Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Christina's Five Questions

    1. What's your favourite item to cook in October?

    I think this will always remain spaghetti bolognaise. I am a stickler for cooking and eating real meals, and trying to cut out processed food.

    Spaghetti bolognaise is the treat of my childhood, one of about two dishes that my parents could cook well. My mother is a prodigiously terrible cook and the butt of merciless ribbing for her cooking, which broke out into open rebellion one Christmas in front of old family friends. But her spaghetting bolognaise was wonderful, as was this very Australian thing she made called tuna mornay, which is basically a cheese toastie the size of a shower cubicle's floor.

    My own bolognaise now runs to including mushrooms and red wine, and is well regarded. I picked up Mum's antipathy for garlic, onions and mushrooms at an early age and it is only in middle age that I've got back into eating and cooking mushrooms, partly thanks to some mad Instagrammers who promote mushroom picking on my timeline.

    The other thing I've had to learn is the cooking equivalent of the distinction in software between "progamming in the small" and "programming in the large", the latter concerning itself with testing, revision control, documentation, specs, negotiating with other parties. "Cooking in the large" is what I call the business of organising one's cooking week-by-week and month-by-month: can I re-use some of today's leftovers and ingredients tomorrow? What should I buy in bulk, etc. Tonight's sauce will last us three or four days in various guises.

  • The musical lamp switch

    As y’all know I’ve hacked a lamp switch to start and stop music so I can do it screenlessly but the other day I added a new feature: “stop after playing the current song completely”. Instead of abruptly pausing. It’s so calming compared to a jarring end. One would think subtle things like that wouldn’t matter.

    So the first button short press is now a three way toggle between “playing normally”, “end after this song”, and “paused now”. Long press is a li’l overloaded because it means “stop fully right now, and also load the previous playlist but don’t start it until I press play”.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Steam Next Fest (October 2025) — Day 3

  • Internet/Gemini

    • So account deletion at Network Solutions is a bit more nuanced than I was led to believe

      I was, perhaps, a bit harsh with my criticisms of account deletion at Network Solutions [1]. I noticed that they had yet to remove the billing information, so I called back to get an update and this time I was able to talk to a “billing specialist.” They still had to manually delete the credit card info (which they did while I waited) but I also learned a bit more about their policies about account deletion. If there's no services on an account, it will be deleted after a month (the “billing speciallist” wasn't exactly clear on this, but it sounded like a month) of inactivity, which, okay, I can see that. I just wish that was a bit more visible on the site, both to reassure those that want to leave Network Solutions, and to warn those that do use Network Solutions that no billing activity on their account can lead to automatic deletion.

    • Can Make atom ur fediverse & strange anomaly on lagrange

      Today at midnight in my country ,i found strange anomaly on Lagrange app. Suddenly I can't connect to some Gemini hosts, and also my HTML link via Stargate proxy. Strangely, when I open it in Poetal Mozz, everything works, but just now for tens of minutes I couldn't access the link in Lagrange, a "connecting time out" notification appeared which I'm worried about skujake planting code tracing & network path control in his Lagrange application, and it could be a tool for spying on users & despicable crimes, controlling & monopolizing Gemini network access from users using remote program coding in his Lagrange app.