Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Excerpts from free writing

    smell the trees, let the ocean wash over you, drag you out and drown you like flotsam and refuse. Salt your body, lie fallow so you'll be of no use and maybe then you'll finally be able to do what you were born to.

  • Re: May 2026 Five Questions

    I'm not sure how to answer this, but I can say that taking some time off from work has been nice. Owning a home is a lot of work, and I'm constantly reminded that even if you take time off to do projects and clean up, it just never ends. My kids are _slowly_ learning to clean up after themselves with lots of pokes and prods, but life inevitably makes for a house in disarray. So neither bang or whimper, just plugging along.

  • 11/22/63 by Stephen King

    1. You can only go back to a specific date and time. A specific September day at 11:58 AM, 1958. From a dark late night in 2011. That’s the portal. No freely controllable time-travel.

    2. While the past-hole is static, the future-hole is moving. I.e. each time you return to 2011, two minutes in the future will hae passed. So you go back, stay there for say 1d6 months, you’ll return two minutes later than you entered. So time can pass in the future but each time you go back, you go back to 11:58 AM that same particular September day in the fifties.

    3. You can bring stuff from there and back home through the hole and vice versa. So feel free to bring a fifties fake ID and fifties money with you.

    4. But, only the most recent trip “counts” in affecting your travel. I.e. if you travel back and carve your name in a tree, that will be there when you get back, but then if you travel back again and get a pack of gum and don’t carve your name in the tree that time, the carving will be gone. You can get many many packs of gum this way and stack them up in the future time line, but if you want to affect meaningful change for example by buring treasure boxes as opposed to schlepping the stuff with you through the portal,

• Science

  • THAT: Scaled Temperature Simulation

    Something I've mostly avoided so far is how to do scaling. Of course, one can assign arbitrary ratios between the machine unit and physical quantities, but how to work through an actual circuit and model, and make everything consistent?

    The guide I have handy is the EAI Handbook of Analog Computation, 2nd Ed. (1967) which can be downloaded for free from the Internet, which goes three a detailed treatise on this in chapter 3. I'm think I'm not quite understanding and doing everything correctly, but I applied it with my ideal gas and temperature model, and the end result seems sane.

• Technology and Free Software

  • CVE-2026-31431

    With the announcement of the copy fail exploit, CVE-2026-31431, which allows anyone with shell access (remote/terminal), to easily gain a root shell; we know, we tested on several Rocky systems. Luckily, the older systems (EL 7.x based) weren't affected. Mitigation was to patch the kernel, or blacklist up to three kernel modules at boot. When you manage a specialized cluster, patching a kernel isn't just an update; our cluster utilizes Mellanox/NVIDIA libraries that are tied to the kernel version, and other unrelated software such as parallel file system access, are also tied to the kernel version. This basically means that if we update a kernel, we have to rebuild several other pieces of software for compatibility. The cluster I primarily manage is mixed architecture as well: x86 and aarch64. There is also a mixture of standard 4k & 64k kernel sizes..

  • fuck off with your AI that doesn't even understand my job

    One of the other librarians emailed this morning asking if the rest of us had gotten an email from an outfit called Librar Labs.

    [...]

    "Librar makes it easier to set up and manage a school library even before you find a librarian."

    Oh, shut up. Even calling yourself "AI for Librarians" doesn't change the fact that you are CLEARLY gunning for our jobs. This thing is selling itself as a way to replace librarians with $15 an hour parapros.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Michael Nordmeyer New Official Maintainer of Antenna

      Michael reached out to me and asked if he could take over as maintainer for Antenna and gemcall officially. He has some nice ideas and has worked on his own versions of them for several months. Before he contacted me I honestly didn't even consider the maintainer role. I just thought that "well, anyone can fork it". While that's true it's also true that it's good to have some sort of "official" version.

    • Re: Michael Nordmeyer New Official Maintainer of Antenna

      Just a quick thank you to @ew0k for creating Antenna and all the years of support. I'm happy that the maintenance of the project has passed to capable hands and will continue on through @michaelnordmeyer's efforts.

    • On Complexity and Antenna’s Future

      Cybertailor has added me to Gemcall’s PyPI project yesterday, which means I will publish Gemcall 1.0.0 on PyPI shortly, allowing me to add it as a dependency to Antenna instead of just including the file in the repo.

      To achieve this, I have to decide on how to handle virtual environments, dependencies, and packaging. Currently, I use `venv` and `setuptools` for both, Gemcall and Antenna, but maybe tools like `uv` are the way to go to be able to bootstrap everything in one go.

    • Re: Who Knows That You Blog?

      No one, really. Seeing how obscure that Geminispace is, there's really only one person that *may* know me, but after I showed them a couple pages via an HTTP proxy and they figured out my handle, they haven't really shown an interest in Gemini. This person is technically minded so it's possible they are quietly stalking me on here without saying anything, but I'm leaning towards that not being the case.