Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • afternoon nap

    the warmth of your sweet afternoon nap
    lingers on your skin
    I dive under blankets to feel that warmth
    plaster myself on you 
    to maximise the area where skin touches skin
    and you don't want to get up
    

  • The Bodyguard (1992)

    In the early 1990s, I remember seeing copies of The Bodyguard in VHS rental stores, and thinking, "Why would anyone want to watch that? It's not Terminator 2!"

    While it does have an Alan Silvestri score, it is no more Back to the Future than it is Terminator 2, and as such, I have to mark it down. It dragged. Apart from Frank, the main characters are all quite annoying. Frank isn't annoying. He's just dull. It's got Mike Starr from Dumb & Dumber. He's OK.

  • i am the lorax and i speak for the trees. the trees say "why don't you call?"

    I have been hiking a lot recently. Mostly because I go back to the child mines on Monday, a job that precludes me from taking off into the woods for three hours on a random Tuesday morning. Partly because the local silviculture plot just opened up 700 acres for public exploration (with the caveat "do not enter unless you have orienteering and wilderness experience," because there are absolutely no signs and the trails are more suggestion than direction), and to me that's just a backyard.

    Gremlin, a bona fide City Boy, loves a good hike but is a novice in the ways of Forest. He is one of the people at whom the "do not enter without wilderness experience" warning is aimed. He is always amazed, when we hike, that I can name nearly any plant he points to.

    (Aside: No, I can't. I can reasonably guess the *family* of nearly any plant. Gremlin somehow thinks this is akin to knowing an individual species and its backstory, when really it's more like knowing the city someone lives in but not their neighborhood, street, or house.)

    So I was out yesterday, climbing a trailless hill steeper than a flight of stairs, face to face with a whole lot of autumn olive and Japanese barberry(FN), trying to get into the head of folks like Gremlin - people who are amazed I can see the trees when they only see forest.

  • Hand cramps

    It's so easy for a healthy habit to get derailed by a consumerist impulse. A while ago I started journaling, and things were good. I like the Field Notes pocket notebooks, and I've been using them for a long time. I had a small surplus in a drawer, waiting to be used. Pocket notebooks are handy, and if you're in the habit of carrying a pen, then it only makes sense to carry a small notebook to go with it.

    Anyway, I decided to start using my pocket notebooks for journaling. My journaling was going really well, but I started having really bad hand cramps that I couldn't seem to resolve. As a lefty, I wonder if I was just never taught really proper writing technique, but after some cursory investigation I determined that what I was doing was okay. Then I had a dangerous thought: maybe the problem is my pen? After all, aside from a space pen that I was gifted awhile ago, I've never really been someone to care much about what I was writing with. I just used whatever was lying around. Could my thoughtlessness be my downfall?

• Technology and Free Software

  • Deckzero-Alpha

    A year or so ago, I became very taken with the idea of the cyberdeck. I'd seen a few examples online, and I knew I wanted one. Not because I needed one -- I just thought it would be a cool thing to have.

    The problem was, all the examples I could find seemed to involve either 3D printing or some fairly advanced crafting and making skills. I don't want to go down the 3D printing rabbithole, and I'm cack-handed with tools. A cyberdeck of my own seemed out of reach.

  • Minimalism, the overly complex kind

    My wife started watching the Alone TV series where ten people are dropped off in some wilderness with a few things in a backpack and are asked to survive as long as possible. The first few drop out quick, realizing this was not what they signed up for. Then there are a few who gradually starve to the point they either are pulled by the doctors or can personally tell they can't be there any longer.

    Than then there are the ones who leave because they start to lose their minds. The producers explicitly prohibited items likes books and games or things to occupy your mind for the sole purpose of straining their mental state. So what most of the people who don't fail out for the other reasons end up doing is keeping themselves busy with other activities that are more pleasure than purpose.

  • Resurrecting a Samsung Epic

    Last week, my work team was assigned to dispose of items that were never claimed from our company's lost and found, and we were allowed to keep some of them for ourselves. Among the many things included were old smartphones. I came away with a BlackBerry Bold 9780, a Samsung A10e, an iPod Touch, and the latest target of my fancy: a Samsung Galaxy S Epic.

    The Epic was a Sprint-only 4G Android smartphone released in 2010. It features a sliding keyboard, similar in design to the Nokia C6. The phone has expandable storage up to 32 GB, four off-screen capacitive front buttons, a dedicated camera button, and a removable battery, as was standard at the time. It originally ran Android Gingerbread (2.3) and could only be updated officially to 2.3.6. That's way too old for almost any software to still be useful.

  • Rambling about backups

    Yet another reason I dislike Apple. Well, I've had many reasons, and this one is not a new reason, it just manages to bite me in a new way. Apple uses the HFS+ filesystem. It stores filenames in a Unicode encoding using normal form D (NFD). Everybody else apparently uses normal form C (NFC). This matters because when you meet a non-ASCII character that has multiple representations as bytes, NFD and NFC use different bytes. As an example, consider the humble heavy metal a, ä.

    NFC uses ä LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS

    NFD uses COMBINING DIAERESIS plus a LATIN SMALL LETTER A

    Anyway, this just sets the scene. On a Linux system the ext4 filesystem says that filenames are just bytes. Nobody cares about encodings. So whatever tool was used to generate the filename, its encoding determines the bytes used. For example, I buy music on Bandcamp and the filenames contain some bytes. I copy them to an external drive. This external drive, sadly, is mounted by an Apple laptop using HFS+. It's smart. It recognises the bytes. It's UTF-8 NFC! It saves them as NFD. Because it's smart.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Weary

      The constant assault that is the bulk of the Internet in 2026, I am so weary of it.

      I've had enough of the constant bombardment, the tension, the aggression and violence of it. Its like the Morgoth of hyper-capitalism took the promise of the web and twisted and tortured it and contorted it into the mockery it is today.

    • How to setup your own IPFS private network

      In this blog post, you will learn how to make a private IPFS network that will allow private peers to exchange data between each other. This is in opposition to the default setup in which you use the default configuration connecting to the whole IPFS network. The incentive to have your own network is mostly speed, because this does not have any extra access control, any peer can potentially access to any content you have in your IPFS network.

    • How to setup your own IPFS private network

    • Enough computer: small internet, old machines, and a politics of sufficiency

      I've been reading a little conversation on Gopher about “withered technology”. It began with Solderpunk writing about Gunpei Yokoi's famous idea of lateral thinking with withered technology: instead of reaching automatically for the newest and most powerful technology, take something mature, cheap and well understood and think imaginatively about what it can do.

      The Game Boy is the classic example. Nintendo could have pursued a more impressive colour display, but instead used older monochrome technology. The result was cheaper, tougher, simpler and had much better battery life. It wasn't the most technologically advanced machine. It was, arguably, a better machine for the job.

      That idea has been nagging away at me because it connects several things I've previously thought of as separate interests.