Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The Worst Part is Seeing the People You've Left Behind

    I'm occasionally still on Facebook, mostly to keep up on a few writing community-related things, and in amongst that and the AI slop, Facebook occasionally decides to show me things by old friends.

    And in some ways, I wish it wouldn't, because it's devastatingly painful the way some of us have changed and grown apart. I'm thinking in particular of one friend: naturally brilliant, soaring through high school without any obstacles, he crashed and burned in university. Fell behind in classes, failed classes, retook classes, failed them again.

    His Facebook feed is maybe five or six posts a year, most of which are out-of-context posts about right-wing talking points. And I've wondered where his heart's gone. He used to be the sort who'd do anything for a friend, and it's been awful seeing him fall to the ring-wing echo chamber of Rebel News et al. When I was younger, I remember having a conversation with someone decades older than me. She told me I was idealistic now, but as I got older, I'd naturally get more conservative.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AUCIORB Wordo: QUICK

  • fire

• Technology and Free Software

  • 2025-06-12

    After trying various #Ubuntu #linux flavors on my old laptop with only 4Gb of RAM, I needed to find something lighter that didn't use up more than half my RAM, but I still wanted disk encryption and working hardware keys and trackpad. I tried #Devuan (I pronounce this Dev-one) and it is awesome! Super #lightweight and looks great. I only needed to add a tap-to-click config and install xfce4-screensaver, otherwise happy with the defaults.

  • Life Update and OS Changes

    The most significant thing in my life that has changed is the fact I've moved into a new apartment with my partner. We moved to Cardiff, Wales about 2 years ago and the rental market was very rough to break into even on basic apartments. Because she was moving from internationally to study here and my employment situation was a far cry away from the norm, it was really tricky to find letting agencies/landlords who would rent to us.

    We finally found someone from OpenRent to let us a basic, small apartment for £750/mo. The catch being that they wanted a £1,500 deposit and the entire 12 months tenancy in rent up front! This was a little wild, but we really had no choice and luckily we had the means to pay for it.

  • working smarter and harder?

    I wanted to be able to go to gemini.thebackupbox.net on my desktop, and have the hostname resolve to the internal IP of the computer hosting it, while still returning the WAN IP address to the rest of the internet.

    I also didn't want to do split-horizon DNS, and while NAT hairpinning could almost the same effect, it would cause the source IP to be wrong.

    I've been duplicating a bunch of records between /etc/hosts and unbound config and that gets annoying. While re-reading an old blog post

  • Thoughts on Video Game Diegesis | Part 2

    Welcome back. Yesterday I wrote about a couple examples of video games which circumvent an issue not by solving it, but by avoiding anything that might trigger it. This morning I came up with a name for that sort of design (though it likely already has one): prohibitive design. You are, in some sense, 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘩𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 your player from encountering a problem you know exists. This concept is crucial to diegetic design because it focuses on what you can reasonably do without breaking immersion. Knowing this, let's return to desktop gaming for an exploration of interactivity.