Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • A quiet Friday, when I take a moment to reflect on the challenge of staying in touch with friends

    What a nice day. It's Friday, and the weather is great, and it's neither hot nor cold for me, neither too gloomy nor too bright, and the amount of things happening in the day is manageable.

    I've been struggling with maintaining the social circle I'm part of lately. The obvious excuse that immediately comes to mind is that the work has been challenging lately, and this is true in a sense that a lot of social connections I've had have deteriorated over me not being available, time-wise or emotionally, due to crapload of work that I have been stupid enough to accept as my own problem, even if it's been clear (on most of the occasions!) that it's essentially incompetence finding its way to someone that is least informed and at times least protective of their boundaries. I've seen others succumb to the same shit over the same stupid reasons, it breaks my heart, but so is life: bullies will bully in order to come out of a bad situation as a winner. I'm sincerely happy that I have been able to live a moderately long and happy life regardless.

  • power outage

    Stormy night, power outage, crazy dreams, out of body experience. A strange loop of nightmares.

    Conflicting realities between a wild crazy life and a simple proper way of being. I can't say that my life is boring, but something wants to be unleashed.

    Gypsy, psychedelic, tattoo, meditation, massage, there is a yearning for the adventure. Last weekend party was so inspiring.

  • Surprise

    I had a surprise today. I have been invited to a Duke of Edinburgh award celebration event at Buckingham Palace. It is lovely to be nominated. Not often you get a chance to visit the King's London gaff.

    The event is a garden party where young people who have earned their gold award get to celebrate. It should be a great event. I am slightly worried but mostly as I cannot bring a guest so expecting a few hours standing around awkwardly while using the defensive tea in a saucer prop. I am sure I will end up recognising a couple of faces with last year's gold expeditions. I would hope that at least some of them would have finished the service, skill, physical and residential aspects of their award.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Diffusion-limited aggregation - "electro-boogaloo plating"

    This procgen method is a diffusion-limited aggregation but instead of random motion and hopes for a collision movers are instead run along or adjacent to known occupied rows or columns in a random direction, and a cell is marked when an adjacent marked cell is found. Probably it needs some more work as there are fairly often degenerate cases where the growth is shoved over to one side of the map or the other. This can somewhat be worked around by letting the algorithm run for even more iterations.

  • Make your own container base images from trusted sources

    I really like containers, but they are something that is currently very bad from a security point of view: distribution

    We download container images from container registries, whether it is docker.io, quay.io or ghcr.io, but the upstream project do not sign them, so we can not verify a CI pipeline or the container registry did not mess with the image. There are actually a few upstream actors signing their images: Fedora, Red Hat and universial-blue based distros (Bluefin, Aurora, Bazzite), so if you acquire their public key using for signing from a different channel, you can verify if you got the image originally built. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with me if you know about other major upstream that sign their container images.

    Nevertheless, we can still create containers ourself from trustable artifacts signed by upstream. Let's take a look at how to proceed with Alpine Linux.

  • Simple sabotage of agents

    If you haven't read the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, please read it. It's short and to the point. And when you're done, you'll suspect that most of the workforce has in fact already read it, follows it, and sympathises with foreign powers.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: Looking for Someone to Take Over Antenna

      I've already emailed ew0k, but I'd be willing to host another clone of Antenna since I already cloned it a few years ago to make DSN Antenna[1]. For those unaware, Antenna went down a few years back and we weren't sure if it was going to be resurrected so I took ew0k's code and cloned it, and then after Antenna came back online I limited the posts to non-computer-related posts since we all love to talk about Gemini and coding etc. here.

      I even made a howto on installing it[2] (I assume it's still valid), for anyone that wanted to host their own, because I know the original intent was not for Gemini to be centralized, and I don't think ew0k wanted this either. I know there's other interest, and I encourage anyone to setup their own server. Hopefully my notes are useful to someone.

• Programming

  • Random Seed

    There was an old Apple //e battleship game where the random seed was static at boot, so you could eventually figure out where the ships would spawn and shoot there and mysteriously sink the PT boat on the first try, or one might instead shoot the turrets off the battleship first to reduce incoming fire, but that's less important if you already know where the shots will land. The state of the art on setting a random seed has advanced a bit since then, though naturally humans sometimes still get it wrong, something like "whoops, that wasn't tested" or plain ignorance of RNG by the new kids on the block. Or maybe the contractor is being underpaid and just. does. not. care. A more recent instance of this problem was that virtual systems started up with the same random state so all the SSH keys generated were the same. Whoops.