Gemini* and Gopher

• Politics and World Events

  • Freiburg im Breisgau

    We are spending some time in Freiburg im Breisgau. Mostly drinking coffee, eating cake, and then walking, hiking and jogging, trying to lose those calories again.

  • kiss them better

    you notice the change
    and kiss all the parts
    you know I used to hate
    but refuse to now
    you kiss them better anyway
    knowing it's not that simple 
    it's not that easy
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • frustrated with standalone meshtastic devices

    My t-deck and t-deck ultra (was it called ultra? The non-pro, non e-ink one, anyway) both died mysteriously some time ago, but they made for okay standalone devices. I’ve since tried a variety of other standalone devices, but they’re all very rough. Below are the ones I’ve tried and the issues I had with them.

  • Breaking Changes (MfGames Project Setup Flake)

    In the beginning, I wanted to use NixOS options with the flake instead of using a `mkConfig` function to generate the files and shell hooks. But, due to complexities and struggling with Nix, I couldn't figure it out. But, after two years of working on it, I finally got a working implementation that uses the cleaner approach of options.

    So that means instead of using `mkLib`, using mfgames-project-setup-flake[1] means adding it as an input (as before), importing the model (that's new), and then using configuration settings (those are new).

  • GUIX is neat

    I’m running GUIX on a 2010 Macbook Air, but this isn’t about that experience, I’ll cover that elsewhere, this just has to do with GUIX more generally.

    I don’t know why it took me so long to circle back and try out GUIX. It’s kind of an alternative approach to NixOS.

  • Semantic Versioning (Leicmin)

    Six months ago[1], we started on a new project called Leicmin[2] to provide an application for managing members of subscriber groups along with a naieve implementation of age verification checks for those who enjoy the “spicer” side of creation.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Announcing Satellite Antenna (SA)

      With @ew0k announcing [1] the eventual retirement of the main Antenna instance, and the request that one or more operators take it over, the source code was tidied up and released [2] for general use. I have been running a content-limited version of Antenna, called DSN Antenna, since 2023 but it hasn't gotten a lot of use over the years, but I am okay with that. It was nice that @skyjake even included a "submit to DSN Antenna" option in BBS. DSN hosts non-computer-related posts.

    • Satellite Antenna

      I have set up a new instance of Antenna sync'd to @mk270 's instance to enable a kind of "federation" and redundancy.

    • protocol-relative URIs

      protocol-relative URIs (actually called relative references by RFC 3986) are a neat way of linking to a resource available over multiple protocols.

    • Commenting on blogs

      Oof, this is difficult. I don't check out the RPG Planet as often as I used to, I guess. And my blog doesn't have comments any more. You can send an email but many people don't do it. I think it would be cool to connect to other RPG bloggers but my locked down browser has made it really difficult to post on Blogspot and Wordpress blogs, and then I am subscribed by email and that means the promise of spam in a few years, and … I don't know. Almost nobody has a contact email on their blog. I usually feel it's easier for me to comment on something on fedi or on IRC. A bit sad, actually.