Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Adventures in amateur furniture construction

    Not long after we moved into our current apartment, something like three years ago now, I guess, I built a long, low and narrow shelf for putting potted plants on, along a long row of windows. It was designed to fit snugly over a long and low radiator at the bottom of these windows. We almost never have that radiator on because it genuinely rarely gets cold enough here that dressing warmly indoors isn't enough for comfort, so the proximity isn't a problem for the plants.

    My approach to building this shelf was extremely naive, or if you want to try to make it sound principled, maybe we we could say "brutalist". I bought two pieces of wood from the hardware store, a plank maybe 30cm wide by 2.5m long, or thereabouts, maybe 1.5cm wide, and a square beam, maybe 5x5cm, and probably again about 2m or 2.5m long. At home I used a handsaw to cut the beam into six equal lengths - no scrap left over! And I stuck those six short legs at the four corners of the plank and at the midpoints, and attached each by drilling a single screw through the plank right into the centre of the leg. Two pieces of wood, six screws, no wasted material, and, of course, no finesse or style or anything. I didn't even sand or stain anything.

  • Adventures in amateur furniture construction

    It's in no way a thing of beauty, and after three years of service the top of the plank is very unevenly discoloured due to irregular exposure to sunlight and spilled water, but you know what, it works just fine. The plants themselves and the long row of large windows capture your attention first and foremost, so the "ugly" shelf doesn't detract from the appearance of the space at all. I call it a success and I enjoyed the experience. I was of course dissatisfied with some aspects. Using a handsaw to make a perfectly straight and square cut through a bit of wood is harder than you might think, so attaching the legs directly to the base of the plank is no guarantee that the two are perpendicular. A single screw fastening of course leaves the legs free to "roll" about their axis. And with the screws being only 2.5cm or so from the edges of the plank, there's a split or two.

  • collarbones

    I bask in the comfort of your closeness
    limbs a tangled mess
    skin sticky with last night's memories 
    not real
    traces of a touch lingering 
    burning, almost painful
    with each exhale you drift further away
    I inhale 
    then hold my breath to keep you
    the scent that lives in that hollow
    where your collarbones meet
    holds the very essence of you
    contently trapped here
    by the thought of your arm
    resting heavy over me
    until the morning light
    bursts the bubble
    the dream lost
    

  • 🔤SpellBinding: UGIRSTD Wordo: SKIMS

• Politics and World Events

  • A People Without an Elite, An Elite Without a People: An Israeli Perspective on the Crisis of Emigration and Culture

    In recent years, it seems Israel is undergoing a dangerous process: the bond between the people and its elite has worn so thin that the bridge connecting them has all but disappeared. The elite, once admired and emulated, has become a symbol of contempt and hatred, and the public appears to parade with pride in the nakedness of ignorance, rejecting any sign of intelligence, rationality, or openness to new ideas. Israel, it seems, is becoming a place where flight from knowledge and education competes only with the glorification of faith, nationalism, and blind adherence to rabbis.

• Technology and Free Software

  • FINDING YOUR (SERVER) LIMITS

    A little postscript to my last post, 2025-06-07My_Session_with_the_Bots.txt, written before I forget the details completely. Before I ended with an Apache MaxRequestWorkers setting of 350, since 450 caused the server's 1GB of RAM to run out before queuing connections to the PHP script which was getting DDoS'ed for some reason. Of course having written that I soon discovered my server bogged down again, stuck on that Apache process limit. Gradually raising it, I found that the RAM requirements just to serve the 503 error response to the now-blocked requests containing PHPSESSID were less than I thought before. I was able to up the process limit to 950 and actual simultaneous Apache processes topped out around 800 while logs showed hundreds of requests from random Brazilian/SE-Asian IPs being denied per second.

    This is obviously a limitation of Apache's configuration options, because before blocking the requests based on that pointless PHPSESSID query string the Apache processes used much more RAM to serve the dynamic PHP page rather than just a few headers with an error response (the bots didn't retrieve the error page). What I really need is a way to automatically scale the process limit based on available RAM and average RAM usage per Apache process, but strangely that doesn't seem to be available.

    It seems to me that it should be possible to write a script to do this by editing the MaxRequestWorkers setting and reload Apache. But testing it would be time consuming and at this point my tally of jobs to do Vs time to do them is already hopeless. Plus any new job that doesn't immediately serve a profit motive ought to be excluded given my current situation, and so long as my website works now, improvements ought to first and foremost be to making/finding products to sell there that people want to buy.

  • AI Cannot Make Art | 🏷 rant

    I’ve heard it said that everything we do is art. I disagree with that statement. When we think of art, most of the time drawings are the first things to come to mind. Why drawings? Not really sure, that’s kind of just the default for art. That being said, it isn’t all that art is. Music can also be art. Videography, photography, programming, arrangements of furniture. Anything can be art. That being said, not everything is art. I’d argue that art needs a soul. If you don’t put your heart into it, if it’s something you dislike doing, if you’re only doing it for profit and no other reason, that isn’t art. This extends to AI. There’s no soul in AI generated images, no passion, no love for what is being done and that’s because AI generated images are nothing but an algorithm. Yes, writing an algorithm can be art but the algorithm running? That’s just it doing exactly as told. The code has no love for the result. This is exactly why AI generated images are not art. This is why I hate that label for it. Art needs love. Programs cannot love (unfortunately).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Geminispace

      Thought, by announcing the link to some new article here, it would be a good idea to also include a feedback link there. This way, people reading my blog will be able to reply. It could make navigation in geminispace more interactive and replace the web comment feature, which I miss all the time.

    • Using Bubble for gemlog comments. Is this Crazy?

      Last evening I was just thinking about some barriers that exist in gemini that kind of prevent people from interaction. Thinking of the web of (and this is weird to type) decades past, when we would read blogs and forums, and if we had something to say relative to the conversation, there would be a way to add a comment.

      Some blogs would not allow comments (and that’s ok, not everyone wants to deal with moderation / internet a-holes). Other blogs would “outsource” their comment system, as James Hague said[a].