Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Here's to Old Friends

    At almost-the-start of the new year, January 2nd, I got an email from an old friend: she'd moved her life and her family across the country, and was now living (roughly) where I was, a little ways out of the city; apologies for it having been so very long; would I like to get together and catch up?

    I was delighted for this because former friends are common enough, but old friends, good friends are rare. We hadn't seen each other in at least a dozen years, when she and her husband came through town on a trip. Before that, it was sporadic, too. The problem with living half-a-country away from someone. We'd lived in the same city for a year, traded our online friendship for off. Then I moved, because it became increasingly clear that I needed to move away, to be with my partner, the right choice and an easy one, but one which left a friend behind.

  • Stages of Age

    Earthly life can be categorized into roughly three stages: Young Age (0-30), Middle Age (30-60), and Old Age (60-90).

• Technology and Free Software

  • Programs from Homebrew

    I use Homebrew to get a lot of random small programs that I otherwise never would have bothered to get. However, the output of `brew list | wc -l` is currently up to the mid-200s, and a lot of these are mere dependencies of things I actually care about.

    Still, `brew update` is a half-decent way to get notified of new command-line programs that you might be interested in. Whenever I see something that looks interesting, I look at its homepage and see if it looks like it’s cool.

    This page, then, is a list of things I carry around with me and why. Or at least looked at briefly and thought “hey, this might be useful”.

  • Testing the bash script

    This is in response to the post from SoftwarePagan. I found the bash script! You have to export a cookie and store it seperately and call it to log in. It's all done with curl basically. Hoping it now posts!

  • A tmux popup editor for Cursor Agent CLI prompts

    I spend some time in Cursor Agent (the CLI version of the Cursor IDE, I don't like really the IDE), and I also jump between Claude Code CLI, Ampcode, Gemini CLI, OpenAI Codex CLI, OpenCode, and Aider just to see how things are evolving. But for the next month I'll be with Cursor Agent.

  • Workflows

    Somewhere in the Alaska series by Nick Zentner the feed turned to swearing and beeps and bonks from the Mac, along with such statements as "never upgrade". From the superbly rounded corners and helpfully translucent menus I'm guessing he upgraded to Tahoe (whoops?) and Apple has broked something.

    On the other hand I doubtless went through the preferences and killed any menu translucency with fire, so it may be possible to get the "it's hard to read things" experience in Sequoia? Not that I like going through the system settings, it's much less usable than the Control Panel ever was back in the Mac OS classic days. Progress! Also why does the "App Store" keep switching over to the "iPhone & iPad Apps" on search? I don't have an iPhone, nor iPad, so having to click on "Mac Apps" every. damn. time. might be considered just a little bit user hostile. Doubtless they make bank on that iPhone crud so doubtless want to nudge users in that direction, or perhaps their Q&A department is more or less AWOL?

  • Counting Capsules

    A quick look at some stats about gemini capsules.

    For those that aren't aware, gemini is a largely text-based, minimal internet protocol. It is part of what is sometimes called the "smolnet", an alternative to the mainstream web.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • First day of travelgemblog

      Really busy with work, so I didn't get around to writing this until now. I brought a thinkpad t420s with me so I could, but I've been here now about 10 days. The t420s has a godawful screen, with really nasty viewing angles, but it gets the job done (and I think I bought it for less than $100...) At the moment, I'm just writing these directly on the server and then manually adding them to the index. I'll start automating this soon. I chose gemini because otherwise I tend to obsess about CSS or whatever and then I don't end up really writing. Even if my thoughts are scrambled and jumbled and next to no one reads them, it's still fun to write.

• Programming

  • In YAML, sequences of mappings should have the hyphens on their own lines

    There have been no updates since, although it probably should get a rewrite for clarity one of these days as its clarity peters out at the end.