Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Asian Hornet

    So while doing a hike this weekend we encountered a guy working in his garden. He asked if we'd ever seen an Asian Hornet. We didn't and he showed us 3 he caught in a sugar trap he had set out. He also told us the fire department had removed a nest from one of his trees too using a ladder truck.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ILNUSTP Wordo: ROWAN

  • She's amazing

    I love the way she smile. I love how she's able to settle to sleep on her own when satisfied since very little. I am glad I'm giving her her own space now. She still needs me at night, but the rest of the time she's her own person. I sometimes forget she's not my first, who needed me constantly, but who was also wise beyond his years. She's the independent observing quiet child and i need to remember she is exactly who i was when i was also a child. And that doesn't make it easier. But it makes it magical.

  • Hello, world?

    I stumbled upon this pug by accident. I wasn't exactly searching for a quiet place on the internet. I am not used to internet being quiet. Internet described as quiet is almost paradoxical for me. My relationship with internet is screwed up. I am paralysed by it. I grew up with it but as I developed, it developed as well. And not for the better. It is just recently when I realised that it's not the world I am supposed to live in. My world, real world is waiting for me but I can't get past the dreaming state. I am a mere vessel designed to live an artificial life that has engulfed my reality. Will I ever be able to revert to a life that is authentic? A reality that is worth living for?

• Technology and Free Software

  • Free software development usually proceeds dialectically

    Or, why I've seen community contributions to free software struggle, and why that's probably ok.

    By this I mean specifically community-driven software projects, not corporate-backed open source projects. Those projects tend to make contributions *too* easy, in order to monetize free community labor.

    In my experience, outsider contributions to actively maintained upstream free software project are usually not welcome. And by this, I do not mean that free software maintainers are unwelcoming, but that actually getting a patch accepted by such projects is often disproportionately difficult.

  • Boundaries

    by way of /usr/src/usr.sbin/smtpd/queue_fs.c on OpenBSD 7.5. This may be surprising if one is prone to run the disk more than 95% full and wants messages to still be delivered, presumably as if the disk is too full then the SMTP server might be in a awkward position of having accepted a message but not having the disk space to process it, which SMTP frowns on muchly. Hence probably the reason for this check; refuse the mail unless there is "adequate" space available.

  • Delete your news apps!

    These days, nearly everyone with a smartphone seems to get their news from news apps and social media. Algorithms are designed to get them glued to the screen and continually outraged about whatever topic gives the media outlets and app developers more engagement, more clicks, and by extension, higher ratings and ad revenues.

    At the same time, we seem to have forgotten how to read. We just skim through the outrage-inducing headlines and lead paragraphs, and before we even critically understand them, we propagate them by hitting the "share" button.

  • Looking Back on AuraGem's Development

    AuraGem used to be called Ponix and it used to be mostly Gopher-first. It was originally intended to be another pubnix system, but that never took off. It was, however, one of the first 50 capsules created for Gemini. At that time I was fully on board with Gemini and excited about it. So I started a new server named Ponix.

    Unfortunately, I don't remember much from this time, hence the name "lost beginnings." What I do remember is that I had a Gopher server at this time, and that Gopher server had a Sefaria proxy and a YouTube proxy. Unfortunately, all of the code and information was lost when my Raspberry Pi's SDCard died. I don't remember what year this was, but it might have been earlier in 2021, I'm not sure. I did end up relaunching Ponix and re-writing much of the stuff that I had, this time in Gemini first.

  • I have a dumb idea

    I wanted something light that can watch repositories for changes, build them, and publish the content if everything builds okay. I didn’t want some resource-hungry GitLab or other massive Ci/CD pipeline to do this. I just want something that will run on a system somewhere so that when I’m using other systems to push stuff to my repositories, they get fetched and built. This will be handy for when I’m debugging changes to my mud and want them to just show up on the test server, or even for publishing stuff to Gemini.