Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • a symptomatic week

    A quick note to mark this week in time.

    Once again, I didn't notice the correlation between my declining mood and the onset of illness.

    I had two depressing days, a breakdown in interpersonal relationships, a complete lack of energy to work and motivation to do anything, weakness, and then the first symptoms of an illness, which I managed to overcome almost completely. And then a great weekend, during which I focused all my attention on my family and regained complete control over myself and my will to live.

  • And just like that, FAWM 2026 is over

    I've been doing the February Album Writing Month (FAWM) challenge since 2016. It's a challenge that started back in 2004, where people try to write 14 songs in 28 days (or 29, during leap years), and it was inspired by NaNoWriMo. The first year had only 4 people participating, but today there are thousands of people from all over the world. Since it started, "fawmers" have collectively written more than 300,000 songs!

  • worm thirteen day

    Thirteen already? I think I miscalculated, as the full moon should be on the fourteen days of the cycle. There will be an eclipse at the full moon.

    I keep on checking my phone, I want to check online to see if anything happened, if anything exciting is changing. There is nothing. I made it so. At the moment there is only my daughter, and she is traveling. I could check my phone, my emails twice a day and I would be as productive as I am right now. But so many times a day, I check my 6 emails, signal, mastodon, and gopher, yes even gopher!

  • sweat lodge

    Over, under, weaving red branches. Walking on the beach to find more. My machete in hand, I spot the lines of red, the new growth, that will be the easiest to weave.

    Like a huge basket, turned upside down. Its purpose, to hold blankets and cover. The aesthetic doesn't matter. But as the weave become tighter, beauty arise from chaos.

• Technology and Free Software

  • ansi colors everywhere (or at least Neovim)

    I’ve been playing with ANSI colors a lot because I’m going to resume using color in my notes. Visually they enable encoding additional semantic information into a block of text and it helps to decrease extraneous cognitive load. Not something I read, just something I feel. So I’m going to try it out for a while and see how I feel about it by way of ANSI escape sequences.

  • Re: Small Phones

    I've been frustrated with the size of phones for many years - there seems to be no choice other than 6.3" or 6.7", so I ended up with entry-level phones around 5.5" as size and weight (or lack thereof) is most important to me. So much so that even if the PinePhone Pro was comfortably usable as a daily driver (software-wise), I'd still use it like a tablet instead of it being my main phone.

    In September last year I finally found a tiny phone with a puny 3" screen, but more importantly also supports 4G (3G will be shutdown), and is dual-SIM to boot! It even runs a fairly recent Android 12. This phone is from a company called Soyes, has 3Gb of RAM and was available for me to purchase locally for the equivalent of about $90. I very excitedly bought it (with as much excitement as most people have when they buy a flagship Samsung or iPhone)

  • What is to be done about the SRCF?

    Late last century I co-founded a club ("the SRCF") for providing UNIX shell access to people, on a machine that would remain connected to the Internet at a stable address. A key feature of this organisation was that it was democratic and independent: the users had to be members of the club, and elected a committee, which granted root access to competent individuals to administer the club's machines on behalf of all members.

    Needless to say, this drove a number of people completely off the deep end. They simply chose to be unable to cope with the very idea, and these feelings would occasionally erupt and trigger controversy.

  • The Connectivity Standards Alliance's Aliro Smart Lock Standard Hits 1.0, Is Officially Released

    The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), best known for its Matter cross-vendor smart home communications standard, has announced the release of the Aliro 1.0 specification — designed to do for digital lock and key systems what Matter did for smart home hardware.

    "Aliro is solving the fragmentation that has held back digital key adoption, replacing it with a single interoperability standard built through Alliance Member collaboration," claims Connectivity Standards Alliance president and chief executive officer Tobin Richardson of the launch. "By connecting the access control industry directly to leading mobile wallet ecosystems, it delivers a secure, frictionless experience that goes well beyond the front door. Lower integration complexity means faster innovation and shorter time to market. This is how the future of access control gets built."

  • I 3D Printed My Brain

    The story of how I got this was that a few years ago, I participated in a study at the University of Washington where they wanted to see how Autistic peoples' brains fired while doing various cognitive/visual tests, such as watching objects flash into peripheral vision. So they had me do a bunch of sessions in an MRI where they scanned my brain and I did these tests, along with a few other measurement methods such as EEG. In addition to paying me a modest amount of money for participating, they also gave me the full 3D scan of my brain that they had built up during this process. They said that you could send it in to a 3D printing service like Shapeways to get it as a model, but that it would cost somewhere between $700-$1000 to do it, so I just held tight.

  • Managing 5 Servers at Once with tmux

    I manage five machines every day: tiny, lenovo1, lenovo2, lenovo3 and my nas. More info about my cluster can be found at the link below.

    Opening five terminals and SSHing manually works - but it's repetitive,easy to mess up and something I don't want to do every time.

    So I automated the entire thing with a small shell script that builds a complete tmux workspace for me.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • I'm back, let's talk about what's happening

      So, spring is here, I'm still alive and thus back as promised. Over the course of the time, you might have seen more daily activity in my Lynx-compatible microblog ([1]), but for those who haven't, here's briefly what happened: [...]