Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • solstice

    Strange solstice

    Hanging dead bird under my car

    I worry

    Did my ex-lover hanged herself?

  • what a garden is

    "Garden" never means the same thing to any two people.

    I don't usually list "gardening" as one of my hobbies. I don't usually tell people "I'm a gardener." Because everyone has varying ideas of what that means, and because even other "gardeners" and I will have radically different notions of what "gardening" entails.

    As I was weeding my weeds (digging the grass and oversized milkweed out of the lambs'-quarters and wild sorrel) this morning, I started thinking about all the versions of "what a garden is" that I have met in my life so far.

  • Canadian Elite Basketball League

    The CEBL is minor professional basketball league where all teams are based in Canadian cities. All teams are required to have a large majority of Canadian players on their rosters.

    Games have four 10 minute quarters. They use the "Elam ending": the clock gets turned off with about 4 minutes to go, and they set a target score. That's like, "first team to 105 wins."

• Technology and Free Software

  • Blocking Hyperscalers on My VPS and Antenna Redux

    Yesterday I wrote about blocking hyperscalers from accessing my VPS. Unfortunately, my manual blocking with `nftables` also blocked outgoing connections as a side-effect, which is okay for me because of the contradiction of enjoying the SmallNet while hosting a capsule on its antithesis.

  • The New Commodore Phone

    I pre-ordered the Commodore64 Ultimate last year and when it arrived I absolutely loved it. Between the great manual and the gorgeous breadbox itself, I was all-in on the Commodore revival, even as someone who wasn't around for the OG.

    Imagine my surprise when I got an email from Commodore introducing their latest product: the Callback. It's a flip-phone quasi-dumb phone with basic messaging and utility functionality through SailfishOS, without any social media or "productivity" apps.

  • A first dive into NeoGeo development

    Why yet another started project (without having finished any of the recent others)? Well the 'enthusi' handle has a reason - I'm easily enthusiastic about things. But I think I'm rather capable of picking up oldish projects and interweaving stuff. The NeoGeo has caught my attention - before that AES+ announcement, actually. I always wanted to look into the m68K assembly and even got an Atari ST for that reason but then started on the notorious Alice Matra with its Motorola 6803 CPU - so some early relative if you so want. It's a fun little CPU and I must say the m68k really makes a great first impression when coding in bare assembly! There are C compilers available for the NeoGeo and even a whole DEV kit but bleh, I never liked those and the Playdate is the only device I ever used a devkit for.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Optimistic about the future

      Wow, time flies as it's been almost a year since I last visited Gemspace. Coming back, I've noticed broken gemlinks everywhere. It's more an observation than a complaint. I should be the last person to complain as I only have one entry in my gemlog and was only occasionally lurking in Gemspace.

      My return to Gemspace is due to the fact that the web in its present state is infested with low quality AI generated content, a sad image of its former self. The first question that every internet user should ask themselves when they visit a new website is who wrote the content? No one wants to read AI generated content masquerading as human written content.

      This leads me to have to constantly spend mental energy trying to determine if every single website that I visit is worth my time or not. This constant effort to figure out whether or not what I'm reading is AI generated or not leads to mental exhaustion. Maybe you also have this similar feeling of how much effort it takes to surf the web.