Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Entity Observation Diary

    Today I was blessed with tips from two additional members of my beloved advisory council.

  • ~hammie's Tiny gemlog

    Where does the time go? Today I cleaned up some odd test pages here and updated my books page. My manager recently went to Scotland and brought back some Tunnock's Caramel Log bars, which are very rare in the south of England.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Cryptocurrency

    When Bitcoin was first emerging I was still at school. It seemed interesting, right up until I found out that just to set up a wallet you needed to complete a huge download which would have completely blown the family internet data quota and filled up a good chunk of my storage. Now of course I realise I just needed to hold onto some coin for a few years and it would have eventually increased in value enough to easily cover the cost of the internet excess and a new HDD. But even then I could only find places in Melbourne as the nearest to actually convert Bitcoin with AUD anyway, so the wallet probably would have stayed empty.

    Plus investment wasn't really on my mind anyway. I was keen on an alternative to Credit Cards and PayPal, which had fees, and equally important back then, 18+ age restrictions. Since then, Bitcoin went insanely volitile and the trickle of services accepting it for payment shrank back again, taking my interest away with it. So I was slow to discover there are now "stablecoins", and PayPal even has one itself. In theory these do seem easier to use, except I've never seen anyone but my VPS provider accept them (and even their PayPal payment option has been broken for years (though I reported it to support), so I rather doubt that it works). Plus I've since developed misgivings about cryptocurrency which I've struggled to fully express.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Strange Goings-On At Ultimatum Labs

      Strange goings-on because it's strange that I'm still obsessing over some of this stuff. Nevertheless, there are some related Gemini-related updates to report.