Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Hard cheeses

    Restaurants, please don’t make halloumi, paneer, “grilloumi” or similar hard cheeses be your “vegetarian” option because they are almost twice as bad for the climate as even pork is (and pork is already super bad).

    I know I come across as a killjoy nag on this doomposting blog but I don’t fault any one consumer for being taken in by this greenwashing. It’s presented as the green, the vegetarian, the vegetable-eating option but hard cheeses are not plants.

  • My day - Sept 6, 2026

    We went out to Texas Roadhouse for dinner tonight. On the way listened to “Steak” from the Madagascar Jr. soundtrack that we sang along to all summer when he was doing the show at Upright. I believe that a legitimate interest in eating actual steak stemmed from hearing that song repeatedly — and we quickly convinced one of them to try the steak from the kids menu — “Steak, it’s what I crave!” It was met with a mixed reception. Maybe a tad too pink in the center. Brought home as a leftover - hopefully to discover that leftover restaurant steak isn’t that craveable.

  • enough for one evening

    Every object comes with small jobs. Find somewhere for it. Keep it working. Move it out of the way. Software does this too, with accounts, updates, notifications and settings. Eventually a quiet evening has a maintenance queue.

    That's what interests me about minimalism: having fewer things making claims on my time. A room can still have books, records and a battered box of dice. I want to use those things, and have enough attention left to enjoy them.

  • A nice place to start

    What is this place about? Serious things. That's the short answer. How long is the "long" one, you ask? Let me introduce you to the No Man's Land. Ever heard of it? It's the land that no one owns or has the rights to. Unclaimed. It's basically the world around us as we see it. We like to think that we are in charge here. No, we are not. We were born onto this land, we live here, and someday we'll just leave it. W

• Technology and Free Software

  • Towards a plain text life

    A little while ago, I began to try to organise my life using plain text files instead of proprietory systems. This basically comes down to 3 things: a calendar (calendar.txt), a to-do list (todo.txt, surprisingly) and a Notes folder. That's easy enough to do on my laptop, but what about when I don't have my laptop with me?

    I manage these files through a Raspberry Pi which hosts them as a git repository. As the day unfolds, I push changes to the repo. At the beginning of the day, I pull from the repo. This means I'm not tied to just my laptop. I have a couple of bash scripts to handle the pulling and pushing and warn of conflicts. So far, so good.

  • Notes on an overheard conversation at a D&D game

    “There's a new Zuckerberg movie coming out!”

    “Yes, the ‘The Social Reckoning.’ It's an Aaron Sorkin film.”

    “Didn't he do ‘The Social Network?’”

    “Yes he did.”

    “I heard he asked Jesse Eisenberg to reprise his role as Mark Zuckerberg, but Jesse turned it down because he didn't want to play such an evil person again.”

    “Wait! Didn't he also play Lex Luthor?”

    “Yes.”

    “He's saying that Lex Luthor is less evil than Mark Zuckerberg?”

    “Seems so.”

  • Are there more bugs in the past or the future?

    This question has been on my mind for perhaps 6 or 7 years.

    If there are more bugs in the past, then being on the "bleeding edge" of your ecosystem at all times is the only responsible state, and you're likely to gravitate toward a rolling Linux distribution like Arch, or otherwise see no problem with frequently bumping your project's package pins, etc.

    If there are more bugs in the future, then waiting to upgrade until the last possible moment is the only way to minimize the pain of betrayal by upstream developers who constantly break their APIs from under your feet and introduce fresh vulnerabilities. You pick slow-moving distributions like Ubuntu and always hang back a few language versions. A software package doesn't need to be upgraded unless it fixes a bug you do have or adds a feature you explicitly need.

• Programming

  • Icons in Swaybar

    While at work on a fresh install the same settings defaulted to nice looking Swaybar icons, at home they were coloured and awkward. I fixed this this morning with a combination of:

    * An explicit `font` declaration. * Replacing emoji usage with icon unicode points.