Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ZBHILRA Wordo: SLOGS

  • bottom surgery

    well i've been away a while from writing gemlogs but that's neither here nor there.. still a nice thing to have i think even if i am infrequent with it. if i get up in my head about how i haven't done it consistently enough then i feel like it's a lost cause or i have to start over from scratch with a new one or whatever. bweh

    i was wanting to do some tooling to make writing gemlogs easier, but then it just makes me end up not writing anything, and the tooling gets complicated and bogs things down further anyway. also i don't like making every post on gemini be about writing posts on gemini. so i'm keeping this as like a brief addendum (predendum?) on the rest of this blog. but yea i did end up throwing together just a small something last night, a bit of vimscript that just slightly automates the bits of the gemlog entries that are supposed to be consistent from entry to entry.

• Politics and World Events

  • re: Stop pretending to be anti-violence

    Yes, government equals violence, in every 'solution' it offers. Yes, enforcement, especially selective enforcement of contracts is violence. And capitalism, especially in advances stages, is total violence -- like most --isms (government preferences) it is and -ism that gives preference to the rich.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Computer literacy and perspectives on tech

    Last year, I tutored several adult students on how to use their computers (specifically, laptops with Windows or ChromeOS) and smartphones (both Android and iOS), as a part of basic adult literacy class at a local library. Working as a software developer and using computers since I was a teenager, I knew I take a lot of knowledge for granted. But this class gave me an entirely different perspective and highlighted many of the issues with the current state of technology, and, specifically, UI.

  • Accessing Alhena's Database

    Everything in Alhena is stored in an embedded H2 database. The database is encrypted. The idea was to prevent casual snooping but the password can be found in the source on GitHub. You can change it if you build from source. You can also set an environment variable with the password but that's a topic for another day.

    Anyway, a new Alhena autocomplete feature runs a query against the HISTORY table as you type in the address bar. I have over 10,000 links in history and I'd like to remove some of them - not necessarily for performance but because I don't need to see them anymore. You can remove links directly by opening the History page and right-clicking. Sometimes though, that's not granular enough. That's when it's nice to be able to run SQL directly against the Alhena database.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • A brief downtime and what caused it

      As you may have noticed, my Gopher server was offline for a couple of days. This was caused by me, moving all the content from an Intel Atom-based dedicated server in the OVH datacenter in France to an AMD EPYC-based VPS here in Czechia.

      I did the exact opposite move in March 2019, and running everything from a dedicated server was a great experience. That server had only two reboots during all that time and is now approaching 2225 days of uptime. It may sound strange, but that was one of the reasons for me to move away from it.

      In 2019, the server was installed from an OVH-supplied Slackware 14.0 image, which was later updated to 14.1. Even six years ago, that was already quite an old system, as it had been released in 2013.