Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 📺 Farewell to CBS Reality

    I was genuinely sad to hear that the CBS Reality TV channel has closed down. It feels like the end of a small but meaningful era of comfort television.

    CBS Reality was never flashy or cutting-edge, but that was part of its charm. It was dependable. You could turn it on at almost any time of day and know exactly what kind of show you were going to get: familiar, simple, and oddly reassuring.

• Games

  • Discovered a game potentially even better than Bulls and Cows

    * You start with 20 HP, which is your maximum health, and your mission is to clear a 44-card dungeon (deck) room by room, without your health reaching zero. The deck is the standard 52-card deck minus all red face cards and red aces (and any jokers). You'll also need a way to keep track of your health. * Every room is dealt from the top of the deck and consists of four cards. You have two choices: engage with the room or run away, but you cannot run away twice in a row or if you already engaged with the room. * If you choose to run, all room cards are shuffled and put to the bottom of the deck, and an entirely new room is dealt.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Other Smarter People

    I don't like reinventing the wheel. At the same time, I'll look for something and not find it, go through the effort to create something of my own, only to find out that my search skills weren't high enough and someone has already figured that out.

    In a matter of twenty-four hours, I found that two such situations had happened. Which means, I can close the topic on identifiers and simply point to other folk's work and build the little quirk I want on to of those.

  • The Joys of Working in IT and being On-Call

    Speaking broadly here, I actually love working in IT. Growing up, technology was one of the few things I had a genuine interest in and was "good" at. From a young age, I enjoyed experimenting with the BASIC programming language on my ZX Spectrum, learning such intricacies as the PEEK and POKE commands to edit memory address locations to cheat at games by giving myself infinite lives etc.

    Fast forward a little later and I even made some of my own games. I distinctly remember using AMOS Professional on an Atari to make a few quiz-style games. I loved AMOS Pro; it was the first proper "IDE" that I used that had a few more features above and beyond just being a simple text editor.

    Even later still, I got my first PC in the year 2000 and went down the rabbit hole of tinkering with Linux installations (I think Mandrake or Red Hat were the first distributions I tried as the installation CDs were actually on sale in shops, perhaps attached to magazines). That led me down a whole new path and I genuinely enjoyed the troubleshooting and learning aspect that these early Linux endeavours afforded me. That coupled with my early participation on IRC networks and my penchant for creating "IRC Bots" to do all sorts of weird, whacky, and in hindsight annoying, stuff. But I digress...

    Long story short, I ended up going to university, getting an IT degree, and working in the industry. Currently, I am employed doing SysAdmin/Azure stuff for a telecommunications company.

  • Moving Away From Containers

    If you happen to follow my website[1] you have potentially seen some recent mentions of my movement away from containers. I certainly had some early enthusiasm for them and found certain workflows they enabled to be helpful; however they have grown obnoxious and unwieldily as people use them more and more as a replacement for learning how to package software for the operating system(s) they wish to distribute to.

  • How Github monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem

    I teach a course called "Open Source Strategies" at École Polytechnique de Louvain, part of the University of Louvain.

    As part of my course, students are required to find an open source project of their choice and make a small contribution to it. They send me a report through our university Gitlab. To grade their work, I read the report and explore their public interactions with the project: tickets, comments, pull requests, emails.

    This year, during my review of the projects of the semester, Github decided to block my IP for one hour. During that hour, I simply could not access Github.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Reply to maverick.i2p and My Own Musings on the Small Internet

      This article — the very gemtext page you are reading right now on my Gemini capsule — began in a place many clearnet visitors might never encounter: the I2P network.

      For those unfamiliar, I2P is a fully decentralized overlay network that runs inside the regular internet. It uses layered encryption (similar to Tor's onion routing but with different trade-offs) and peer-to-peer routing to provide strong anonymity for browsing, hosting, and communication. I have kept I2P installed alongside Tor on all my devices for years, even if I only use it occasionally. Recently, curiosity and a taste for digital adventure pulled me back in.

      While exploring newly registered I2P sites through an index, I stumbled upon maverick.i2p. There I found an article that perfectly articulated many frustrations I had felt about the modern web. Somehow — the exact path is blurry now — that led me to the Cheapskates Guide to Computers and the Internet, and specifically this excellent introduction to Gopherspace: [...]

    • The All-Music Guide in Gopherspace: A Detailed History of gopher://allmusic.ferris.edu

      The early 1990s were a time of transition for the internet. Before the graphical World Wide Web became dominant, the primary way to access online information was through the Gopher protocol, created in 1991 at the University of Minnesota. Gopher used a simple hierarchical menu system to let users browse text-based directories, files, and databases on servers around the world. Universities and research institutions quickly adopted it, building a global network known as "Gopherspace."

      One of the most highly regarded resources in this text-only world was the All-Music Guide (AMG), hosted at gopher://allmusic.ferris.edu by Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. It provided one of the era's most comprehensive music databases and was widely praised in early internet directories, mailing lists, and academic publications.

    • qrencode

      This might be old news to some, but I discovered it only yesterday. qrencode is a handy little program, installable on Debian with a simple `apt install qrencode`, for creating QR codes. By default it will produce a PNG image, but with the options `-o - -t UTF8` it will actually produce a "textual" QR code right in your terminal using Unicode block drawing characters (assuming you are using a Unicode-aware terminal emulator and have the appropriate fonts installed). You can just pipe arbitrary text content into it, up to 4,000 characters. This is a super quick and convenient way to transfer small snippets of data (smaller configuration files, for example, or passwords, or URLs, or email addresses) from an offline/air-gapped machine to just about any modern device, where "modern" means "has a camera, but lacks basic practical computing peripherals like USB or SD slots".

    • Digital ad spending USD 710 billion in 2026

      Today I learned that the global digital ad spending market is projected to cross USD 700 billion in 2026. [1] Which is bigger than the GDP of Belgium. [2]

      The AI slop will probably add even more to that. Different sources mentions different amounts, but in 2025 there was around USD 200 ~ 300 invested in AI. And more to come.

      Companies only invest in ads because they think it will give them some kind of return of investment. Which means that if they didn't spend it, they would expect lower revenues.