Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Separated by Plexiglass

    For the longest time, I have felt as if there is something profoundly and inexplicably wrong with me. There is an air of something that separates me from the rest of the world, as if a sheet of plexiglass prohibits me from fully participating. I can see through it and the people behind the plexiglass can also see me, but it feels as if they can't quite understand what I am saying.

    I'm not anti-social, nor socially inept. At least I don't think I am. I have been in a long-term relationship for just short of twelve years. I know how to relate to people and seek to converge with them in conversation but not obsequiously so. I also get on incredibly well with my immediate family, if not my extended family. When we are together, we spark off one-another in the most uproarious and absurd ways.

  • in your hair

    my hand in your hair, a gentle tug
    not a new thought
    a resurfaced one 
    imagination running wild
    so many steps ahead I can't count
    not like I'm really trying 
    happily distracted by that thought
    my hand in your hair, again
    

  • Minotaur

    Lately, our conversations feel like navigating a labyrinth.

    One way in, one way back. But guess what?

    There's a minotaur in here, and every turn of phrase leads me closer to the center.

• Politics and World Events

  • A page from the history book

    Well over 3000 years ago, in the time of Pharaohs, a young man named Alexander¹ managed to conquer the entire world, until he died on dysentery, alone in a remote corner of the world where his soldiers had left him alone, to divide the whole empire for themselves. One of them, by the name of Julius Caesar, took the westernmost part of the conquered lands and founded the roman empire. Constantine took the part that was properly greece, and founded the byzantine empire with it's capital in Istanbul. Further east, Ptolemy took Egypt, and wrote the Tetrabiblos, the first book of astrology ever, which took the old knowledge of the egyptians and mixed it with the babylonian practice. At the east, Darius took the part that belonged to Islam and founded the Persian dynasty. South of Persia, the Mughal dynasty was formed, and so, the whole known world was distributed among a handful of hegemons, in what would later be called the Spring and Autumn period, because the known world was so big, stretching from east to west, that while it was spring on the western half, it was autumn on the eastern half.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Four Hours of Time Travel: Troubleshooting an Old Basic Stamp 2

    Sometimes technology takes you on an unexpected journey into the past. Yesterday I spent four intense hours debugging a Basic Stamp 2.

    A BS2 from a 2003 robot, a piece of history. I had no idea how involved this would become.

  • A Resilient, Low-Tech Information Network

    I usually treat connectivity as if it were a natural state: just there, always available, never questioned. In truth it breaks easily, because it depends on commercial services, on stable power, and on political availability.

    The Offpunk Manifesto by Ploum documents this with several examples: internet shutdowns in conflict regions, outages at major cloud providers that suddenly take half a country offline.

  • A digital expression of quiet optimism

    Something about the way Orwell describes that face you ought to make towards the telescreens really resonated with me. When I first read it, I thought it spoke to some kind of forced insincerity I felt we all had to perform. These days, I find myself taking the line a lot more literally. The more time I spend in the real world cyberpunk dystopia, the more I feel I ought to be making a face of quiet optimism towards the telescreens, or more specifically, in how I portray myself on the internet.

    There was a time when I think you could earnestly get away from surveillance capitalism by simply making the right consumer choices. But these days I'm finding that quiet hard. Meaningfully resisting fingerprinting is hard. Using Librewolf is a worse experience than stock Firefox or Chrome. Network effects will keep you coming back to harmful platforms, which will leverage their draw to cultivate addictive behaviours.

  • Beautiful Emacs on 7 inch HDMI display

    Some time ago I purchased a cheap 7 inch 1024x600 HDMI display, for a project is was working on. After the ending of the project, I attached a Raspberry Pi 4B with 4GB RAM to it, and installed FreeBSD 15.1 on it.

    I keep the FreeBSD install lightweight. I runs Xorg, with ratpoison, my favorite tiling window manager. Apart from Emacs, I didn't install much software on it, to keep it light. Besides, Emacs covers almost all your needs.

    First I thought of installing the text mode version of Emacs, but then I remembered that those variants can be compiled very minimal and decided to install the graphical version.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Jörg Rippel - Author

      Welcome to my Gemini capsule! Here I share my thoughts on technology, electronics, and the future of the internet - or rather: its drowning.

    • Drowning Internet

      I'm a German tech author. My Gemini capsule is about what I call the Drowning Internet: authentic online communities disappearing under a flood of AI slop, SEO spam, and commercial noise.

      All posts in German and English, covering hobby robotics and electronics, internet forum decay, alternative protocols, and related topics.

    • Schreibfaultier got a new home

      There was a pleasant surprise waiting too: the capsule is automatically also available as an HTML version via https://schreibfaultier.pollux.casa/ without me having to set anything up for that myself. For anyone who doesn't (yet) have a Gemini client installed, the content can still be read perfectly normally in a browser. A small but very welcome bridge between the two worlds.