Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 8 🔤SpellBinding: AILUQTO Wordo: WASHY

  • Chena Lakes Observations 2025-05-17

    Emily and I visited Chena Lakes today while the kids were with cousins, which has an artificial sand beach for relaxing and for swimming. Chena Lakes is about a 10 minute drive from Fairbanks, near the city of North Pole.

    The sun was high and bright today, though unfortunately that was offset by a strong, cold wind, so that it was not quite the relaxing sun-bathing experience I was aiming for. We came out a little too early in the season. Nevertheless, it was nice to walk along the beach. Because the beach was mostly empty, we got to see a few birds that normally wouldn't be around.

  • Space Firefly's Tiny Log

    Considering doing a basic atom feed reader for feeds hosted in gopher. It won't be superpopular but sounds fun, and it could be useful to some of us. Something easy to install, maybe in Python...

  • If Anyone Builds It, Everybody Dies

    I’ve been keeping an eye on Eliezer Yudkowsky for a while, and I was pretty convinced that if we get a smarter-than-human superintelligence on the planet, it would end up with goals — and the ability to carry them out, against our wishes — that would supercede any possible “don’t kill all humans” programming.

    The reason I don’t talk about it constantly is because I expect that I will have nearly zero impact on this sort of thing, which will, at the very least, involve convincing a lot of both U.S. and PRC politicians that a superhuman AI will kill everybody (almost certainly in passing like in my playthrough of Universal Paperclips, not out of malice like AM in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”).

  • Existing and Coping

    Almost forgot how to exist because coping looked like the only option.

    Humans are simutaneously overrated and underrated, in the sense that they are all so small and pathetic, yet at the same time feels limitless. To recgonise such a thing constantly and consistently is very difficult, because of how contradictory both idea are when put together. It is easy for lots to feel limitless, but when they realised that isn't always the case chances are they fall back to feeling small and pathetic.

    And it's fair to say that I am just like anyone else.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Alpine Linux in WSL

    I'm using a Windows computer for work and like having an instance of Alpine Linux around to do things that are hard on Windows. Or just to have a little bit of fun from time to time.

  • Finally Upgraded!

    Each time I've had a few hours and sat down to do it I've run into issues that I haven't had time to fix at that moment. As I've realised that this would need a longer time to do in a single sitting, and that I had to start all over again each time it'd been a couple of months since my last attempt.

    I finally decided to just get it done. I dedicated this entire weekend to it, deciding that I would work through all issues and just get it done no matter what.

    The issues here were several but they can be summarised succinctly: a lot of the different components had interconnected dependencies and new versions that weren't backwards compatible. This led to a situation where I had to figure out in what order to upgrade the different components in order to not make another of them break in a way that made it a lot harder to upgrade.

  • Rebooting

    It has been a long time since I visited Gemini space. My plan is still to continue working on the gemcast, but until I am able to produce a new episode, I figured I might as well write something to my gemlog in the mean time.

    It's hard to believe that my last gemlong entry was in 2023. I've changed systems more than once since then, and I'm not even sure if my original Gemini setup still works. Right now I'm going through everything, checking the scripts, and making sure that I can effectively resume publishing to Gemini without having to do everything manually like I did in the old days.

    So far it looks like everything is still working and in place, which I guess is a testament to some of the design decisions I made when I created this system. My Gemini capsule is still going *brrr*; I owe a special thanks to both Martin Bays (author of diohsc) and Omar Polo (author of gmid) for enabling my capsule to run indefinitely. gmid is a full-fledged FreeBSD package thanks to its author, and so the server is now kept up to date automatically. So far it doesn't seem like diohsc is packaged for the system, but I guess I should figure out how to do that myself.

  • CATCHING A RELEASE

    I compile various programs from source for my 'Internet Client' SBC where I run internet-related software remotely on my other (older) systems. The idea is that I keep the internet-related software on it up to date while ignoring that for the other systems. But when I'm compiling things myself (or downloading cross-distro static binaries etc.), that means I need a way to know when new versions are released.

    Projects on GitHub which use its releases system can be watched via an ATOM feed, eg. https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/releases.atom

    GNU projects also have ATOM feeds for releases if they use "Savannah", eg. http://savannah.gnu.org/news/atom.php?group=mailutils

    I use rss2email to send me emails when these feeds have new posts (although I'd prefer to find something that's not Python based).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • On Gemini

      I'm new here. I'm probably 6 years late, but I'm excited. I've been reading a lot about Gemini and spent time on Gemini in the last few weeks.

      It's almost that I don't need to worry anymore about Chrome winning the current incarnation of the browser wars and not knowing if Mozilla is still sane with all that they did recently. The Gemini world is simpler by design and client wars just won't possibly happen.

    • Pinhole Photos

      It's been a while since I last went out and made large-format pinhole photos. I've been curious though what the experience of encountering photos is in different Gemini clients, so I'm sharing a few here.

      These are all taken with 8x10" or 4x5" large-format wooden pinhole cameras on direct-positive paper, which I develop in hand-mixed coffee developer. I might make a longer post explaining the process at some point.

  • Programming

    • Problematic Code

      The main issue may be difficult to see, though if one develops "antibodies" for the bad pattern the problem is more likely to leap out at you. Without this understanding the issue may be complicated by compiler flags and various host differences, which may confuse the various people involved, much like the sensor probes in "Fifth Element" show wildly different values and thus confound analysis.