Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • ... and then did the wheels veer from the tracks

    Like I previously posted, beautiful start. Got into some Pub replying. Great leftovers for breakfast. Coffee the way I like it.

    Then I go to the sink to rinse dishes.

    ANTS!!!

    Tiny little buggers. It looked like they were entering through a hole in the kitchen window frame whose purpose is to let rainwater drain back outside. But then there were so many it was hard to tell, because there was another place that might have been point of entry.

  • It's a beautiful morning

    This day is off to a heck of a beautiful start.

    And here I am wording about it instead of being blissfully (see also: wordlessly?) immersed in it.

    But such is addiction to words.

    Can I stop it?

    Probably. But it seems part of self-definition, which continues to seem the greatest bitch-to-let-go-of of all.

  • Kitten Burst

    I picked up a really unique game called Kitten Burst during the latest Steam sale. I wasn’t very far into the game when I knew I’d be writing about it here once I finished it. So here we are!

  • "The Stoic Challenge" book notes

    Gods set you up for a challenge to see how resilient you are. Is getting angry worth the price? If you stay calm then you can find the optimal workaround for the obstacle. Stay calm even with big setbacks. Practice minimalism of negative emotions.

    Put a positive spin on everything. What should you do if someone wrong you? Don't get angry, there is no point in that, it just makes you suffer. Do the best what you got now and keep calm and carry on. A resilient person will refuse to play the role of a victim. You can develop the setback response skills. Turn a setback. e.g. a handycap, into a personal triumph.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BEMNORV Wordo: GANEF

• Technology and Free Software

  • The Fluctuating Coolness of Geekdom

    I know I've written quite a bit about "geek culture" on here in the past, but it is a phenomenon I find myself thinking about a lot, as I feel I had a front-row seat to the entire odyssey that was the rise and fall of geek culture. Before the 2000s, every part of geek culture was considered deeply uncool, both the aesthetic and cultural aspects as well as the . However, in the late 2000s and into the early-to-mid 2010s, it seems geek culture enjoyed a brief window of being THE cool thing (see: Felicia Day's song "Now I'm the One That's Cool).

    At some point in the mid 2010s, however, only the most surface-level pop-culture aspects of geek culture (such as gaming, movies, superheroes etc) became simply a part of culture-at-large, while the parts of geek culture that made it truly "geek culture," that is to say the countercultural streak, the refusal to walk in lock-step with the rest of society, the determination to actually *learn* and *understand* things, that has become even more taboo than it was before the 2000s.

  • A gentle guide on getting your Tenstorrent card running on Arch Linux (with the Metalium stack)

    Recently I got a message from Tenstorrent's community manager for helping with improving the installation documents. To make it easier for everyone. While that is still in progress, I wanted to document how I got my Tenstorrent card running on Arch Linux (since Tenstorrent officially only supports Ubuntu).

  • The Right Tool for the Job (plus bonus Marmoreal Tomb unboxing and initial impressions)

    Since my last post, I decided to pivot to a (closer to) pure MUD version of Vanquish Vanguard Online, or VVO. The only differentiation I'd like to make from a pure MUD is to have support for a minimap and some primitive, static graphics for showing image locations, character and monster portraits, and the like. Even this primitive level of graphics does unfortunately mean that I can't go with the standard Telnet MUD, since that would obviously be text-only. That means I have to consider more sophisticated solutions.

    Despite the fact that I sometimes have a burning hatred for CSS, I nonetheless like to gravitate toward HTML/CSS/Javascript for creating GUIs that don't require sophisticated graphics, mostly because it's the GUI tech I'm most familiar with, and I've never had good experiences with GUI frameworks like Qt, JavaFX, etc., always finding them a pain to work with compared to building a webpage. So, wanting to use a webpage for the client side, I decided to use a PHP backend for the server side since I have an account with a webhost with built-in PHP support.

  • Licenses, Free/Open Source, and Maintenance Woes

    Specifically leaving aside what Nat wrote about EEE and the Fediverse (which is interesting, and which I've thought about a bit, to the extent that I've just blocked threads.net via my Mastodon account), I think I agree with ploum, and with Nat - for infrastructure-type code, there are a lot of reasons not to use the more permissive open source licenses, such as MIT or the BSDs.

    The thing is, I'm not sure how much it matters. We live in an age where companies violate copyright, and norms, with absolute impunity. Think of Microsoft or OpenAI sucking up the entire text of the pre-generative-AI web, creating models from it, and having their lawyers claim there's no copyright problem, that when they copy, that makes it right. It used to be claimed that the GPL (and variants) would force companies to open source any changes. That feels like a lot of wishful thinking now, belonging to the same era that felt that the web would be a great force for democratization, rather than the perfect surveillance mechanism for authoritarian regimes across the world.

  • The UPS Story

    So at some point management decided to buy the UPS; it was a budget model from a budget vendor and not the more expensive pair the IT group had recommended. There was a pair as all the rack-mounted servers had two power supplies, and in theory there were different circuits feeding the UPS, and if you're really fancy you'll have two different power lines coming into the building, from two different providers. (A single earthquake can still ruin all this redundancy.) Anyways it turned out that the Linux software shipped by the budget vendor was only for Fedora 12, which may not be the right number, but if you think "at least a decade out of date and clearly not getting security updates" you wouldn't be far wrong. Also it was only for 32-bit linux, while in production we had already in some past year migrated everything to 64-bit. So to actually run the vendor's software—apart from running some Windows system, nope, not happening—we would have had to install a Fedora 12 32-bit system and wire up the UPS to that. At least the UPS used USB and not $100 serial cables with some janky non-standard pinout as was common back in the good old days.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • gemini.koplugin 0.2

      Announcing an update to the gemini plugin for KOReader.

    • New "soundtrack" for my Gemini browsing

      I don't know about you, but I like to listen to something smooth or calm while relaxing browsing through Gemini. And I'm a Konpeito orphan.