Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • lady of woodstock novena

    i think i haven't mentioned on here my plans to pray the woodstock novena this year. well, i am! it's day three. i've prayed with the way of the rose before but during the usual rolling 54 day "novena", dividing up the different mysteries for different days. i have also prayed the full mysteries previously as well, just not for nine days straight. could be interesting, especially since this one is recommended to be said in the intention for the recently departed, which - applicable. so far i'm surprised at how easy it is to go on for an hour.

  • Cold Tea?!

    This may sound (and may very well be) terrible if your idea of tea is milk and more sugar with some tea in it, though various teas do taste good cold. A good Pu'er in particular is quite drinkable when left to chill to room temperature, perhaps because you were busy pushing keys and forgot about the tea for a while. A less credible claim would be that it was an experiment for science. At least one other tea related publication muses about cold tea, so at least one or two others have come to the same conclusion that some teas can be had cold.

  • Re: Cold Tea?!

    Well, I've tried it by accident, and it's not my cup of tea, actually (pun intended).

    Ice tea is quite OK, but it is more of a soft drink, due to adding sugar and lemon juice or something.

    Pu'er is a nice tea, I've just lately started out drinking it. Since it is prepared with boiling water, it is a "hot" tea, and I like it like that.

  • Echoes of tomorrow (a flash fiction)

    "Welcome to our new paperless office," announced general manager Heather Eng on the first day at Advantex Corporation's new, state-of-the-art office. "Today marks a new milestone in Advantex's 30-year history. We go paperless as we ride the wave of the Information Superhighway, and as we do so, we save countless trees!"

    Gone were the old fax machines and dot-matrix printers. Now it's floppy disks, Zip Drives, and email. Over the coming months, old paper-based records will be scanned and digitized thanks to the OCR technology.

  • Preparing for tattoo

    It's bad form to ever retell your dreams, they're usually not that interesting to everyone else. But this one is pretty funny, and it's the start of this whole story.

    Some years ago I had this dream where I went to my local mall and discovered an absolutely amazing tattoo shop in there.

    I chose a design of intertwined snakes on my shin and lower leg, front and back. On the front was a diamond-shaped inset frame for the snake's head; on the back a diamond shaped inset of a cartoony baby snake hatching out of an egg.

  • Faith restored, though briefly lost a little bit again

    I ran sound for a stage at a local festival (most of which was in a mall), yesterday, and the first two acts were just so heartwarming to hear and watch. Add to that crowd response, as well as how glorious it was to see a mall teeming with people despite most of the store spaces being closed/empty. I even said to the crowd at one point, "You know, if we'd all just keep coming here and *pretending* it was vibrant, merchants would likely return."

  • Burning the library of Alexandria

    Every now and then, something gets hold of me and I go ahead and wipe the big collection of books that I had collected up to that point. Why do I do that? Of course, I could always point to the stuff that happens at home, maybe even try to blame my partner for it. That would be completely unfair of course. It is true that usually a domestic discussion is the catalyst that leads to this "great cleansing", but it is by no means the ultimate cause of it. So why is it then? Why, after all the time spent looking for, selecting and cataloguing books on many different and interesting subjects I go on a whim and with a single command delete everything that I have so far collected?

  • growth

    In San Francisco, of all places, I finally got into plant care. I started with succulents, which felt appropriate for the area. I had a Graptoveria Debbie, which was my absolute favorite, it's so gorgeous. Then we had some "Black Rose" succulents, some Lithops, and I think a fourth one that I cannot recall. They all did pretty well! Except I couldn't find anyone to take them from me when I left! So they ended up in a common area of the hotel we stayed at before our flight. Hopefully someone took them home instead of just tossing them... I tried, no one would actually come pick them up from me :((

• Technology and Free Software

  • Against the Appified Society

    The criticism of the appified society can’t be just “it sucks for those of us who refuse to join it, we’re left out”. That’d be circular reasoning. That’s weaksauce.

    Temporary inconvenices and setbacks like running out of battery or locking your phone in the car by mistakes are more legitimate. But we can do better: [...]

  • Disaster averted via free theater wifi

    One of the performance acts I needed to provide music for at a local festival this past weekend were six dance studio performances, which I rather enjoyed.

    However, about 45 minutes before they were to go on, the owner of that studio came up to me and asked me if I was ready, and I thought I was, so I said yes, except that I wasn't sure of the ordering of the audio tracks they had provided. Her response was something about how that seemed impossible given the mp3 filenames began with numbers indicating order. I mumbled something like "Oh, right...", but started feeling some fear quickly heading in the direction of panic.

  • How to setup aerc with Gmail and OAuth2

    Here are the steps for setting up the aerc email client with Gmail using OAuth2 authentication.

  • British operating systems, part one

  • OpenBSD extreme privacy setup

    This blog post explains how to configure an OpenBSD workstation with extreme privacy in mind.

    This is an attempt to turn OpenBSD into a Whonix or Tails alternative, although if you really need that level of privacy, use a system from this list and not the present guide. It is easy to spot OpenBSD using network fingerprinting, this can not be defeated, you can not hide the fact you use OpenBSD to network operators.

    I did this guide as a challenge for fun, but I also know some users have a use for this level of privacy.

    Note: this guide explains steps related to increase privacy of OpenBSD and its base system, it will not explain how to configure a web browser or how to choose a VPN.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Preparing for the DCU Soft Reboot

      Due to the utter failure of the DCEU (DC Extended Universe) films, DC has decided to do a soft-reboot with a new franchise called the DCU (DC Universe), and any shows outside of this new shared Universe will be labelled as Elseworlds (similarly to the comics imprint name).

      To prepare, I wanted to discuss the three different DC franchises so that it is easier to understand.

      The DCEU was the shared Universe of most of the DC films and one show. It started with the film Man of Steel, and includes the Ezra Miller Flash movie, Justice League, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Shazam!, Birds of Prey, Batman v Superman, Black Adam, Blue Beetle, and Peacemaker. DC produced these movies in partnership with WB.

    • Planning Gemini Hosting Service

      I have an idea for a project that I’m pretty excited about and I think it could be very helpful to the gemini community. I’ve started building it, but I realized that I should get peoples opinions before I go any further. I would love to hear from you, whether that be through a post response, or a direct message.

      Even though gemini is a very simple protocol and can be created with ease, you still need some technical expertise to set up a server. There are of course groups which allow you to have your own capsule directory such as [gemlog.blue], [bbs.geminispace.org]. [Or you could join a pubnix.]

    • Gemini Table Markup

      I believe that gemini needs ability to represent tables. There are several way to represent them, from manually alighning characters in pre-formated block (yuck!) to using data url with csv data. But these methods have a flaw in that they don't support cell groups and footers and only minimal support for headers. Seeing value in these feauters, I decided to create a table markup inspiered by org-mode.

  • Programming

    • Compare nlohmann/json to Glaze

      I've been wanting to replace nlohmann/json with something else in my codebase for a while now. Recently Glaze entered my radar and I decided to give it a try. Here are my thoughts after writing a PoC program comparing the two libraries.