Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Checking in – August 2026

    Several applications and one interview with an automatic system. I have the suspicion that that interview is not all as it seems but I have no choice but to follow through with it. As of time of writing I have put in about 8 contact requests.

  • There's a more interesting story in “Star Wars: The Phantom Menance” than we ever got to see

    The Star Wars prequel trilogy was more political than the original series. I mean, “Star Wars: The Phantom Menance” started the film with a blockade and trade negotiations. And I felt that the plot was more sophisticated than the original series, as the main protagonist, Senator Palpatine/Darth Sidious, arranged events to come out on top no matter what happened: [...]

  • gone / back home?

    The cat is gone
    She normally comes back
    a couple days
    after I return
    
    
    The deer is eating the compost
    It doesn't like it too much
    and walks away
    
    
    The mice have taken over
    the house
    I trapped 3 yesterday night
    I would have caught more but the
    trap was slightly mis-adjusted.
    
    
    I've never seen 2 mice running
    away together. I feel like there
    are a lot of them. I'll have to
    setup many traps over many days.
    
    
    The house feels abused, empty, not
    mine anymore. I'm home, alone, and sad.
    

  • And just like that

    A strange thing happened on the way out of the front door when I transitioned. I swiftly developed what's referred to as "hypervigilance".

    I won't bother getting into the ins and outs of what that looks like in day to day life, but I'll just say it comes with a keenly observed sense of when a place is safe and when it may not be so, a sense of winds shifting, a sense of when the ingredients for a problem are present and so you slip away before they bake into something that you really can't handle.

  • denfur

    i want to be better for next year. i want to be more sociable i want to be able to go and say hi to someone without worrying about "oh god what if they think i'm creepy because i don't Look Right (it's dysphoria)" i wanna act bubbly and stuff without worrying about that!! and it's just something i need to get over!! but i can do it!!

  • Iconoclast

    The ever narrower concensus of acceptable thought makes extremists of reasonable people whom hold similarly reasonable beliefs. They become iconoclasts without ever intending to be, when offense is taken but was never given.

    I remember how the mosquitoes used to disturb me in the night with their unsettling, alien hum but as morning dawned with its delightful chorus so too it dawned upon me that the music of birdsong is just as profane.

  • eepy

    would we ever get out of bed
    if we were sleepy together 
    in the same bed? 
    
    
    a morning thought I filtered out 
    still warm from sleep
    this morning
    

• Politics and World Events

  • Bibi Is the Hope of Israel's Haters

    September 2026. The fateful elections in Israel are drawing closer. But in practice, the result is already known in advance — in every scenario, Bibi will win, form the government, and remain the eternal prime minister...

    How? Very simply —

    Either Bibi, Likud, and the right-wing bloc will win a majority and form the government: a full-on, fanatical right-wing government.

    Or Bibi will lose the election but refuse to accept the results and threaten civil war or a governmental coup. He will claim that the elections were "rigged" by the left and the deep state, and his supporters will believe him. Either way, from Bibi's point of view, the possibility that he has lost and must leave the political stage does not exist in his vocabulary. If Bibi is not at the head of government, then "let the country burn."

    It is already clear that Prime Minister Bibi is the destroyer of the Jewish state — and if not of the state itself, then at least of Israeli democracy and of the fake statesmanship he once still adopted for himself. Today he no longer has any intention of even pretending to be statesmanlike, even when half the public or more has grown sick of him in light of his failures, his endless wars, and his Spartan vision for Israel, as well as the far-right government he has cultivated, the systematic destruction of the judicial system, and the systematic contempt for and destruction of its legitimacy.

• Science

  • Calculus Problem: Change in Production Rate

    I was stumped for a while by an interesting little calculus problem. In my systems biology textbook, an exercise showed that a problem of change of production rate β from β₁ to β₂ has this solution: [...]

• Technology and Free Software

  • Android Out, Cyber deck In

    I've been an Android user since I hand to painfully stop using Blackberry (cuz they stopped making the best phone). I switched to a 3rd party ROM quickly after and have been De-Googled for a while now. My "computer in my pocket" has been working well until Google decided to destroy the "free as in freedom" Android community.

    With the influx of AI into everything, the loss of community on the internet and a lack of open solutions for "security", I've decided that I am going to work on replacing my Android device with a more free solution. My goal is to build a cyber deck from scratch, either using off the shelf parts like SoC boards or building custom hardware. The idea will be that I move my telephony needs to a dumb "feature phone" and the cyber deck will handle all my internet needs (via 5G Hotspot or WiFi).

