Gemini* and Gopher

• Politics and World Events

  • Not Going Down to the Shelter Anymore

    As an Israeli living here, I have made the decision not to go down to the shelter when the alarms sound. This isn't an easy decision, nor is it a result of carelessness or lack of fear. On the contrary – I am fully aware of the risks involved. But something inside me calls out to feel, even just a little, the suffering that people in Iran and Gaza experience, constantly living under the threat of bombings and fear.

  • A completely different vision for the centre of Cambridge

    The Daily Telegraph has run a piece on the redevelopment plans in Cambridge. The PR campaign for this development is in full swing, right down to taxpayer-funded shills taking up the usual stations that charity muggers do in supermarkets, handing out leaflets and engaging with the public.

  • Strategy of Mental Whims

    Strategy of Mental Whims

    I am writing these lines in my humble room, on the fourth day of the war that Israel launched against Iran, trying to formulate my thoughts and feelings after nights of alarms, casualties, and injuries resulting from Iranian missile barrages in response to the Israeli attack.

    Iran is a giant country, a regional power rich in oil and natural gas, with a long and glorious history. It stood the test of war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq for eight full years, and Israel is also a regional power but a tiny country that cannot live in peace with its neighbors or with itself. Iran is an Islamist dictatorship, and Israel is a former democracy that is gradually turning into an authoritarian theocracy.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Building a dungeon - context

    One of the major aspects of a roleplay session is the dungeon. This is a theater for players to test their abilities and have fun. This is an occasion (one of the best) for the DM to explore interesting ideas and come out with an ambiental and interesting environment and themes. Feeling, narration (some time visual), allegories can become alive in this place.

  • My thoughts on emacs vs vim so far

    I started using emacs a little bit back to write my gemlog posts and general prose. I dabbled in using it for code, too, but ultimately went back to vim for that. I haven't done a ton of prose writing since then, so this isn't founded on a ton of experience.

    At first, the emacs workflow centered around using control didn't really speak to me. Control and Alt are awkward buttons to press on a standard keyboard, and I was missing a few functions that I used often in vim. This reached a point that I installed evil-mode to use Vi bindings. But I've uninstalled it now.

  • Gigantic Toolchest

    As my woodworking has developed so has my collection of tools. Recently it had gotten to the point where I had run out of room in the conventional spaces for storing such things, and had to resort instead to shoving tools and bits of wood into various nooks and crannies around the house. This was not scalable.

    Around that same time, starting in late January, I enrolled myself in a 35-hour woodworking course here in the city. The course was spread over the course of 11 weeks, 3 hours a week, and was done all in italian, which was really the more challenging part. It was 100% a worthwhile experience; there's only so much you can learn from the internet, which is often full of contradicting or exagerrated information, and so it's really nice to have a professional sit down and explain what's what.

    The last five weeks of the course were set aside for each of us students to build a project. The actual parameters of what these projects had to be was pretty open-ended; as long as we could finish it in the 5 weeks, it was fair game.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • AuraGem Search Improvements

      The recent changes to the AuraGem search engine and crawler have now doubled the crawling speed and made searches consistently take up less than 1 second of time! And the memory usage is no longer excessive like it was before. So I would say the change was very successful!

    • Trying to understand the bots

      The numbers themselves are not that big, but I am annoyed. I live in an English/German world and I don't see a reason for service providers from Vietnam, China, Brazil and Romania crawling my sites.