Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • If you worried a bit more, I could worry a bit less

    My life is, and always has been, dominated by worry. Sometimes it's just a nagging, background annoyance, but on other occasions it escalates to a crippling, stultifying anxiety. I'm ashamed to say that I sometimes berate my family and friends because they don't worry when I feel they should. I just can't help thinking that I worry such a lot because I'm doing everybody else's worrying for them. People, I feel, just _don't worry enough_.

    Like most parents and grandparents, I worry most about the safety and security of my family. What's different, it seems to me, is the length I'm willing to go to, to mitigate every conceivable risk.

    Let me give you an example.

  • forced samadhi

    The integration is hard. I don't feel good, and it's not even a substance 'down' of any kind. My soul, my mind my emotions are re-balancing slowly. I'm glad my body is doing well...

    Samadhi is a traumatic experience. They don't tell you that when you start meditation. Samadhi is the goal, oh and by the way, you'll be traumatized for somewhere between a few months to a lifetime, or maybe multiple lifetimes.

• Technology and Free Software

  • ROOPHLOCH hackathon

    A guest is visiting this weekend to teach me about the networking approach I'm curious about for replicating packet-radio BBS in today's world. The keywords are LoRa, RNode, and Reticulum.

    We're going to try to get something working at least good enough for me to post something to Gopher a half-mile from an internet access point, and maybe manage routing serial over Reticulum before she leaves.

    She arrives sometime Saturday and leaves Monday. If you'd like to join us as we play with weird network- ing, I suspect we'll be at it Saturday 1000-1300 UTC, Sunday 0800-late UTC and maybe Monday morning.

  • Summer of upgrades (Epilogue: Fell for it again)

    If you read my previous "Summer of upgrades" gemlogs you might reminder "Never underestimate the power of having no plan at all". Well I clearly underestimated that one! Here is quick runup of the recent changes in my homelab.

  • To My Students

    A little while ago, one of my colleagues sent me this. It's a thoughtful piece by a Computer Science professor, writing to his students about the new tech world of scarce junior jobs, about the devaluing of expertise as workers are told by their companies to go all-in on AI. We spend years in school learning how to program, how to debug; and it's a lifelong skill, one that you develop and refine. Or at least, that's how it was for me. I'm in my mid 40s; I can see that things are changing; but I wonder, for how long? Anyone can vibe code an app, but what happens when that app becomes used, becomes critical, and then nobody understands how it actually works, because nobody actually wrote it?

    That's the world we're getting into, one in which the tech industry is trying to railroad one particular piece of tech into our lives. And while I hope I can hold out, being in a niche industry whose code is much, much more complicated than "I need a Python script that...", I can still see how things are being remade around me.

  • Arduino's Long Move Away From Arm's MbedOS Culminates in the Zephyr RTOS Core's 1.0.0 Release

    Arduino's Zephyr real-time operating system (RTOS) core for its microcontrollers has hit the milestone of a formal 1.0.0 release, a little over a month after the company announced it was leaving beta status with version 0.9.0.

    "We're excited to announce version 1.0.0 of the ArduinoCore-Zephyr, our biggest release yet," the Arduino team says of the new release. "Building on the stability milestone we hit with 0.90.0, this release brings new hardware support, an updated Zephyr base, and a long list of fixes and improvements across the core. Thank you to everyone who tested 0.90.0, filed issues, and helped us get here. This one's for the community."

  • Luser storage issue delayed my dinner...

    It was already one of those days where I was basically a cluster fire fighter - putting out small fires all over the system. Normally, that's a minor annoyance of being a systems administrator, it actually does come with the territory. Yesterday, was different though. My son and I were on campus at 06:30 and began working immediately! We worked until 14:20 or so, and ate our lunches on the way home; side note, we call them "car lunches", which is fitting.

    Once we arrived at home, it seemed like it was going to be a rather relaxing evening. I helped prepare dinner for the family, and was ready to hear about my daughter's day while we were eating. My son picked-up an extra shift at his other job, so I said I'd drop him off. I came back hungry as a mofo and then _it happened_.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: Missing

      Has something changed in the air at smol.pub? I'm too new to notice, but I miss littlecampsite, too.

      It reminds me that online community can be very real, but it it is also very fragile. Almost by definition, people are bound to come and go and the reasons for the coming and going aren't necessarily public. (Nor should they be).

      The best we can do is try to build a culture of openness and welcome. I think I found that here.