Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • “What has happened to optimism?”

    Richard asks:

    “What has happened to optimism?”

    …where he wonders specifically about imagining a successful, peaceful governance system at whole-Earth scale.

  • taking notes

    I used to imagine 
    what I'd want to teach you
    then caught myself and felt shame
    silly girl, thinking you'd even want that
    but there you are taking notes
    of the silliest things
    I choose to share
    

• Science

  • A few minutes of AM telescope stargazing

    This morning (2026-10-09) I was pretty tired and didn't wake up especially early, but the skies were still clear, so I was eager to spend at least a few minutes stargazing before work. Notwithstanding what I said earlier about the longer setup and teardown times, I was eager to try out my 90mm refractor again. So I decided to bring out my telescope and just forego any hope of doing a sketch.

    I finished getting set up in the yard at about 4:45am, which gave me around 15 or 20 minutes to work with. I took another look at Jupiter and mars, with similar results as last time — I detected some real color but could not distinguish any planetary detail. Jupiter's moons were interesting, with all four on one side, and the two of those in the middle were squeezed close together.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The final blow

    Until recently I was able to connect to the sdf.org from my SGI O2. The ssh worked with older cyphers. Now the SDF's ssh server is updated (which is easy to understood) so the O2 cannot connect any more.

    I can live without ssh but it also means that I cannot access the git on the SDF from the O2. This is much worse.

  • (No) life without smartphone

    The university introduced the mandatory dual-factor logins everywhere (to far the toilets do dot require this but one never knows...). In practice, the only place where I can log in without a smartphone is my desktop with installed thumb reader. A windows desktop, of course. Everything else requires the smartphone.

    Honestly, they had no options as the security level required by the university by the law needs this.

  • Two Months With the Fairphone 4

    Back in November 2024, we bought a Fairphone 4 as a hedge against the tariffs and trade wars that seemed likely to commence the following year, figuring they'd drive up prices just in time for one of our phones to kick the bucket. The idea of a phone that's built as sustainably as possible, is user-repairable, and guarantees support for a minimum of 5 years was appealing.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • XMPP and OMEMO

      There's this joke about the various encrypted messengers that basically goes like this: you open the messenger app and all you can see is that all your chats are encrypted and your device cannot decrypt them anymore.

      Encryption is hard, and the usability around it is hard, too.

    • Trying to gemlog again!

      Hi, so I am trying again to do some gemlogging.

      I used to have my blog go through gemini as well, but it often looked broken as the markdown to gemtext converter was rather shoddy and I just didn't really.. Care.

      The problem with writing to my blog is that it feels way more public, especially nowadays that there's bunch of Linux news etc. reading it. I do still post my cosplay images there and other such non-Linux stuff. But doing blogging is a bit of a hassle at times.