Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • xavi for you

    I was thinking about earnestly writing in this morning pages style, but I'm on the fence. Anyways, it seems I'm in a new phase of my life: less professionally ambitious, more broke and whimsical. I watched a few videos, harvested from DVD-Rs, of dolphins painting canvases made from stretched t-shirts this morning and did little else. At one point I watched two 16mm films with a shared theme of sunshine. The second one was quite devastating: about a young deaf kid who describes his relationship with the world and has a brief encounter with a racist clerk. There's a scene where his sister leads him to the park, and he describes how he knows each object in an almost erotic sense: the way abstract sounds could obliterate him at any moment, the feeling of drinking out of a "bubbler," and how it feels to blow a balloon. The inside of his mouth feels akin to the inside of the balloon as he inflates the vessel, stretched and spacious.

    Likewise, I think I'm a bit less stressed financially because everything feels so hopeless these days: I can ride the $3,000 from student loans for the rest of the summer. I've been slowly applying to jobs but each of my attempts are empty and shallow. Nearly all of the news outlets I used to rely on are moving further towards conservatism. I talked to my sister on the phone, and she mentioned that our parents live with her because it's still hard for her to take care of herself. In response, I mentioned that perhaps I could move back closer to her in the Midwest after I finish grad school. I'm going to be in so much debt anyways, it would be nice to not have to pay rent for a while (or at least less rent potentially). When I graduate, I'll be nearly 28. I think it would be okay if I lived in her home or my grandparents' home for a while just to get my shit together and linger in application land.

  • thoughts on your 41st birthday

  • ...listening to cannibal by kesha this morning

    i thought I should write all of this down because my memory is bad...

• Technology and Free Software

  • Alhena 5.1.8 and Working Cheap

    A few people starred the repository so I thought I'd thank them with an update. I work cheap. Seriously though, I really appreciate it.

    Alhena 5.1.8 fixes the close_notify issue (notably with vger servers) and adds support for search urls. I also added a popup menu button with the top 20 most visited bookmarks based on history.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • My hope for the Butlerian Jihad

    • Bringing the Butlerian Jihad to Gopher

      And of course somebody is requesting pages every 2–3 seconds, including all the URLs that are no longer available, that haven't been available in years.

      My problem was that there was no way to log these with the go-gopher library I was using. James Mill had said in an old issue that the solution was to write "middleware" but I think this cannot be done without a small change to the library. See the `remote-addr` branch in the patched go-gopher (and `markdown-gopher`). Ideally both changes can get merged and future readers will wonder what this was all about.

    • Bringing the Butlerian Jihad to Gemini

      A long time ago I was very enthusiastic about Gemini. I wrote a wiki engine called Phoebe with many plugins for all sorts of things. Then I got disillusioned and dropped it all. Then I put some stuff back online using a patched satellite. It adds on-the-fly Markdown to Gemtext transformation, handles all the certificates transparently and just works.

    • Bornhack

      Haven't updated my phlog for a while. I'm currently at Bornhack 2025 - a hacker camp on Funen (despite the name) where I am in a big tent with my computer. I have attended Bornhack a few times before, but took a break for a few years for various reasons. It's quite fun to be among so many hackers, but I am really not very good at tent life.