Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Stardust Racers at Epic Universe

    This is the best coaster at any of the Universal parks in Orlando. Two simultaneous trains. 10/10 acceleration. A boost up to 12/10 acceleration! A ton of airtime. An astonishing intertwining dive (“celestial spin”). This thing is massive.

    Ya best proteck ya neck. I found it best to /not/ push back against the headrest, against the advice.

    The best part is the great rider throughput, meaning it never went over a 45 minute wait the entire day, and we never waited more than 10. We rode it four times.

  • Inexplicable + antihistamine

    Divarin asked what inexplicable experiences others had. He also stated he can't remember the difference between H1 and H2 histamine blockers.

    If my first story is too sad, I provided a heading for my second (on blocking histamine receptors) to aid those who wish to turn the page.

• Poetry

  • persistent whisper

    the day escaped
    and left me with no words
    or all the words
    but in a jumbled mess
    one or the other 
    how do I make sense 
    of anything
    

  • perfume

    I smell like every perfume 
    but the one you suggested 
    
    
    I wrote in my notes
    on a cruise ferry last summer
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • Defenestrating GenAI, Big Tech, and other miscreants

    As far as operating systems and Linux distros goes, I can't not use Linux, but I *can* avoid using IBM and Canonical products where possible. My desktop and laptop run CachyOS. I have FreeBSD on my NAS right now for native ZFS support. If I want to increase my ethics points I could run Gentoo, as they've taken a stance against GenAI. This might be feasible on my NAS, but for my desktop and laptop it would be a whole ordeal that's likely to turn into a shitshow. It figures that the least unethical option is the most inconvenient. Can't get a fucking break there.

  • Find What You Love and Let It Kill You

    A long time ago - a dozen years or so - I was in the obsessive early phases of a personal software project that has blossomed to become a lifelong software project. It was the fourth iteration of an idea I'd had since high school, a game about exploring a world made of small islands. The first attempt, in Turbo Pascal, was a little term project bound by my extremely limited skills in 1998. The next two attempts faltered as well: I'd forgotten about the second try, but wrote about it in my electronic journals; and the third I definitely remember, in C using RHIDE on my old 486, an attempt that collapsed under my lack of experience with pointers and manual memory management. I put it on the back burner. I did one advanced degree, dropped out of another. Moved across the country twice, got a dog, got married, got another dog. One left us five years ago. The younger dog is now the older dog. He'll be sixteen next year.

  • Notes on going hermit-mode/closed-curtain.

    I recently decided I wanted to get all of my code off of GitHub. In doing so - I decided that rather than migrate to an existing platform like GitLab or Codeberg, I would run my own private instance of Forgejo.

  • Fuck AI, I'm taking my ball and going home.

    I've gotten pretty sick of the current state of the tech industry, and the large push to slurp data up into AI/LLMs. I'm going to use the terms interchangeably - I don't really care to distinguish them. I'm also not here to put up with any "your issue isn't with AI, it's with AI companies" - it's all just AI.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Gopher Rabbit Hole

      The plan was to fix a crash in Lagrange caused by not properly validating the content of Gopher type 0 selectors. I figured I need to run a Gopher server to test this properly, but the available options didn't strike my fancy. How hard is it anyway to write a Gopher server? Not hard at all, it turns out. A few days later, I had a new server written in C, serving my Gemini capsule content via skyjake.fi port 70.

      Then I had a thought: since my Gopher server is taking Gemtext files and rendering them as fancy plain text, maybe I could use a higher-level markup and use that to generate BOTH the .gmi and fancy .txt variants?