Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • page after page

    I scroll page after page
    of flowy dresses
    heels too high
    to dance in
    colours I'd never wear 
    I scroll and I scroll
    and can't decide
    anything
    

  • Stellar

    Initially, I was attempting a strategy of simply putting as many three star cards as possible in the telescope, while putting the low star cards in the notebook. This usually translated into having a roughly equal number of each card type (suit) in the telescope.

  • hover

    I hover in the doorway
    unsure
    if I'm wanted in 
    a room
    I dare not enter
    will you
    show me the way
    in
    

  • 2026-04-18

    what a lovely day! needed to run some errands in the morning and it was, unfortunately, raining. but it was a light spring rain and everything smelled really good. partner and i went over to the big park and it was full of blooming azaleas, positively glowing with color. extremely fragrant tulips, too. snails! very cute. and almost nobody else around, felt very fairy-tale.

  • The Wallawood Tree: The Ironward Gambit

    The Shield-Captain badge slid across the scarred wooden desk and stopped just inches from Arthur’s hands. It felt heavy; its pragmatic design was etched in a darkened metal that refused to shine.

    “Congratulations, Captain," said Marshal Fyrd in a low, raspy voice. His office smelled vaguely of dried sweat and pipe tobacco.

    “Thank you, sir. I’m eager to be deployed.”

    “Deployed?”

    The marshal held an uncomfortable pause. “You did well at Stonewall, Arthur. Better than we expected. However, until you can prove yourself here at Ironward, there’s not a single commander in the Hearthguard that would allow you their men.”

• Technology and Free Software

  • Slide Rule Addition

    Through an accident, I own a copy of the instruction manual for the Hemmi 266 slide rule, but not the slide rule itself. This is an electronics slide rule produced by a Japanese company. The manual is in English, though a few ESL artifacts are included, such as the word "sylinder" instead of "cylinder".

    Browsing through this manual, I noticed that it has two interesting sets of scales, one for solving the parallel resistance problem (or series capacitor problem) and another for solving series impedance problems. The first set of scales is the r1 and r2 scales — not to be confused with the r1 and r2 square scales on other slide rules. The second set is the P and Q scales.

  • Got a Cardputer

    The cardputer arrived today. I flashed it with ratcom (a reticulum client) from the ratspeak.org website (there’s a flasher located at Downloads).

    After configuring the WiFi Settings I had to add a TCP interface through the WiFi menu. Kind of an odd place for it, but it has to live somewhere, I guess. Kudos to them for supporting more than one, the Sideband app only supports a single TCP bridge.

    Another oddity with it: I had to reboot the device to get the TCP endpoint to work. It wouldn’t show up on the network nor see others on the network without the reboot, despite it reporting everything was fine. On successive reflashes I discovered it actually instructs the user to reboot after making this change – and the online docs say to as well.

  • The Matrix, Big Brother, and the Telescreen

    I was 17 when I read "1984" by George Orwell... I’ve read it several times since and let it seep into me...

    For me, this is not science fiction at all, but rather a book that is a vision of the future—a book that is slowly taking shape and coming true before our very eyes...

    All that remains is to long for the 90s and the 2000s, when surfers from all over the world flirted with the vision of the global village, and the internet that was born was relatively truly free—a wild west of possibilities. Today, in practice, nothing of that remains. Governments and tech corporations have burned the global village for profit and control over consciousness...

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Syncing this Capsule With a Makefile

      I use one-way syncing of my local content to my server with `rsync`.

      If I’m in the capsule’s local directory on my device, I execute `make deploy` and the whole content of the directory I’m in is synced to the server’s capsule directory, adding new files to the server if not there, and deleting anything on the server, which is not in the local device’s current directory. Additionally, rsync is smart and only transfers data if it has been changed.

      Submitting to Antenna is done by executing `make antenna-submit` after above deployment.

    • I TUI Web Browser

      I don't remember exactly what I was looking for. Probably a TUI client for a specific web service. But I found a web browser named Chawan which works in the terminal.