clerics

    I noticed a bunch of posts on the topic of clerics. I got them via the fedibot that reposts the blogs from the OSR Discord server (@osr@social.alexschroeder.ch, feed RSS).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Practical Gemini use case: giving an Ignite Talk

      Last night I gave a talk at LandTalks, using Gemini for my script.

      Gemini Just Works. I use it for uploading notes and text documents because it's simply less hassle than HTML, Markdown and so on. Save the file, and sync it to the server.

      During the talk, I was reading a single Gemini document off my phone; I would never normally speak so closely from notes, but the talk format required exactly fifteen seconds per slide, so I did this to keep to time. The prep for the talk consisted in getting some slides together, then adapting a script to them, and timing the script to make it sure each stanza was about 13 seconds long.

    • The audience questions from last night's talk

      I recently posted about having given a talk, incidentally using Gemini as a sort of note-publishing system.

      The talk was about Residents Management Companies in the UK. There were three questions from the audience at the end, on a similar theme:

      * how much does last year's legislative reform help?

      * what would the ideal situation look like, in 20 years time?

      * what can be done to get the existing RMCs handed over?

    • Shutting Down the Blanket Fort Webring

      Well, it was fun while it lasted, but eventually all fun things must end. 10 days short of 2 years ago, I created a webring called the "Blanket Fort Webring". The name was based on the idea that people make their own blanket forts. They don't buy them and they don't just pick one from a list of default templates. That's what I wanted from folks who were a part of this webring.

      While I did enjoy having a webring on my website, it made me slightly nervous to host yet another service pointed towards the Internet. Not that I suspected a nasty security breach was going to happen necessarily, but in my opinion, the most secure service is the service that doesn't exist.

    • New Website and RSS Build System

      About a month and a half ago, I wrote about a bug I accidentally introduced to my static HTML page generator that made blank lines appear in situations I didn't want them to. The post is linked below.