Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Mexican Lore 1: Mordor and the city

    A while back, I saw a video where it was mentioned that industrial capitalism was "Mordor Economics", as opposed to "Hobbit economics", which would be community-based, cooperative, that of communes, gift economies, and the like. It would be natural, then, to go ahead and call the anglozionist empire as "Mordor", and it wouldn't be too far from the truth. For one thing, it kind of looks like Mordor. Also, they are actually developing a surveillance system called Palantir, pretty much fully owning the evil that they are. Generally, I am tempted to use the term Mordor to refer to the anglozionist occupation of North America.

  • If I Only Knew

    If I only knew how much pain he was carrying, I would have listened more carefully.

    I would have asked him how he was really feeling, and I would not have accepted “I’m fine” as the end of the conversation. I would have stayed longer. I would have called more often. I would have made sure he understood that he was loved, wanted, and important.

    But I did not know.

    He was my friend for many years. He was intelligent, creative, sensitive, and deeply thoughtful. He could speak about books, music, technology, and life with a rare kind of insight. He noticed things that other people missed. He had ideas, talents, and dreams. When he felt safe enough to be himself, he could be funny, warm, and generous.

    Yet much of the world did not see those qualities.

  • So be quick! a poem (tho/en)

    Travelling gives you a different perspective on humanity, and a lot of time to ponder and reconsider everything. Let's say the results are not always optimistic, especially in proximity with almost untouched nature. Or rather, it would be, weren't it for certain creatures.

  • delight

    the first morning light
    when waking up 
    is a delight
    first time
    in ages
    

  • (Im)practical animism

    I've been meaning to write something on this for a while after reading njms' gemlog post about seeing animism in everything, but I've finally been prompted to do so by a dream I woke from tonight.

  • A comedy of errors

    The military commander is quite green. Why not send someone with experience, and have the green officer serve as second in command? Or is such in-house training too expensive, or did someone want the mission to fail for plotcrafting reasons? "Bug hunts" are not unknown, according to the grunts, so in theory there should be competent officers as well? Learning on the job was how the Romans did things, back when they had something going for them.

  • no sleep

    I stay up late
    writing
    

  • sail

    The day outside is soft and gray, A quiet hush upon its way. The blankets pull us into ease, Beneath the sheltering autumn trees.

    A single leaf falls with the soft breeze, Right onto my weak and tired knees, My eyes get heavier to prepare for slumber, As I hair rain and thunder in the distance.

  • fragrant

    I am a warm place
    the little shop of incense 
    next to the fruit stand
    

  • Swing is business, jazz is music

    The notion in the title is attributed to Duke Ellington, though maybe not by those exact words. This is not a new concept; Beethoven once turned down 500 quid if he would only compose symphonies in the "old style", so here Beethoven chose jazz over swing. Others choose swing over jazz, usually business units who are more concerned about paying the rent than the Beethovens are.

  • Its so weird to me that so...

    Its so weird to me that so many in software development have so much disdain for software development. I'm definitely a "means to an end" guy when it comes to coding, but in the same way that I cook because I want to eat delicious food. But I don't disdain the work of professional chefs. There's gotta be a whole book in exploring the growth of this phenomenon...

  • octopus

    swam (mask and tube) at Petit Bot, south edge, following the rocks out to the mouth of the bay. i almost turned back before then but i'm so glad that i swam on to mouth of the bay.

    i've been hearing much about how many octopus there are this year and saw my first one.

    i'm not sure how big these get to be around guernsey but this one would easily stretch over a metre. it had picked a neutral grey colour; about 4 m below me in clear water. we watched each other for over 5 minutes until it slipped below some rocks and out of sight.

• Science

  • Klutzashev scale

    With apologies to Nikolai Kardashev (responsible for the so-named Kardashev scale) we might coin the Klutzashev scale, which defines how bad the fuckups of civilizations are. A type I civilization would only be able to fuckup on a limited basis, such as setting fire to their hunting valley, or not being able to deal with excess salt in their fields. A type II civilization would be able to fuckup larger areas, perhaps on a continental scale. Type III would be a planetary scale fuckup, which some humans seem dead-set on reaching. Most of our damage, so far, looks to be type I and may eventually yield some interesting (if thin) geologic layers.

