Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Barely hangin’ on to my streak

    You read Marcin Wichary’s blog, don’t you?

    I don’t subscribe to him in a feed reader, but somehow pretty much everything he writes finds itself in a browser tab of mine, so I guess it works out.

  • A Sudden Loss

    The brother of one of my oldest friends passed away this month.

    He'd suffered from epilepsy from an early age. When my friend and I were in high school together, I would sometimes ask why his brother wasn't at school that day, and the answer was almost always that he'd had a seizure. However, the seizures seemed to lessen over time as he became an adult and settled into a job routine. Then, a few weeks ago, my friend came to visit his house in the morning and discovered him unresponsive in his bathroom. Paramedics came and tried to revive him, but he was declared dead after about half an hour. The leading theory to his cause of death was a severe seizure that interfered with either his heartbeat or his resporation.

  • Summer holiday

    My Summer holiday is about to end. Did I enjoy it? Man, I can assure you I did. Besides doing a lot of work in the garden I also met some of my friends for breakfast or a beer in the afternoon.

  • Back to reality

    Once again, my vacation ends. When I start feeling too mentally exhausted, I arrange for a vacation from work. Nothing crazy, just a weekend or so away from the "routine". This time it was for about a week.

    Every time without fail I'm met with the familiar feeling of melancholy: "I didn't get around to doing X", "I wish I had more time to do Y", etc. I think we've all been there, we all want to "catch up" with all kinds of projects or various hobbies that there's seemingly never enough time for in your *daily life*. Well, same here really. There's always something or other I want to do while on these mini-vacations, but more often than not I end up not even realizing that more than half of my free time has already passed.

    This used to bother me a lot and I'd be lying if I said it doesn't bother me to some extent now - yeah I wanna wrap up my self-appointed projects, yeah I wanna pick up drawing again (I really liked it but haven't gotten around to doing it for a good year now), yeah I wanna do this and that.

  • Well that's rich

    The social importance of biscuits cannot be overstated in the UK.

    I should clarify, for large sections of the English speaking world, that biscuits in this context are the equivalent of cookies, particularly the mass produced, store bought cookies, not the thing that tastes like a really badly made scone that you've forgotten to include all the ingredients in. That may well be culturally important for you, but I can only speak to my own knowledge and cultural insight here and this is particularly about the rich tea biscuit.

    Nobody likes a rich tea biscuit. They are the most boring biscuit on the face of the planet, despite their name they cannot be dipped in tea for more than a nanosecond and the flavour is described as "lightly baked", as if a process is a flavour. It doesn't taste of anything except "lightly baked". They're awful. No one likes them. Yet they're everywhere and people keep on buying them.

  • The Great (?) Tadpole Experiment

    So, for the first time ever, I'm going to do something I've wanted to for most of my life: raising tadpoles! You might wonder how I, a self-professed nature addict, made it this far without having kept a few tadpoles. I distinctly remember spending so long staring into puddles full of tadpoles all the way back in kindergarten, wondering what kind of frog they would become and marveling at what an incredible change they went through. As a child, every time I was outside, I always kept an eye out for critters: I'd flip over rocks to check out scorpions and blind snakes; I'd bend down low to watch trails of ants; I'd catch snakes and lizards; y'know, all the sorts of things a budding young naturalist does. Seeing tadpoles and poliwogs in puddles or still pools in creeks always brought me a special spark of joy: they weren't everyday critters and they were so cool! While I kept my fair share of little things: caterpillars, isopods, a scorpion, a tarantula, ants (even with queens!), I never got around to trying tadpoles, or anything else aquatic for that matter. That didn't mean I didn't want to: I just never really had the opportunity.

• Politics and World Events

  • Exploitation and the Epstein Files

    Whenever people start mouthing off about unverified and grandiose claims extrapolated from the so-called 'Epstein files', which have only really only ever served to exacerbate incendiary conspiracy theories, I tell them that if they really want to combat human trafficking, they ought to:

    * Refrain from buying illegal drugs

    * Refrain from consuming pornography

    * Refrain from paying for sex from a prostitute.

  • What’s with all the conspiracy theories?

    I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it, but for some time most of my internet feeds, especially YouTube, have been awash with right-wing conspiracy theories. I say “right wing”, but perhaps “free market libertarian” would be a less contentious label. However you might give them a political label, there’s been a lot of them

    The pandemic has obviously pushed a lot of people’s buttons, and for good reason. But honest skepticism towards the government and its motives has for some become something much darker and more pervasive. They have become convinced that we are living in a system so corrupted as to be beyond redemption, controlled by an unnamed elite, usually referred to as “Them” or “They”.

• Technology and Free Software

  • A brief history of computers

    3000 years ago, when the egyptians were still egypting, they devised a new invention that revolutionized everything, it was called the computer. Computers were huge monsters and they could fill an entire room, and a few of these beasts have been found in old egyptian ruins. They didn't have screens, for they weren't invented for another 1500 years. What they used back then was papyrus. These computers were used to predict the future, and they were only used by the priestly class.

  • Power users in 2026

    Recently I caught up on an older 32-Bit Cafe thread[1] that discussed the death of the power user in computing. The post linked by OP had some really strange ideas of what a power user looked like back in the day - really, power users used to understand DNS and IP routing? I think not - and was almost certainly written by AI, but it got me thinking about what I would consider characteristics of a power user in 2026.

    Here are some ideas I have about different categories of users, ranging from the most basic to the most complex. I'll describe what "level ups" occur between each category, and then attempt to identify which level of user could be considered a power user in the 90's and in 2026.

  • Tiwaz is More Than an STMicro STM32-Powered Mechanical Keyboard: It's Two Keyboards, Plus Joysticks

    Maker Timo Strube has designed an open-hardware split-layout mechanical keyboard with a twist: both halves can operate entirely independently as macro pads and gaming keypads, complete with built-in joysticks, in addition to linking together into a fully-featured compact keyboard.

    "Tiwaz is an open-source mechanical keyboard designed for people who want complete control over their hardware," Strube explains. "Each half of its split layout can be used independently as a gaming keypad, macro pad, or custom controller, while connecting both halves creates a full split keyboard. Built around repairability and long-term ownership, Tiwaz is fully open source. Hardware design files, firmware source code, and documentation are available to the community, allowing users to modify, repair, and extend the platform for their own needs."

  • Internet/Gemini

    • When the Small Web Gets an AI Door

      At first glance, this sounds pretty cool. An MCP server for the small web!

      It supports Gopher menus, text files as well as Gemini resources. It has timeouts, response limits, caching, host allowlists and other sensible security features. It even returns structured data specifically designed for LLMs.

      Technically, it's a neat project. But I don't think it's particularly good for the small web.

      My Gemini capsule and gopher hole are NOT databases. They are a collection of blog posts, terrible jokes, homelab notes, CGI experiments, tutorials, an imaginary 400+ days old plant (I plan on watering it until it reaches 666 days - that's why it's name is Beelzebub), and whatever else I felt like putting online.

    • We're doomed

      some tech bro figured it can be beneficial to create Gemini MCP

  • Software Releases/Announcements

    • Alhena 5.6.8

      If you use ImageMagick for inline support of image types like avif and jxl, there's a decent performance boost. I changed the intermediate format from png to bmp which is faster.

      Inline prompts are the big story though. It basically means Alhena doesn't block the rest of the application with a modal dialog when you're entering prompts or using the Titan editor. The "dialog" sticks to the page/tab doing the prompting so you're free to go to other tabs, etc.