Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • new music i like

    Hello everyone! Long time, no post. Made a bear blog post about this but decided I wanted to share it here, too. I found a series of Japanese new age albums called the Isotonic Sound collection and I've been obsessed ever since. Here are my favorites from the list!

  • Catchup

    So, where do I begin? I haven't been updating things on my gopherhole because my blog has been a little more usable with my limited time and energy right now. I'm doing this because I do miss updating things here, but like with the web, I've been offline far more than online.

    Back on June 27th, my uncle passed away peacefully, out of everyone's view, as he wanted. He left me with a crapton of things to go through here at home, and even more in one last big order that he gave to me to keep me going until we could get back on our feet. Food, a bit of clothing, some equipment to help us until we can get proper vehicles... All stuff we needed, and which has indeed kept us going.

    It hurt, losing the last of the four people who raised me from birth. He left me a lot. The house was put in my name with survivorship rights back in 2007, my van (still down) was always in my name since my grandfather sold it to me, and his life insurance couldn't be touched by anyone but me since I was the beneficiary.

• Politics and World Events

  • Russias war against the Ukraine

    I know there are some people here who are on Russia’s side in the Ukraine war and bow down to the Kremlin and Putin. And I also know that I’m not going to make only friends with this post. But I just need to vent my anger!

    There are people who say the Ukraine war is a civil war, but that’s a blatant lie from russian propaganda. Putin has been saying since 2014 that it is a civil war with which Russia has nothing to do. But we know he's a liar. In reality, they have been conducting anti-Ukrainian agitation and propaganda after the illegal annexation of Crimea and supporting pro-Russian, paramilitary groups to further destabilize Ukraine. In February 2022 Putin and the Kremlin started the unlawful attack on Ukraine which started the open war. All of this is against international law. And it was planned long in advance. So it is no civil war. It was completely provoked from Russia and is therefore an illegal attack against a foreign country.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Digital Camera

    One day back in May, I was taking some cardboard waste to the recycle bin next to the garage. My Samsung A15 was in my free hand, and I was wearing a pair of shorts that didn't have pockets, so to lift the lid of the recycle bin, I placed the phone on the trash can. It's not hard to imagine what happened next: the phone immediately slid off the top of the trash can and landed on the concrete. The lens covers on all three of the cameras immediately shattered. Dirt quickly got in, and now the phone is all but useless for taking photos.

    I immediately called a repair shop in the area that has worked on my phones before. I opened a case to get the lens covers, and when the lenses themselves became scratched, I added a new camera unit to the repair order. That order is still outstanding, pending the availability of spare parts from Samsung. Those new parts have been out of stock all summer.

    Up until now, I've compensated by using my work phone to take pictures, but that got annoying pretty quickly. It felt silly for me to put one phone away and take out another phone simply to snap a photo or take a video. That was ignoring the matter that I was keeping personal data on a work device, which I didn't want to do. Then I had to remember to move the photos off the device at regular intervals and back them up to my network drive.

  • Printers

    Printers get a lot of hate, but I think many of us actually love them.

    When I write a letter (which is rare) in LaTeX and then print that on my laser printer (which is 20 years old!), I can't help but be amazed by the result. It's fast, very reliable, and the print quality is great.

    The problem isn't *printers* -- it's that they are a prime example of deliberately *sabotaged* devices.