  • Analog Cosine and Sine Approximations: More Details

    On the bottom left of the diagram, I scribbled in the coefficient values that stretch both outputs over the [0,1] MU input, i.e., 0 to 10 volts; and the output being the first quarter cycle of each function, i.e., [0, 90] degrees or [0, π/2] radians. In this configuration, one can feed the same angle voltage into both circuits and get consistent output. Here is a screen shot of the output.

• Technology and Free Software

  • esp32-gemserv: A multithreaded Gemini server for the ESP32

    I wrote a little multithreaded Gemini protocol server for the ESP32 microcontroller with Arduino FreeRTOS. It's still a WIP, but I made it so far that I can publish it on Codeberg.org. I've just been working on it for 2 or 3 days when publishing this. But it should already be able to serve a few (not tested) requests simultaneously.

  • esp32-gemserv - multithreaded Gemini Server for the ESP32

    I created a small multithreaded Gemini server for the ESP32 microcontroller with FreeRTOS on Arduino. It's still a Work-In-Progress, but I managed to make it ready to publish already. It is already able to process a few requests simultaneously. I've MIT licensed it, so you can hack on it as you wish.

  • Analog Cosine Approximation

    I imagined something similar would be available for cosine. It is possible, of course, to just adjust add or subtract a constant onto the input in order to shift a sine curve onto a cosine curve. However, this is a little more complicated than necessary, and you must take care not to overload the summer that is adding the constant.

  • 2026 Old Computer challenge: Day 6

    Had work again today, but I did have time to implement a Fedi script that could display statuses with a hashtag, which is apparently distinct in the Mastodon API from the idea of searching for hashtags. Thanks to @eric@geldmacher.io for pointing me in the right direction.

  • Solar haul

    Re: trying to solar power this gemini capsule.

    So, the components arrived:

    - Waveshare solar manager PCB

    - 18650 batteries

    - 18650 battery holder (came with the Waveshare board)

    - Cheap weatherproof solar panel

    - Waterproof project box

  • The roguelike that can be expressed is not the true roguelike

    So the game FTL or Faster Than Light is technically a roguelite, though certain folks will endlessly debate roguelike versus roguelite, the Berlin Interpretation, etc. While FTL does not have an @ to move the tough choices and having to make the best of a typically crappy hand (without the option of bluffing) are hallmarks of something like the rogue experience. Oh look I have one fuel left, a bunch of underpowered parts that do not jive, and the Mantis just boarded is very much like having a cursed mace, a bow, no arrows, and an Umber Hulk just showed up. FTL is also kinda sorta realtime, in that you have to wait for weapons to charge, but does allow pausing the game to sort out what to do. It appears to use Windows-style controls which means you need to right-click, maybe, sometimes, and it's not always clear who is moving to where, where the enemies are, and what weapons are pointed where. Lots of replayability as you try to figure out how to die differently.

  • Won’t that be grand?

    Watching Tron (happy 44th birthday!).

    The following exchange, about 15m in, felt relevant to today.

  • 2026 Old Computer challenge: Day 5

    Was busy with work most of today, no progress on anything to speak of. I've barely caught up with people's OCC emails. Nice of tekk to do that roundup on the mailing list, though, so I can see how everyone else is getting on.

  • Long-term review: SanDisk Ultra II 2.0GB microSD card

    I cleaned out my car at the weekend, pulling gunk and junk out from under the seats. It was mostly litter and stones and dirt and pens and such, but also... a microSD card. Intriguing.

  • Old Computer Challenge 2026, Day 4 (final)

    Today I finished the drawing on Amiga Deluxe Paint 3. Since I have other things to do for the rest of the week, this is the final post about the challenge. It was fun to do a bit of drawing every day between Monday and Thursday, so thanks for the challenge organiser Tekk.

  • NUL byte unexpected

    Where exactly this error comes from is not clear, as the error string appears to be assembled, so a simple grep will not find the exact line of code.

