Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ABCEUSO Wordo: CURDY

  • To Do 📋

    Tighten bicycle handlebars that went floppy

    * Clear space in the garage for an art sink

    * Clear my junk out of EC's old room so he can come to stay

  • This My Rabbit Hole & My Circle Hubs, if You Happy play Hunt

    I have contributed too much to the Global Civil Society Community that I built. also expanding the circle in Cyberspace. and this is a list of Gemini, Gopher, Midnight Pub, Spartan, Nex sites that I have managed to collect, and will increase your interest in exploring starting from the smallest Circle Hub network in Cyberspace. until it ends up in the Circle Hubs of my vast Global Civil Society Community. I am a Cyberwalker & HighestLeader of Global Civil Society. my alias is Cybernetwalker! and this is my Gem treasure link that you can open on the Web Browser or in the Gemini app which can access various other server protocols.

  • Urban Photos

  • until I taste blood

• Technology and Free Software

  • I DeGoogled my Fairphone

    Two weeks ago I have decided to deGoogle my Fairphone 5. I have not had any major issue so far, I am quite happy, and I am able to do everything I did when I was using stock Android, so I think it’s worth writing up a little summary of what I did, in case it is useful for others.

    I have a Fairphone 5 and I am really happy with it. It is my main driver (also my only phone actually), and I bought it specifically because I want it to last long and replace its components if I need to.

    I bought this phone a year ago and I have been really happy with it so far, but I was growing annoyed by the latest Android updates in which Google was pushing AI and Gemini more an more. I also wanted to be able to remove apps I am not using and I don’t care about like Chrome, Gmail, and the Google app itself.

    My first choice of OS was CalyxOS, which I had been eyeing for a while as a good candidate. However, unfortunately, its releases went on pause recently, so I had to find something else. After some research, I picked iodé and e/OS/, and ended up settling with e/OS/ due to a weird bug with the Aurora store with iodé (more on that later).

  • A Cyberpunk Journey from the Digital Underground

    I'm excited to announce that my first novel, "Connection Timeout: The PingStarved Chronicles," is now available for purchase! This has been a labor of love that combines my passion for cybersecurity, hacker culture, and storytelling into a dystopian cyberpunk narrative.

  • ROOPHLOCH 2025

    Well, I'm not sending this by laser or lora, just carrying it back to an internet access point for posting. The kids are giving their balls of clay to the ceiling after making it into pokeballs.

    "Mama I want more gummyworms because I'm a bird," intones mine in a robot voice.

    "Wow, the clay splats really good. My hands are muddy now," says my friend's kid. "But it falls down."

    The water drips. The kids both fall silent at the same time, except my friend's kid's congested mouth breathing. ---

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The Eye Of The Beholder

      Page styles in Alhena are a great way to break up the monotony but it's easy to end up with capsules that look like a GeoCities home page from the 1990s.

      An easy way to make a tasteful page is to put Alhena into a dark theme and inherit all the attributes in the style editor. Next, change the fonts to taste (but not the colors). The secret sauce is to then switch Alhena back into a light theme as your default.

  • Programming

    • PC-BASIC, Python, and Code Rot

      PC-BASIC is a "free, cross-platform emulator for the GW-BASIC family of interpreters". The more I use it the more impressed I am. Loading and running old GW-BASIC programs is one thing, but to do that it also contains its own partial emulator for 1980's PCs. By default it opens up a window to run in graphics mode, but command-line switches can be used to instead use a a terminal for input and output. It is implemented in Python, and running it is only a pip install away. And it has a Python API for interacting with GW-BASIC programs. You can load and run an old BASIC program from within a Python script, while peeking and poking at its variables.

      It worries me slightly though that there has been no new release since 2022. That should not be a worry of course. If we didn't do sofware in such a shitty and short-sighted way that should be no worry at all. If it works it should keep working. There is no reason for it to suddenly break. But unfortunately that is not what reality is like. Python in particular breaks backwards compatibility ALL THE TIME. Literally every new minor version contains non-backwards compatible changes. And that is just in the core language and standard libraries. Most code has other dependencies too and will end up in a never-ending battle to keep its set of dependency versions in some state that will hopefully run with one specific minor-version of Python.