Gemini* and Gopher

• Politics and World Events

  • 2026-03-01

    * The USA and Israel attacked Iran yesterday and killed the ayatollah. So far, Trump has removed one foreign head of state per month this year.

    * The situation in Palestine remains as crappy as ever, if not worse: Israel closed border crossings due to the new war with Iran. (Wait, they were open?)

    * While abducting and killing other dictatorial heads of state, Trump still insists on shaking hands with Putin and promoting ‘peace’ in Ukraine on Russian premises.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Setting up the feed

    So I took a little time before bed to find the specification for gemfeeds and write a simple file to fill the gap while I consider if I want to script or automate any of this down the line. For now, it's all just nano and this rubber keyboard. If there are any typos, I blame the keyboard.

  • Nice personal website

    The first time I really realized how useful source control (Subversion at the time, although everyone uses Git now) was, even singleplayer, was when I was working on my website and made a complete mess of things and didn’t know how to get back to where things were still looking OK and not totally messed up. Reverting to the last known good commit with just one command, undoing the state of everything back to when everything still looked OK, was nothing short of revelatory. Man, that saved my bacon.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • 2026-03-03

      Still just fiddling with this capsule. I'm using Molly Brown as my server for now, and I like how it lets me customise the directory listing for my transmissions, for example. The only thing I've found it doesn't do so far is multiple hostnames. But that's no big deal at this point.

      I've never had much of a web presence, which is probably why jumping at gemini like this feels a little strange. On the other hand, I grew up with IRC, forums and terminal emulators, and I've been feeling a kind of increasing nostalgia for simpler, slower, quieter and more meaningful alternatives to today's noise and stress. In that, at least, I am evidently not alone.

    • 2026-03-02

      I figured keeping any kind of journal on the index would get unwieldy pretty fast, so I moved it into its own directory for now.

      On that topic, I was just reading a little about the small/indie web. I hadn't given it much thought before, but it made me realise that webmentions are actually pretty cool for using the web for *correspondence*, not just yelling and hot takes. I've seen them on blogs, of course, but I never really saw the appeal until now. I was never a blogger, hardly even a microblogger.