Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • there is no rain to wash things away

    I've been desperately hoping for rain for weeks and the rain keeps avoiding us or dissipating just before it reaches us or ...

    Honestly that whole thing -- promise of rain, no rain -- feels like it's a good metaphor for a lot of things right now, but I'm too flat and too dead to articulate exactly how.

  • Death... again

    Another line in the proverbial address book erased, yet another life claimed by the be-normal-or-gtfo-society that has been forced on every soul descended into flesh.

  • Onion Love - Harumakigohan

    So I looked at the metadata of this thing and apparently there is no genre, I guess you could classify this as idk because back when I wanted to write something about this and looked at what AI says about it's genre it also couldn't confidently identify any of the genre as the dominant one?

    Also someone said it sounds like the Wii Sports Resort music? And I have no idea how it sounds like that considering I've heard it for at least 3 consecutive years?

  • I did... stuff 🏁

    It took about seven hours to drive to the Belgian Grand Prix in 2018. I've been watching F1 for nearly 30 years, but that's the only race I've ever been to. I stood near the top of the Kemel straight, hoping to see some overtaking. On lap one, I nearly got it. The first four cars arrived at the corner side by side. But none of them got past, and the rest of the race was a procession. We got home at about five in the morning.

  • Third thoughts

    I don't remember which book specifically, but in one of Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books the idea of first, second and third thoughts is put forth. I think it might be in a discussion between Tiffany and Granny Weatherwax. Fourth thoughts might even occur in there somewhere.

    If I recall correctly, the idea is something along the lines of first thoughts being your initial assessment of a situation, i.e. the server has stopped working. Second thoughts are then an attempt to understand what has happened - someone has spilt their cup of tea on the server and fried it. Third thoughts are then thinking about why the situation occurred at all - seriously, why was someone drinking tea in the server room with all the critical systems in the first place?

• Politics and World Events

  • the merchants of Detroit

    Sad. At times I feel sad - sometimes for myself (in general), other times for others. But not a melancholy mournfulness in regards to the latter - no, the sadness for others falls in the category of passive pity. Pitying someone, but really just passively - not much time spent on it.

    People online, with a ko-fi, a small shop, an ad-hoc attempt at turning a buck as a result of having wifi, doodling a drawing, pasting code together into software, waxing influental and just wanting people to give them money *just because* of their content, etc.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Full-featured email server running OpenBSD

    This blog post is a guide explaining how to setup a full-featured email server on OpenBSD 7.5. It was commissioned by a customer of my consultancy who wanted it to be published on my blog.

    Setting up a modern email stack that does not appear as a spam platform to the world can be a daunting task, the guide will cover what you need for a secure, functional and low maintenance email system.

  • Full-featured email server running OpenBSD

  • Emacs Fun! The doctor

    And Eliza is smart. Super-super smart. Well, maybe not really. But she's fun none-the-less!

    I've tried to convince various AI's, such as Samantha Mistral, of the existence of dragons and elves and other fantasy creatures. Their responses can be downright snarky at times lol.

    But the "doctor" (aka Eliza) is probably my favorite. Below is a conversation I had with Eliza just trying to explain that I am a Sylvan ranger! It is fun to see that old "doctor" trying to parse my thoughts and reply.

  • Programming

    • Janet for Mortals - Chapter Fibe: Concurrency and Coroutines

      It’s because this is a chapter about fibers.

      JavaScript doesn’t have fibers, so I’m going to pretend like you’ve never heard of them before, even though you might be familiar with them from another language already.

      The word “fiber” is a cute play on “thread:” a fiber is a lot like a thread, but it’s smaller and lighter. And a thread is a lot like a string, except— wait, no. That’s not right.

    • Janet for Mortals - Chapter Six: Control Flow

      Alright. We just did a whole chapter on concurrency and coroutines and complicated cross-stack control flow. I think we’ve earned a break.

      So this is going to be a chapter about *simple* control flow. Loops and list comprehensions and `if` expressions; things like that.