Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BGILNTY Wordo: LUXES

  • Lake surprise ☱

    We were there a few days ago, looking at baby coots. They start as a fluffy ball with a red face, then get rather elegant grey throats. Even when quite large they will ignore food that's in the water right next to them, preferring to be fed by their parents.

  • Packrafting

    Last sunday we went packrafting. We rented to packraft that we could pick up around 10:00 and had to bring back before 17:00. We did one of the suggested routes of 16km which was 9km walking and 7km packrafting. The rafts were actually more compact and lightweight than I had imaged before, the paddles were actually more bulky. With the rent there was also a waterproof backpack included which was useful for the walking part and keeping everything dry during the part on the water.

• Politics and World Events

  • My reflections and thoughts on the United States of America today

    As an artist, here's my apolitical observation detached from my own political opinions: The above image will end up in a history textbook generations from now. It has all the elements that make a great photograph and an emotionally moving work of art. The centerpiece is Donald Trump, defiantly raising his fist and appearing to shout something ("fight, fight, fight," according to a press report) into the sky. A large American flag overshadows him. Like the iconic soldiers hoisting the Star-Spangled Banner atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, the Secret Service agents' motion frames the stationary Donald Trump in the middle. The framing and perspective of this picture are perfect. I'm sure someone will also make bronze sculptures inspired by this photo. It is a great piece of art. It shows the indomitable spirit of a man. Too bad this is Donald Trump and based on what I know about him, my appreciation of this art can be diminished.

  • Trump shot

    I wanna partially defend people like Seth Meyers who distanced themselves from this assassination attempt because I think that in general, political violence is wrong. That belief is partially religious (it's part of bodhisattva vows—while there are interpretations of ahimsa that make all kinds of exceptions, I'm not so convinced by those exceptions. They've given me hate but I know there is love) but it’s also common sense because if the only out is for the camps to shoot each other, I’m pretty sure that we on the pluralistic left are the ones that would lose. The arc of the moral universe has been pretty flaked out recently.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Gemini: Re anyone using SCGI (vs CGI) on their capsule? how do you like it?

    Yes, much of the stuff on gemini://gemini.thegonz.net uses SCGI. There were a few reasons for that. One is that molly-brown kills CGI scripts after 10 seconds, which is reasonable but means they can't be used for streaming. Another is to be able to run as a separate user. Another is to store state within a process between requests. I have some C code to wrap a CGI-script to run as SCGI, gemscgi_wrap.c in gemrepl. I could polish that up and release it if anyone's interested.

  • Change Virtual Console Font Size

    openSUSE Tumbleweed follows a rolling release update cycle. And, when there are major updates to KDE, I like to switch to the virtual console (Ctrl+Alt+F1) to run zypper so that the update doesn't fail. Sometimes KDE will reset (and kill the update process) if one of its critical files is updated. So, using the virtual console avoids that potential issue.

    The problem I'm having is that the virtual console is impossible to read. The font size is too small. Or, the display resolution is too high. And, I need some way to make the console more readable.

  • How I'm Syncing My Podcasts

    When I first got into podcast listening, I started with Google Podcasts. Pretty soon after I was wanting something a bit more developed, so I switched to PocketCasts, and there I stayed for years until very recently.

    I really liked PocketCasts. Enough to pay for their monthly subscription to get access to their web player. It’s been super handy having all my podcast subscriptions and playback positions synced between all my devices and available anywhere I can pull up a web browser.

  • Done with Duolingo

    Almost done my Irish course, with another $130 (or whatever) payment looming at the end of the month, I've decided I've just had it. I'm not going to finish the course in time. It's not worth it to me to pay another chunk of money for next year if I don't have a course I want to do. And so I cancelled my subscription, and have been unsubscribing from the mess of email lists over the last few days.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Who's Fucking with Antenna?

      I'm not going to link the asshole's post explaining their rationale, I'm not even going to summarize it. You're a pathetic vandal.

    • Hack and Slash

      It's fascinating how even small, simple, static sites like this one are still liable to tinkering. Or perhaps it is because they are small that they are so tinkerable. It's easier when you can see the whole thing, poke at all of its parts. I can better envision rebuilding, modifying, hacking a bicycle than a train engine, for example.