Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • creating a logo for my new venture

    Now that I am setting up my own business, I need (or want) to get some of the formalities out of the way. One of which was getting a little logo together, to use on third party sites, apps etc, to create some sense of visual consistency. There is a story behind the 8by3 name, which requires a post of its own. For now, I wanted to incorporate the numbers 8 and 3, as well as some idea of balance and flow. And I like typography and minimalism, most of my attempts at design in life were entirely comprised by black text on a white background.

  • good salad with violent preparation:

    * brussel sprouts = grate

    * almonds = mortar & pestle

    * parmesan = shave

    * dressing (olive oil + lemon + grainy mustard) = whisk

  • Scrambling the Arista de las Campanitas, Sierra Nevada

    The "Arista de las Campanitas" from Cerro los Machos to the very summit of Veleta is a superb scramble/easy rock climb with a distinctive alpine nature. We did this last week in the hot sun, the ridge never falling below 3000 meters. I guess, grading wise, it would certainly be a grade 3S scramble but there are some very exposed sections and some short grade 3 rock climbing sections.

  • wild and untamed

    a gentle fog 
    crawls up from the water 
    embracing fields and meadows
    where animals still sleep
    enveloping their innocence 
    in a protective veil
    
    
    the moon watches 
    as travelers silently move
    through the scenery
    a handful of souls
    scattered 
    among the wild and untamed
    

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ACYFPTE Wordo: MYALL

  • Welcome home, native son

    It took many, many hours to get here, but I am back in the US again. So far, it has been nice being home.

    Jetlag notwithstanding, of course; it is 01:19 and I am wide awake after having slept only one and a half hours. This is something I have to endure each time I come here.

  • Human connection to nature has declined 60% in 200 years, study find

    Computer modelling predicts that levels of nature connectedness will continue to decline unless there are far-reaching policy and societal changes – with introducing children to nature at a young age and radically greening urban environments the most effective interventions.

    The study by Miles Richardson, a professor of nature connectedness at the University of Derby, accurately tracks the loss of nature from people’s lives over 220 years by using data on urbanisation, the loss of wildlife in neighbourhoods and, crucially, parents no longer passing on engagement with nature to their children.

• Politics and World Events

  • Britain’s social fabric has been tor

    There has been a debate about “broken Britain” in recent weeks. Many rightwing commentators see a nation brought down by uncontrolled immigration, soaring crime rates and unacceptable demographic change. Many liberals dismiss the “broken Britain” rhetoric as “hyperventilation”.

  • Why Russia Plotted to Kill the Rheinmetall CEO Arming Ukraine - Bloomberg

    On a clear night at the end of April 2024, arsonists slipped into a tidy residential neighborhood in Hermannsburg, a German village of about 8,000 people surrounded by flat farm fields, heathland nature reserves and military bases. Under the cover of darkness, they arrived at a large redbrick home, where they set fire to a clapboard garden house and a towering beech tree out front. They escaped undetected before the fire brigade arrived. Neighbors awoke the next morning to the smell of still-smoldering wood.

    The home belonged to Armin Papperger, the chief executive officer of Rheinmetall AG, Germany’s largest defense company. Papperger, a stocky, white-haired 62-year-old engineer, wasn’t home at the time. In fact, he hadn’t been there since 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, local residents say. The war had made Papperger a busy man: He was turning a sleeping industrial giant into an international defense juggernaut on track to bring in almost €10 billion ($11.6 billion) in revenue that year.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Upgrading Debian Bookworm (12) to Trixie (13)

    I'm ignoring the warnings about directories the upgrade process was unable to delete: The ones I did check contained scripts and the like. I would have felt OK to delete directories with generated files, or files modified by me. But this? I don't know.

  • Using 'tar' on actual tapes

    My earliest concept of 'Unix' as a child growing up in the 80s was certainly vague, but central to that notion was the idea of magnetic tape media -- as in: if I heard of a place that 'ran Unix', I'd picture cabinets of tape decks or even reel-to-reel tapes. Whatever "Unix" was, it had tapes. (And it sounded pretty badass to me)

    But while my Unix (Linux) experience was early, (My Linux flex is that I installed Slackware from floppy sets onto my 486 PC) I never really had occasion to actually use a tape drive with my Linux or BSD boxes through the years. My only real, personal use of a tape drive was with a 80MB DAT drive on an older DOS PC. My later professional use of DLT tape storage was mostly on Windows Servers.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Better quality PDFs from Gemini pages

      I have made some updates to "gemtext2latex", my tool for making LaTeX files from Gemini files. Since LaTeX can produce high-quality PDF output, gemtext2latex constitutes the first and critical stage in a pipeline that allows Gemini-formatted files to be turned into PDFs.

      Obviously, this provides a labour-saving device for pathologically lazy people who want to write reasonable-quality PDFs by typing out Gemini source text. Like me.

      Apart from a bugfix, the updates add a handler for non-standard "quote" extensions in Gemini, which begin with "> ". By default, gemtext2latex does not handle the other major non-standard extension, which is the use of paired asterisks for italics/emphasis. This is disabled by default, but necessary for serious writing.

    • The Last Dog Day Of Summer

      Today is the last day of the dog days of summer. Who knew? To celebrate, there's a new Alhena release. In addition to a number of minor bug fixes, there are two new features:

      * Embedded images/text via data URLs

      * Optional link icons for easy identification of link types

  • Programming

    • Elixir of freshness

      Closer to the weekend, when I had figured out all the **essential** NixOS stuff, I also made another decision to learn something new. The time has come to get familiar with the Erlang ecosystem. The BEAM runtime itself is something that I'd never heard a single bad word about in many years, and I do still have some warm nostalgic feelings about the original (pre-Sony) Ericsson phones, so that was another factor that nudged me to this decision. However, what was left was the language choice itself. Unless I'm missing anything, for now there are three worthy candidates: Erlang itself, Elixir and Gleam. There also are some BEAM ports of existing languages, like Clojerl, Luerl and LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang), but I wanted to learn something fully original, like the pre-Sony Ericssons. Erlang itself, while being iconic on its own, looks too verbose and low-level to me. I think I will come to it at some point in the future, but for my first encounter with BEAM, I needed something easier.