Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • https://rarecooking.com/

    If there's one very cool blog I can recommend, it's this one. The fascinating mix of history and cooking is just so much fun. Absolutely worth checking out.

  • getting roasting in before the heat

    roasted vegetables are so flavourful and great I love to make them but in the summer we don't want to have the oven on for an hour or two. it's pretty cold here today so I'm roasting some stuff up for two different dishes: roasted tomato soup and roasted fennel salad.

  • Silence

    Silence is a bliss to others. And, maybe, to ownself too.

  • fluid

    the goodness of moist
    established 
    I read in my notes 
    but maybe 
    it was meant to be the goddess
    all along
    

  • 4:20am

    I just don't know, and I guess I'm not in a hurry either. She didn't make a move. I like what it is for now. A part of me want to apologize. Hey I'm not super emotionally available. But apologizing for who I am? Putting myself in a place of I am the problem? I've done that for 15 years of my life!

• Technology and Free Software

  • Jing Dong's Omega-Chassis Aims to Be the "Endgame" Upgrade for Clockwork Pi's uConsole

    Self-described "engineering geek" Jing Dong has created an upgrade kit for Clockwork Pi's classic uConsole handheld PC, designed to add "maximum utility" to the gadget: the Omega-Chassis.

    "The uConsole has inspired a wonderful culture of maximalism. It’s a testament to the device's potential that so many of us want to see exactly how far its capabilities can be pushed, often resulting in impressive 'laboratory-style' builds featuring striking antenna arrays," Dong explains. "These setups are a great way to showcase the raw power of the platform. The design challenge then becomes a fun one: finding a way to integrate that same spirit of high-performance expansion while maintaining the sleek, grab-and-go portability that makes the original form factor so iconic. I've spent the last eight months trying to solve a different problem: How do you add maximum utility without destroying the original intent of the design?"

  • It's Kind of Boring Now (by ~moendopi)

    I almost miss the early days of the stupid return to work because then folks weren't nearly as busy and we had The Game going. Now, the game has fizzled.

    Maybe that's partly my fault cuz I slowed down in painting minis and critters. But everyone is busy again and it seems like deadlines are back to corporate style "it needs to be done yesterday" (or at least that is the impression I get from some coworkers.

  • Toby's tinylog

    When it comes to #computer #programming I firmly believe that making it human readable is one of the most important things you could do. This video from Computerphile eloquently demonstrates exactly the kind of programming style I strive for and consider to be beautiful code. The satisfaction of writing a test that reads like an English sentence is peak programming for me.

  • Pre-smart Phone Movies

    When I watch movies create and set in 2008 or earlier, I feel a sense of loss. I watch the world as it was when I was a young adult, without smart phones, and I long for it.

    Of course, the world is not a dystopia. When I go out in public, I don't see hordes of people with their heads down and their faces glowing with the reflection of a screen. Mostly people have their heads up and in the world. The same at the store, etc. Most people are present, most of the time.

    And yet, it's still not quite the same.

  • More lateral thinking with withered tech

    Peter, a retired electrical engineer, came over today to look at my cyber scrapheap and decide what potential projects interest him.

    Solderpunk, two days ago, responded to the Free Thinker's reflections on lateral thinking with (salvaged) withered tech. Solderpunk specifically noted the capabilities to hack, modify, repurpose gaming consoles for PCs, terminals, or entertain- ment, and old routers as servers.

  • Changing window manager

    I've been a long time FVWM user, since the 90's or so, but lately I keep feeling less enthousiastic about it.

    It used to be that FVWM's configurability was unmatched among other window managers, but lately, I find that it feels kind-of limiting.

    I always felt (and I'm sure I'm not alone in this) that it's config syntax would have been better off just being implemented via a scripting language instead, with internals and low-level drawing functions exposed for maximum flexibility. Others, of course, have had the same thought, and this is how we ended up with perl scripting in FVWM. But it always was a bit of a bolt-on that felt a bit awkward to use. FVWM is a rather complex beast with a lot of organic growth over time, which has lead to a lot of issues when it comes to resource passing / resource ownership, and to some degree, state management. And internal drawing primitives, as far as I know, were never exposed very well to the scripting layers.

  • Entering short waves

    Seven years after passing the exams and receiving my amateur radio licence, I finally took the plunge into the world of shortwave bands. Back in the old days getting into HF either meant either being skilled enough to build your own gear, or having a spare heap of money, 'cause shortwave equipment was anything but cheap.

    The arrival of inexpensive SDR radios from China changed that, just like various Baofeng, Quangsheng, or Wouxun transceivers made usage of VHF/UHF bands affordable about a decade before that.

  • Changes in my desktop computing in 2026

    In 2026, two major things happened in my desktop computing so far:

    1. I built my first desktop PC since 2001, that could be considered at least somewhat modern and not just a toy for occasional tinkering.

    2. Since day one, I have been using FreeBSD on that machine instead of Linux.

    I did not decommission my beloved POWER9-based Blackbird from Raptor Computing Systems, and I still use the PowerPC-based Sam460LE, which is essentially a modern Amiga computer. I also still consider POWER to be my favorite and primary CPU architecture. But when the graphics card in the Blackbird started doing strange things, I went looking for some more standard hardware to test it in and eventually came to the conclusion that I might as well build something permanent.

  • It is deeply funny to me that...

    It is deeply funny to me that Anthropic straight up announced that Fable will quietly nerf itself if you try to use it to build a competitor. But don't worry, it's not because Anthropic is being anti-competitive. It's because Fable is so incredibly powerful that it could create Skynet. It's about safety, guys. Safety.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • RSS for web version of this phlog

      One of the posts on the web version of my phlog[1] was recently featured in Vermaden's Valuable News[2], which resulted in roughly thirty times the usual amount of traffic. That got me thinking that the web version could use an RSS feed, in case anyone wanted to follow future posts as well.

    • Less banning, more garbage

    • I feel seen...

      It's a funny thing, quietly writing on this blog, fully understanding I'm posting in public while deep down expecting few if any will notice.

      And then one of those posts lands on Hacker News and this happens...

    • Cuneiforth, for real this time!

      Hi again Gopherspace,

      It's been several months since my last phlog entry. This year isn't off to a great "start" (seriously, it's May?!) on that front. Of course I always say something about this being my happy place and wanting it not to feel like a chore, but I'd be lying if I said it doesn't weigh on my mind a teensy bit. Particularly as I visit Logout's Bongusta feed most days and really enjoy reading other people's posts. This ritual starts to feel like lurking after too long without saying something in return.

    • My little anniversary gopher challenge

      In exactly one month, it will be fifteen years since I launched my gopher server, at the time the only one on the .cz domain. Over the years, I've sometimes had more, sometimes less time to dedicate to gopher, but the server has been here the entire time, running steadily and serving some content. I'm not writing this to boast, but because the same unfortunately cannot be said about most servers that have appeared during these years - they came, stayed online for a while, and then disappeared again.

• Programming

  • 2026-05-25

    And honestly is that so bad? Let's be real, a lot of opensource software has been co-opted by tech companies and businesses who use it as their foundational tech stack. Let those software use cases be the ones that need the rapid-AI code generation and all that jazz.