Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Birch Leaf Sketch (publ. 2024-06-23)

    I was able to try another sketch during a few minutes of free time just before dinner. The subject was a paper birch leaf stolen from an obliging tree in our front yard. My sister gave me a sketch notebook, a few fancy artist pencils, and an archive pen, all an improvement over my previous tools.

  • You're not supposed to sympathize with Pan Han

    If you haven't read The Three Body Problem and ignored the spoiler warning, it deserves a bit of exposition. The Three Body Problem is a book about a lot of things. It's got themes regarding the limitations of human experience that I loved, and which were totally eclipsed in the second half by this conflict between two factions fighting over the fate of humanity. The Three Body Problem follows Earth on the precipice of a total invasion by a highly advanced alien race called the Trisolarians. It's going to take a few centuries for them to arrive, though. Aware of the fact that humans tend to develop technologically and industrially at an exponential pace (interesting assumption #1 of the series), the Trisolarians decide to organize humans against each other by establishing the Earth Trisolaris Organization (ETO).

  • 🔤SpellBinding: OCEHKNB Wordo: CLOVE

  • Better times

    So my last post was a bit dark and bitter. Since then I've had a nice conversation with my employer and some tasks were shifted to somebody else. This has really removed a big weight from my shoulders and I'm feeling genuinely better and in a lighter mood.

  • On Being Dull

    I am dull. Boring. Uninteresting. I think that's ok? Or at least that's what I've ended up telling myself haha.

    In reality I think it has negatively affected me, it at least makes me less likely to talk to people, I don't want to be a burden on them? Or bore them with my nothingness. It makes it hard to keep friends too I guess, if you don't talk to people they kinda don't talk to you - at least that's my experience.

    I understand it's partly down to always being told off or talked down to for my interests, my family simply do not care about what I'm interested in because it doesn't interest them. I remember talking about pokemon on several occasions at the dinner table as a kid and being very told very shortly: "no talking about pokemon at the table" this very quickly spiralled into anything I would talk about, which is probably the cause of me not talking about the things I enjoy, the guilt from me starting to think something was fun/cool.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The case of the weird profiling results

    After a bit of thought, I had an idea on how to determine where the CPU (Central Processing Unit) time is going on my gopher server [1]—I have at least two working hypotheses that I can test, wraping text and translating links. So, to test these, I will get a list of requests since the logs rotated earlier today, and then run them through the gopher server (a second one set up on my public server just for these tests) to get a baseline; then remove the link translations and run the requests again; then remove wraping the text and run the requests a third time and see what I get.

    For the first test, the expected results should result with the test gopher server having the same CPU utilization as the one that normally runs. It makes sense right—the normal one has x CPU utilization with y requests, so if I feed the test gopher server the same requests (even though all the requests come from the same location) it should have the same CPU utilization. Or at least close enough to show that I'm on the right track.

  • Cafecito

    I've been trying and failing to make cafecito for a while, and I finally got the crema right.

  • Summer is almost here

    I can't believe it's been a year again.

    My work life has been very intense, and I just now feel like I have a bit of spare time and energy to work on my personal projects.

    I am posting from my RasPi, using Lynx, typing with one hand as I hold an ice-cream with the other one.

  • Namno blog: Distrohopping misadventures

    Up until recently I have been running Debian testing. It worked for me for a while, but last ~4 months it stopped updating, most likely because debian team is in the middle of mitigation of year 2038 problem. Some packages still could be updated, so I tried to install one package. Because I didn't read output as thoroughly as I should have apt uninstalled many packages, one of them being xorg. I have found this situation as a reason to try other distros, so I burned OpenSuse iso and installed it.

  • OpenSSH Autoban

    Continuing the recent topic cluster of firewall bans in response to naughty traffic, rumor has it that OpenSSH is adding a temporary autoban and moreover will turn the feature on by default, coming soon to OpenBSD 7.6 (fall 2024); other operating systems will pick up on the new OpenSSH at their leisure, and then eventually users will update their systems to obtain this new feature, or not.

  • You need another dimension to free your mind in

    ASCII freedom is only in one dimension. If you want more — and you want more — you’ll want to have a branching tree structure like one sees in Ferengi writing.