Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Fantastic Four #3146

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ILMNUPO Wordo: RANKS

  • September 21 2025 Navarro Family Reunion

    Hola! Happy Hacking to all hackers, DIY, Creators and tinkers out there.

    Last weekend September 20 I caught a fast speed train (AVE) to visit family in Alicante. This time was not a party, or friends motivation, but family reunión that was MUCH needed! I had not seen many of my younger family members in 20+ years or even 30! Since I moved to the USA in 1997 and came back to Spain in 2019, there has been this huge gap with the younger generations who were babies or not even born when I left.

    I had such a great time, I was so happy to be in-family I could not stop talking jajajaja. I was excited and happy like a kid in a candy store! We had family come from overseas and different parts of Spain and even Europe. My son Alex came as well, so it was complete!!! Having him there made everything even more special, seeing him connect with cousins he barely knew existed.

    The Navarro side was in full force - tíos, tías, primos, sobrinos - generations mixing together, kids running around, the older ones telling stories from the old days in Alicante. The energy was incredible, that Mediterranean family warmth that makes these gatherings so special. You know that feeling when you are surrounded by your blood and everything just clicks? That was it!

• Technology and Free Software

  • How to play Frontier: Elite II (Amiga version)

    What is Frontier: Elite II you ask?

    It's a space trading and combat simulation game developed by David Braben and released in 1993 for the Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS. The sequel to the 1984 classic Elite. It's building on the original’s open-world gameplay with vast improvements in realism, scale, and depth.

    Get lost among millions of stars, planets and moons, with thousands of them to explore. You can hyperjump between solar systems, get on orbit around planets, and even enter the atmosphere and land on them. Heck, you can even watch the sunset from their surface! Some have settlements, others have underground facilities. Some planets have space stations orbiting them where you can dock. All with a relistic space flight and landing simulation with Newtonian mechanics.

  • Review of the M68EC020TK CPU accelerator card designed by Matze

    The Amiga 500/500+ has many great accelerator extensions to increase the machine's speed and memory significantly. It can be done either externally with a "sidecar" connecting to the CPU expansion slot on the left side of the machine or internally, by replacing the original 68000 CPU with an expansion board.

    The 68EC020-TK (or M68EC020TK) was created by Matthias Heinrichs (aka Matze) with the goal to design a low cost expansion that gives a significant performance boost while keeping the machine as compatible as possible. In theory it should also work in an Amiga 1000, 2000 and CDTV (won't fit in the case), but I haven't tested and can't confirm that. I've seen reports of it fitting and working fine in an A2000.

  • Why buy an Amiga 500 today?

    The Amiga 500 with it's 4-5 million units sold was Commodore's best selling machine after the C64 and the one that kept the company around for a little longer. Today it's one of the best retro computer platforms with advantages hard to match.

    It was the most popular Amiga model, so there are still plenty available second hand, which makes it the cheapest too.

    It's the simplest to get started with. Turn it on, insert a floppy disk and enjoy.

    Using an Amiga 500 with a Kickstart 1.3 is fun in itself. Besides the biggest game library in the Amiga world, there are plenty of productivity software for it too. It has software that can be still useful today (think DeluxePaint IV, ProTracker, OctaMed, WordPerfect).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Hackers (UTF-8)

      Pardon the UTF-8 post. The post below is something I wrote a long time ago for cat (baud.baby). Screwtape's recent reading of my 2022 gopher post on warez made me remember this one, as it bring up some similar nostalgic feelings, so I figured it's probably time I share this one with everyone. It's not as well written as the warez story, as it wasn't really intended for public consumption, and as such, it is also a bit long-winded, but i hope someone gets a chuckle out of it regardless. This whole thing was in response to cat's super duper cool Hackers card game, which you should most definitively check out over at baud.baby.

    • YouTux

      YouTube channel recommendation: YouTux is a Linux and tech channel with thought-provoking intellectual critiques and analyses around open source and tech. Uses an AI-generated voice for narration, but it's good one that feels provocative and almost insurgent.