Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Thoughts from Buildwas Abbey

    The British Isles are tolerably well-stocked with grand old ruined buildings , and I've been fascinated by them for most of my life. Even in ruins, the fact that these places have been present through hundreds of years of history is remarkable to me. Whether sacred or secular, I love to ponder the human stories that have played out in and around them.

    These old places are also a challenge to me. In their heyday, they must have seemed like they would last forever. The castles that dominated the towns of medieval England represented the power of a feudal system within which everyone knew their place and from which few were permitted to deviate. But permanence was an illusion. The stones of the castles have been scattered and the system they represented is all but gone.

  • Can't Sleep, Make Stuff

    So much stuff going on in my life. Most of it not great, some of it mundane. But mostly it is stuff that keeps me up at night. And I am already prone to never sleeping. Rather than wasting that time, I've been burying my head into random one night projects for Smolweb. It makes my lack of sleep feel a little bit more productive.

    I understand why they say you need to take time for yourself to decompress and process things. I never feel like I can take that time unless its past midnight and the rest of the family is asleep. And at that point the benefits have diminishing returns over sleep.

  • Depth-first vs breadth-first cleaning

    I was doing some chores and tidying around the house today when I had a funny thought. Forgive a brief detour while I provide some context. When I was in school long ago, I took a data structures course where I learned about tree traversal. Two of the most common algorithms for traversing a tree are depth-first search (travel down the tree before visiting sibling nodes) and breadth-first search (travel to sibling nodes across the tree before descending). My little bit of humor today came when I realized that my partner and I have different approaches to cleaning that could accurately be described as depth-first vs breadth-first.

  • Third Concert Done

    Last night's concert was a blast. Small ensembles from the larger group I played with put on a concert at an old church and it was a huge success (well, apart from the two people who had open cans in the front row and were quietly asked to leave). The acoustics! The sound echoed and soared. I haven't been religious in a long time. I'd forgotten how incredible churches feel.

    We have recordings, and members of the group are working to line up the sound from various sources with the video, then chop it up for YouTube. I'm generally pretty happy with my playing. It's been getting better and better all summer, and last night there were some very exposed bits that went off without a hitch.

  • Exercising Again, Sorta

    A huge summer storm a couple of weeks ago has dashed my employer's mandate that I go back to the office four days a week. Water came in through the ceiling, through the foundations; and when they cut through some siding to check, they found black mold covering fibreglass batts.

    So I may be working from home for a while. Funny how when it's a necessity, the work still gets done.

    I'm trying to use this extra time best I can, and try to get back into shape. Last year I very much got out of it. I hurt my knee running last July or August, and had to pull out of a couple races I'd planned to run in a September (a 3k and a half marathon). I was very bummed out, and was in an awful mood for a day or two when I saw a doctor, and his recommendation was that I stop running, that I'm not in my 20s anymore, that if I keep it up, I'm likely to become an orthopedic surgeon's best friend.

  • Finally, some fresh air

    Somehow I always ended up living next to some open space filled with water. Be it a wide Siberian river, or a lake, or a sea, it was something I never thought much about, but it turns out having a walk on the shore, looking far away, or even getting into water to stand an imagine there is no shore behind me — these are rituals I really need in my life.

    So here I am, again in Tokyo suburbs, hoping for this nightmare to end by the end of year. I feel squished into some kind of dungeon. It's bright, there is sky, but it is still a dungeon. Commuting by train also was a chore. It might feel like a vast choice of places to go with railway network big as this one, but in reality you are kind of limited to these hot spots where folks gather after work, or on weekends. Anything more open, queer and seemingly pointless — go figure, you're on your own with 1.5hr walking on average, sometimes around overpass roads as seemingly no one expected a human to just walk there.

• Technology and Free Software

  • S is for Serenity: A Defence of Windows' S Mode

    I sold my MacBook, along with all my other Apple stuff, earlier on this year. I needed the money due to changing circumstances and I realised I had about as much fun as I was going to have with it, so I wouldn't miss it if I sold it. Many aspects of the Apple ecosystem were holding me back. Don't get me wrong, everything just worked and it looked pristine while doing it but it was unsustainable for me to remain trapped within that very expensive ecosystem.

    The Apple Silicon Macs are very impressive and are all still powerhouses compared to other computers on the market. That said, they are fraught with a litany of their own issues. macOS is not immune from bugs and other imperfections, no matter what the fanboys will try and tell you.

    I always liked macOS, not least because of its design language, simplicity and Unix lineage - as well as everything it inherited from that family tree: performance, security, efficiency and class. However, it was time to move on.

  • Set my phone on greyscale

    To reduce the lure of my smartphone, I enabled greyscale on it.

    I really looks shitty, and makes the whole thing less attracting.

    Now we'll have to see how effective it is.

  • Putting Graal Online Back Online

    All of the talk over the last couple weeks about people starting up vintage World of Warcraft and Minecraft servers on #CGHMN made me start thinking about an experience from my youth: an old MMO called Graal Online. It started in 1998, originally as *Zelda Online* with assets ripped from *The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past*, but quickly evolved beyond that. I played actively through most of 2000 into 2001 before calling it quits around the time the NewMain stuff got started. Technically it's still around, but now it's a freemium mobile game, a mockery of what it once was.

    I remembered seeing the leaked source code to the v1.3.1 server back in the day and I wondered if it was still out there. That set me off on a trip down a deep and twisted rabbit hole.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Gemtext: A Condensed Guide

      Gemtext is a simple, line‑oriented markup format used by the Gemini protocol.

      Each line is a complete element. There is no inline formatting, nor nesting.

      I wrote this guide to be as simple as possible, formatted in such a way that would be easy for me to read. I hope you may also find it useful!

    • Hola Mundo

      Hola