Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • A new story opening

    Folks, while I was away from the pub, I let my mind ferment with the lore of my new stories.

    Each one talks about mortal sin. The effects of it, and the conditions of mortal sin.

    Im going to do the my last story to establish how the story works.

  • Magical Princess Minky Momo: the chain of merit.

    There is another gem that originated in the “steven universe”. That gem did not belong to any class of gem and fusion. His gem is represented as two pyramids inverted to form a star. (like the star of David) In comparison to Steven, who lives in the USA, that gem lives in the UK.

    His gem is a soul that has the powers of an interdimensional traveler that can enter any uni/multiverse. In his land, he is kind and compassionate. He is a messiah to the fusion gems. He helped the progression of toleration and acceptance of them. His group is more similar to Steven's family.

  • Some days the magic works

  • Food Forest Video Short

    I'm trying something a different today. I took a short little video out in the food forest. I'm not sure if I'll keep posting videos or not, just trying it out. Let me know if you like it, hate it, want more etc.

  • Living off the fat o' the LAN, George

    I think gardening is a wonderful concept and I have a lot of admiration for people who are into that but I personally don't like all the bugs and dirt and stuff.

    I feel this way with a lot of outdoorsy stuff. I love the outdoor aesthetic, living off the grid, camping, and self-sufficiency, but I'm too entrenched in my current cozy sequestered hermit digital lifestyle to enjoy something like that.

  • lungs full

    I make a  home  in  your  arms
    calm   the  racing  of  heart
    nestle  in   your   embrace 
    breathe   out   and  watch 
    worry fall off your skin
    like droplets of water 
    no room for it here
    release the hurt
    breathe deeper
    lungs full
    of  you
    

• Politics and World Events

  • Without Ranks and Without Flags: 22,000 Children on One Wall in Tel Aviv

    The 2026 People’s Peace Conference will open tomorrow in Tel Aviv, and one of its central installations is already marking itself as a point of friction. The installation, “A child is a child is a child,” is a memorial wall featuring more than 22,000 names of children who have been killed since October 7—Israelis and Palestinians together. According to the data on which the installation is based, this includes about 62 Israeli children alongside more than 22,000 Palestinian children (most of them from the Gaza Strip) who have been killed since October 7. Conference participants will be invited to stop at each name and light a candle.

    The names are presented in complete intermixing, with only a first name and age, without any national affiliation or other distinction. On one hand, criticism is expected regarding the very placement of Israeli and Palestinian children’s names together, with claims that it harms Israeli mourning. On the other hand, the opposite criticism is anticipated—that the mixing of names creates a sense of symmetry, at a time when the gaps in the scale and context of loss point to an imbalance between the Israeli and Palestinian sides. The installation expresses precisely this dilemma.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Introduction and the Alley Cat

    For any physical invention a man has made, there is a story of trial and error, the story of how design has evolved over the years. I have seen many such books on evolution of computer hardware design, but rarely if ever I have read a story of how design of a piece of software that does a specific job has evolved. These things are so oddly specific the moment you to stumble on such kind of story it is fascinating.

    Back in 2024 I made 2 tools: One allowed me to observe how state machine operates variables in memory, and another tool showed me how the same machine reads tokens from memory.

    What is more interesting, I could observe all that while listening to the song this program plays. This produces as sort of blinkenlights environment. Blinkenlights was a way to debug programs in early days of computing: you would stick LEDs to any "moving" part of the computer, it's processor, interfaces, peripherals and observe how they, yes, blink. Machines were so slow that with some training you could notice if lights blink "right" or "wrong" and figure where something went wrong. It's like that airplane panel with mind boggling amount of meters and number shoved in your face.

  • Twelve years --- farewell isa

    Twelve years may seem like a long time or rather not --- this depends entirely on context. However, in the context of modern day computing, twelve years are suspiciously long.

    Side Quest: How old is your computers OS installation? Well, I have come to answer this question with the creation timestamp of the root filesystem or the ominous lost+found folder in there. Sometimes the host keys in /etc/ssh are the same age, or the initial commit in etckeeper.

    So after twelve years I did shutdown isa, a tiny box sitting in the basement humming along and serving all my self-hosting, network and infrastructure services. Thanks isa! Your work will not be forgotten!

  • Internet/Gemini

    • 🔐 Does anyone know how to import an existing identity cert from another client (Lagrange)?

      Side quest: has anyone found where certs are stored when using `cert new`?

      update: did a bit more poking, created a new cert and then search for any files modified in the last minute.

    • Rough landing

      Finally, it seems I made myself some space to write down stuff.

      I ended up asking chatgpt to code a maildir -> gemlog generator, then upon reading that threw away maybe 80% of code.

      This thing is good for such cases: gives you bad code that stirs you up, then you go and make something usable, sigh.

    • Everything seems okay?

      I am always amazed to see whatever goofy code I wrote to actually doing the task. Well, not quite this time.

      [...]

      Then on the gemsite:

      1. Getmail fires up eventually

      2. A custom generator also fires up at some point

      3. Messages that pass checks get processed

      4. A glog index is updated, files created, everybody happy