  • Old Computer Challenge 2026, Day 3

    Today I made a move from ASCII art to pixel art on Deluxe Paint III, moving to more familiar ground. While I never dabbled much with ASCII art, I used to draw a lot of pictures and make animations on DP3 when Amiga was my main computer.

    I remembered there was some kind of grid functionality in DP3, which I though would be useful since I had drafted the picture on a squared paper. The grid in DP3 works quite differently from what I remembered. Instead of toggling a grid visible or invisible it just restricts the locations where one can draw. After a bit of head scratching I remembered how I used to use it: I set up an eight pixel grid, drew a single pixel at each grid intersection, corresponding to the line intersections on my graph paper and got as a result a kind of dotted graph paper. I used the beige colour so I could get rid of the markers by changing the colour to background colour when I'm done.

  • 2026 Old Computer challenge: Day 4

    Today, I've hit my first issue: I need to order medication and the NHS website requires JavaScript. I've decided I'm going to have to cheat and boot another computer. To avoid cheating too much, I'll go with one from a similar vintage but that can run Firefox...

  • 11 Years of Colemak

    I thought it would be nice to celebrate my eleventh anniversary of using Colemak by sharing my Colemak journey. This post has been a long time in the making and was supposed to have been written last year to celebrate ten years, but I procrastinated so here we are. I hope this post inspires others to give Colemak a try.

    I never learned how to properly QWERTY touch type. Depending on the word, typing using three fingers on my left hand and two fingers on my right hand was just how I always typed. My journey started in 2015 when I purchased a Filco Majestic Touch 2 Tenkeyless (TKL) with Cherry Blue MX switches, my first mechanical keyboard. TKL keyboards do not have a numpad, so I could position my mouse closer to the keyboard. You may have heard that Filco recently went bankrupt so it's sad that this keyboard will no longer be manufactured. Switching to a new keyboard was the perfect opportunity to properly learn how to touch type. To force myself to not to look down at the keyboard while I typed, I decided to use blank keycaps. The aesthetic was stealth black, black keycaps to match my black Filco.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Server Name Indication (SNI) is for selecting a service, not a certificate

      I added support for Server Name Indication (SNI) to the Gemini Protocol server I am working on, Ground Control, so that multiple capsules can be served by the same server with their own certificates. This is something Ground Control lost when I switched from OpenSSL to BearSSL. BearSSL explicitly excludes this feature because it's not a core part of the TLS protocol.

      The paradigm in OpenSSL is that the application developer writes a function that takes as a parameter a domain name and returns the key that should be used for that domain. This function is attached to the OpenSSL object, and is called by the library during the TLS handshake to configure a new connection.

    • Star Trek: The Original Series: Season One: Mostly For The First Time

      Gemini throws us back to the days of bulletin boards, plain text, and homebrew software, but let's be honest about the true purpose of late 20th century computing: Talking About Star Trek On The Internet.

      Firstly: I am by no means a trekkie. I'd seen one or two Original Series episodes, a couple dozen TNG episodes, maybe the same amount of Voyager, one or two DS9 episodes, all the movies apart from the latest one, and nothing of Enterprise onwards. The characters and catchphrases are all so famous, and the influence runs so deep, that it feels like I've seen a lot more of it than I actually have. I've got a general awareness of the lore, but second-hand.

    • em-dash market is now OPEN

      em-dash market is now OPEN

      here you go ai, all the em-dashes u could ever want, for SALE at GREAT PRICES !!!

      send all payments for em-dashes to [REDACTED] with a note specifying how many em-dashes you would like to purchase.

    • Titanic Public Page Experiment

      Please feel free to edit/add something to the public titan page at the link above.

      Collisions will happen if two or more people are editing, so be patient.

      Titanic is a simple gemini/titan page server built on libFornax. Trying it out -- and reporting problems -- will help me shake down any remaining bugs in libFornax.

    • Checking into Antenna submission

      checking to see how Antanna works by submitting this link. Antenna doesn't seem to be working in my bookmarks.

      checking to see what happens here.