Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Posting small pleasures

    I generally only post things (especially to my main gemlog) when I'm either very unhappy and want to complain, or I've achieved something interesting. Lately while the former has been true, I've also not had the energy to write anything. So in the interest of building up some energy, it's time for something completely different.

    I've been recovering from a mild case of covid. This morning, I woke up, started the coffee maker, and went back to lie down. While I was making coffee, I gave my cat some wet food, because she was asking for it. When I lay back down, she came and sat on my chest, with her nose close to my nose, my head tilted up on my pillow. We relaxed there together, eyes opening and closing, noses occasionally touching, until my coffee was ready.

  • Performative empathy

    Usually, the implication here is that if neurotypical feel upset or unheard when someone expresses empathy in this way, then they're being ableist. The person seeking empathy should be the one trying to understand other's expressions of empathy, as opposed to others working to express their empathy in the language that the one seeking empathy will understand.

  • Math Flywheel (publ. 2024-01-30)

    Two weeks ago, my six-year-old Silas was working on his math homework.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: DHIMOSP Wordo: CRORE

  • Re: "The Death of the Grown-Up" by Diana West

    I picked this book quite some time ago at one of many bookcrossings in my area, and it has been dusting on my shelf until recently I decided to challenge myself and regain my ability to read.

• Politics and World Events

  • gopher.black — Citizenship

    Tomorrow I have a call with the US Embassy in Iceland. It's an informal interview in preparation for my renunciation of citizenship. Friday is the big in-person meeting where I'll make it official. No more US citizenship for me! In a few days I'll be Italian and only Italian (at least for now). I'd like to get Icelandic citizenship when I qualify in a few years.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Running dezhemini on guix

    Guix is a very powerful distribution and makes it easy to distribute your own off-main channels (additional package and service repositories). A couple of months ago Ludovic Courtès wrote an article on the guix blog about publishing your source development repository as a channel and it got me to move my capsule to a guix server.

  • Knobs, buttons, dials & FreeBSD

    I like physical buttons, knobs, dials. As an extension of that, I quite enjoy messing with input devices. of course, that includes keyboards. For the longest time, I used a unicomp pc122 clone with buckling springs. But recently I traded it in for a pinnacle DEKO fast action keyboard.

  • TTY InfoScreen

    As a little fun project and to have some actual information of my homelab and some other information I made an 'info screen' which runs completely in a tty.

  • Wayland Video Playback

    I have an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H mini PC. This has a modest integrated graphics card. And, one of the things holding me back from switching to Wayland was video playback. When I watch a video on Wayland, there is a loss of frame rate to the point where I get motion sick.

    I was recently watching RetroBytes' "The History of X11". And it suddenly occurred to me that the problem might be that I'm using an application compiled for X11. And that is forcing my video to be emulated by XWayland. This might be a source of the latency I experience.

    I'm using openSUSE which comes with a Wayland version of KDE. I logged into "Plasma (Wayland)". And I watched a video--specifically in Firefox. Firefox enabled Wayland support by default starting last December.

  • Meddling With Mechanics

    It's time to start on a new project! This one is an internal game jam at work titled "Don't Go Outside!" It technically doesn't start properly until the middle to end of February, but that doesn't stop me from looking at mechanics and learning new techniques before I get started.

  • Folstavia - Anime 5E RPG World Setting & Monster Expansions

    My shipment of stuff from Dyskami Publishing's Folstavia - Anime 5E RPG World Setting & Monster Expansions came on 11 December 2023, but I'm only now doing a post about it.

  • Weight of the world

    I remember when Mr. Freeman series was just coming out, 14 years ago. I remember my feelings when I first saw the episode in which Mr. Freeman dares the viewer to erase own hard drive or gift away own mobile phone, claiming that doing so would be like suicide. I felt my supremacy. I knew that Mr. Freeman was mostly right, but I was different.

    Year 2010. I was a student. I had my Nokia feature phone and a laptop that saw most GNU/Linux distributions in existence. Neither of them were really defining me. You see, around that time, most of my life was real. Offline lectures and seminars in the university, meetings with friends and family, courting the girls, failing miserably at dance classes, working out with LARP club -- it all was physical, real. There were couple things I cared about, like latex sources of my thesis, but even that could have been easily recovered from paper print-outs.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Round, not purple

      Recently, I got an email response to my previous post that contained advice "get as offline as possible". Somehow this simple and probably obvious idea made me think, and I came to the conclusion that I have been holding many things completely wrong.