  • Some notes on the origins of Systems Librarians

    Back in, oh, '98 it was, I attended my first Access Conference[1]. Billed as "Canada's Premiere Library Technology Conference", Access back then was the place to be - at least, in North America[2] - for anyone interested in following the seismic changes in library work being wrought by the exponential growth of the Internet in general, and the Web in particular.

    My job then was not that of a Systems Librarian. But as the project coordinator for a provincial library consortium brokering Internet information services for post-secondary libraries, I was at least Systems Librarian-adjacent. The first night of the conference I recall going for post-reception drinks with a couple of veteran systems librarians, who spent the evening trading war stories about malfunctioning servers, recalcitrant vendors, misbehaving users, and sysadmins and programmers with personality traits one might charitably describe as "quirky". And as I listened, I experienced a growing ambition to join their storied ranks, envisioning that one day - many years down the line - it would be me recounting my war stories to some awed neophyte over whiskey and beer.

  • I guess this falls into the “hate the game, not the player” territory

    I came across this video [1] (untitled) which is a protest against LLM (Large Language Model)-generated videos on Youtube [2] (with a title that is pure link bait and not in any way true). I do wonder how effective this form of LLM protest will be on Youtube, as so far, this seems to be the only one of its type that I've come across. I wish them luck, but I'm not too optimistic about this.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Categorizing Web Crawlers

      Web crawlers have picked up a lot of steam in the past few years, for various reasons. A lot of sysadmins, who were blissfully ignoring their server logs, are now being forced to actively handle the web traffic issue in order to keep their servers afloat. Configuring web servers is often a chore that makes it less fun to host the project in the first place. Especially for projects in maintenance mode that you weren't planning on spending more energy on, which is where most web servers end up at.

      I have read a lot of discussions about web crawlers on sites like HN and Lobsters. Many of these conversations go sideways with people talking past each other. Mitigations like Anubis proof-of-work are proposed which make no logical sense given the constraints. I think this is because there's not a shared understanding of what a crawler *is* and what crawler traffic looks like. The truth is that there are many different types of crawlers with different purposes, and they get mixed into a single bucket that muddles the conversation.

      In this post I will attempt to categorize the types of web crawlers that I have seen on my own server https://mozz.us. I host *lots* of different stuff on my server including a dozen different archives/mirrors, dynamic sites that generate millions of unique URLs, a public cgit instance, and a social game with leaderboards.

    • Is it too early to call Google and Microsoft an email cartel?

      In the past week, we've learned through multiple trips to the pharmacy that two of Bunny's medications have been discontinued and alternatives have to be found. And then it was phone tag and several lost emails to her doctor before she got replacement prescriptions.

      And it's those lost emails that are very annoying. It turns out that the doctor's office uses Microsoft Lookout for handling all their email. I run my own email server. I've sent email to that doctor before, but that was maybe last year. This year, I guess Microsoft has decided to just simply drop emails from my server without any notification what so ever.

    • ROOPHLOCH 2026 announced

      Solderpunk has announced ROOPHLOCH 2026 [1]

      If you are not familiar with ROOPHLOCH, read the announce, it is a wonderful event!

      [...]

      Every year I love to read the ROOPHLOCH posts. People can do such amazing things!

      I would love to participate, but I think this is very hard for me. I did once wrote an ROOPHLOCH phlog on a Palm device, but it is a bit silly to do that again. And I don't have that many special devices.

      Also, writing a phlog on my Palm doesn't really fulfill all the requirements. Although using a Palm I write the phlog outside and off-grid, I can't publish a phlog from an off-grid position, this I can only do from my home network.

  • Games

    • Homeworlds: Lock Out, Timing, and Green Seed Attacks

      After losing quite a few games to this mistake, I learned about the importance of not getting locked out of a color early on. By this, I mean that you need to have at least one ship of each color before all the small ships of that color are taken. That doesn't mean you have to get all the colors right away, but in particular the colors that your opponent is trying to get. If you get locked out of a color in this way, this makes it possible for your opponent to just keep building ships of that color without being concerned about you getting access to the larger ships. So, you need at least one small ship of that color so that, once the larger ships become available, you can start building them as well.

      If you neglect this, you may find yourself needing to build a large number of ships of a different color in order to get a two pip ship that can be traded out for a ship of that color, which might take too long or be impractical for other reasons. Another trick to get out of lock out is to trade your original three pip ship for a ship of that color; but this is often problematic, as that original ship is already providing an important power in your homeworld system, or it might increase your vulnerability to an overpopulation attack.