Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Exercise

    If it's quiet (when the power is out) one may hear the slow surf-like sound of clothing brushing against itself. Not so much these last few nights, as the treefrogs have been going nuts.

  • Happy New Year 2024

    Once again 'pharc' worked truly well. All posts were successfully archived. This means that I will not have any need to update the code this year. There is not any more option in sight that needs to be implemented.

    I am not a coder anyway, I write several scripts throughout the year but they are basically text manipulation for a private website we have in an internet association. Sometimes people ask me to implement something and I try to do my best.

  • When the jeans rip beside the seam.

    It's quite rare that I buy new clothing these days. I'm not super into clothes in general so I usually keep my wardrobe pretty lean, and when I do get new stuff, I'll get it from a second hand shop.

    This is where I get pretty much all my jeans.

    I don't mind my jeans getting ripped. I'm not super big on the look of ripped jeans--if I get a substantial rip I'll patch it, which is an aesthetic I do in fact like. But most of the rips I get end up being rather small, and they don't feel like they merit a patch on their own. So, I'll just take some thread and a needle and I'll repair them.

  • sold soul to telecom industry

    *Barges in and asks bartender for a Budweiser, is already seemingly drunk* I started a wireless sales job a few months ago after moving cross-country, and the nature of my job is sort of interesting.

    I sell Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile in a big box store (think Costco or Walmart), and the company I work for is far from the greatest. For the most part, I've been learning on the fly in this job, as I received almost no training. However, I believe it has helped me in terms of my confidence in talking to people. It also got me interested in the state of the modern cellular industry.

  • 🎧 Remastered Obsession

    If you’ve been following along you’ll have read about my quest to remaster Mike Cosford’s Hyperspace Mix, from the Obsession: Progressive Excellence tape-pack.

  • Is There a Term for the Small Sadnesses for What Will Never Be?

    A couple of years ago I decided to take my in-progress poetry manuscript seriously. I talked with a few poets whose opinions I trusted around finding and hiring an editor. I followed up with one of them, and she and I worked through things together. A few months later, the manuscript was better for it.

    I sent it to a few places. I got mostly personal, courteous rejections: close, send this elsewhere, etc. But the one that hurt, what I tried to shrug off but couldn't, was a rejection from a press with whom I've got a personal connection. I had low expectations. I knew the odds. And it was a quick no, and it stung like hell.

  • some updates ~

    And I have one microgame up, and two bits of microfiction, and have moved some things around. But, actual page updates to go with posts! :D

  • Detached

    Hello there ~Bartender, pour me something strong, large.

    Since shortly I am now in the later half of my life. It's been eight years of marriage and two years of having a child. But I've never felt so detached from family ever before. Feels odd. Son is (still) having massive sleep problems. He doesn't talk, he doesn't eat properly. Just runs and laughs. Wife just keeps silent whenever she's upset. Both don't help.

    Work is at a still stand, I am unable to and really don't feel like I want to invest more energy into it. But I am here with 12 years working in tech, still at the lowest level. I am allowed to call myself "senior", but no on

• Politics and World Events

  • Biogeochemical girl

    "Biological gender" is at best a conceptual model for how human bodies operate, and it's one that hurts a lot of people in the way it materializes patriarchal power structures--it lends the authority of science to something that ultimately we just made up. You know, like economics.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The Repair Culture, Part II—Electric DeoxIToo

    I've repaired my Logitech Trackman Marble a few times over the years, but this time the traditional fix [1] didn't work. But I have seen enough Black computer repair videos [2] to know that perhaps, a liberal application of DeoxIT Spray Contact Cleaner [3] on the buttons might work. I ordered some last week, and when I went out to check the mail, I found it sitting on top of the mail box! I'm surprised it didn't fall off.

  • Dear LinkedIn, I don't think I'm the expert you want answering these questions

    I cross post links to my blog on LinkedIn [1] mainly to be contrarian, or at least think I'm providing something different than all the business related stuff posted there. But lately, I've seen notifications there like, “You're **one of the few experts** invited to add this collaborative article: …” and it's some article about AI (Artificial Ingelligence) [2], or Agile [3] or the latest one, “Your team is falling behind on project deadlines. What web-based tools can help you catch up?”

  • Thumby release 🏃

    After about a year, my Thumby game, Tinymine, is out. A year is a long time, but in my defence I got sidetracked by writing other stuff.

  • Browsing Gemini with Kermit

    Kermit has been continuously developed since 1981, first at Columbia University in New York City and since 2011 by Frank da Cruz independently. da Cruz is one of the original contributors to the project, meaning he has been involved with Kermit for a staggering 43 years!

    I began to dig into Kermit after trying CKermit as an SSH wrapper. At first, I was only interested in its ability to facilitate file transfers without dropping the SSH connection. Soon I found myself wandering farther and farther into CKermit's extensive command list, deceptively encapsulated into a single `kermit` invocation at the command line.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Vanitydoc reloaded

      I created vanitydoc to be able to use my own domain for my go modules while being able to host the code on different forges.

      [...]

      I used vanitydoc to generate the documentation of all (~10) my Go modules. I initially wrote a Go program that started multiple instances of vanitydoc in parallel to achieve this. After a while, this became quite cumbersome to maintain, so I integrated this capability directly into vanitydoc. My Go program has now been replaced by a straightforward JSON file.

  • Programming

    • How much for the book? I don't think I paid that much for the computer

      Now, about that Amiga Hardware Reference Manual [1] link in my previous post [2]—$577.99‽

    • I know languages that have support for “read-only memory,” but what about “write-only memory?”

      I'm still hacking away on my overengineered 6809 assembler [1] and one feature I've beem mulling over is a form of static access checking. I have byte-level access control when running tests [2] but I'm thinking that adding some form of “assemble time checking” would also be good. I've been writing code hitting the hardware of the Color Computer, and there are semantics around hardware that I don't think many languages (or even assembler) support—write only memory! As the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual [3] states (only referenced here because it's a good example of what I'm talking about): [...]