Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The beginning of May

    I’ve been walking through the neighbourhood again, looking at flowers. Aargauerstrasse is particularly beautiful with the tram rails.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Yeeting Oligarch Tech: four months out

    When I started deleting my social media accounts, dropping Amazon, and changing my computer-ing habits, I didn't entirely know why I was doing it. I knew I needed a change. I knew that Big Tech had stopped being fun or useful for me years ago, yet I didn't understand how to get away from it. I knew that once I discovered alternatives, I was delighted to discover the Web I remembered from my teen years still existed.

    Lately, however, I've been able to articulate the problem more clearly: social media and Big Tech in general had me perpetually dissatisfied.

    Perpetual dissatisfaction is good for capitalism, of course. It keeps one scrolling or buying.

    I knew I was done with social media forever the day I found myself doomscrolling Reddit and suddenly thought "I'd rather be scrubbing the bathtub." Bathtub grime is finite, and when I finished, I'd have a clean bathub.

  • Rabbit holes I fall into

    Every once in a while, I get caught up on keyboards. Not because there's anything wrong with my current one (an older SteelSeries Apex M500, with the gamer-girl wasd/space keycaps wearing off), but I'll just see a picture or article about a cool keyboard someone made, and start thinking about the ways standard keyboards are silly. This time around, it was the bayleaf:

  • New Setup for Offline Browsing ZIP File Backup

    Until today, my ZIP file generation script was a python script that created a new ZIP file each and every time. That's not efficient, especially because I was repeating work each time by including every file anew. Well, now I have fixed that problem! Only files that have changed will get added, updated, or removed from the ZIP file now, saving a LOT of work and a LOT of processing time. On my raspberry pi server, it would take well over a minute to generate the ZIP file each and every time, but now it's only a few seconds or less.

  • Graphical Mode Links2 on Mac

    I consider myself a happy links2^ user. I tend to just use links2 in text mode but recently, I wanted to see the magic of graphical mode links2. There's just one issue: I wanted to set this up on my work computer and my work computer is a Mac.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • I updated my Bluesky PDS and it stopped working. Here's how I fixed it [tutorial]

      I run a bunch of stuff on my server. So to keep things consistent and simple for myself, I opted to run my Bluesky PDS behind nginx using the excellent instructions on Ben Harri's blog:

      https://benharri.prose.sh/bluesky-pds-without-docker

      In fact, it was so easy to set up that I wasn't compelled to get to know the file & folder structure for the PDS (and more embarrassingly, never set up any sort of automated backup script!).

      Doing either or both of these things might have saved me a lot of headache when an update went bad - but then I wouldn't be writing this post, which will hopefully save someone *else* from banging their head against a wall for multiple hours over the course of a couple of stressful days.