Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • ROOPHLOCH 2024 - Post from the Mueggenburg park

    Hello from the "Müggenburg" park near my home at the Norf creek. So I'm outing myself as living in Norf/NRW/Germany. But I'm most likely the only one here in this town who regularly uses the Gemini protocol. If you really live in or near Norf, you can send me an email, but I won't tell you my real name :)

  • Back

    This summer I did a lot of driving. I was supposed to head out and visit my family, but my grandmother has had some serious health issues, and until my parents were able to arrange for a more permanent caregiver, they were basically on-call helping her with, well, everything. _It might not be the best time to visit_, my dad told me in June. So I didn't, and the summer slowly passed.

    Slowly passed until the last few weeks, when I went down to the States a couple of times. Eight hours there, eight hours back, times two. We broke it up a bit (stopping in the same small city each time to get gas and/or stay the night before heading east), but it was a lot of driving in a fairly short span. I thought we'd all listen to more music. We listened to very little. We spent a lot of time talking.

  • Labor Day Weekend was...

    ... in a word, wonderful. We kicked off on Friday with our realtor coming over to take exterior photos of the house. She was so impressed, she wants to come back to take twilight photos and some more via drone. Sounds good to me!

  • Languages 🗪

    The lingua franca in F1 is English. A Spanish driver talks to an Italian team in English. Everyone can speak it, so there's no need to context switch from one language to another.

    Only sometimes do other languages creep in. At the end of a race, before the top three drivers go to the podium, there's a "cool down" room where they get water to drink, towels for the sweat, and sponsor caps to put on. There's a camera and a microphone in there, and sometimes they say something interesting. When Nico Rosberg was the main challenger to Lewis Hamilton, Rosberg could speak several languages and knew that Hamilton couldn't, so whoever the third driver was in the cool down room, he'd pick any other language they could both speak and use that. It was a telling micro-aggression: "the race is over, but I can still beat you at this one thing!"

  • My Experience Going Vegan - Day 3

    Today was a very mixed day as far as this lifestyle change is concerned; the food that I ate was incredibly yummy but unfortunately I discovered first hand the extreme loneliness of being vegan in a meat eating world.

    I managed to get into an argument with a family member about my disapproval of the usage of animal products generally that ended in her suggesting if I push the issue further I should move out. Apparently the consumption of meat really struck a chord with them, more so than me disagreeing on political matters with them ever did. This early meeting with the loneliness of veganism kind of makes me want to go back at risk of alienating myself rom society, but I know that I can't.

  • First Clear Sky Stargazing (publ. 2024-09-03)

    I woke up very early this morning (2024-09-03) due to some noise, and then was having trouble falling back asleep. After getting up, I noticed it was still clear skies out, and so I decided to head out to the front yard. I had a nice time of mostly naked-eye stargazing from about 2am until 3:50am.

    I decided to focus on naked-eye star gazing, since it would have been too noisy to get my telescopes out of storage, and also I wanted to focus on studying the constellations and brighter stars, rather than focusing on one small FoV. I did bring the binoculars out for a little while, but they fogged up in about 5 minutes, from my breath I think, and I decided to just put them away. It was a little chilly out — 36 deg F — but not too bad with no wind and wearing my winter coat and cap.

  • Parking Lot Blues New Hat Old Shoes Old Soul Renewed

    kicked out

• Technology and Free Software

  • How to use Proton VPN port forwarding

    If you use Proton VPN with the paid plan, you have access to their port forwarding feature. It allows you to expose a TCP and/or UDP port of your machine on the public IP of your current VPN connection.

    This can be useful for multiple use cases, let's see how to use it on Linux and OpenBSD.

  • How to make Japanese input work on Windows 10 ("Japanese IME is not ready yet" error) [Ed: Very basic things still failing to work in Windows]

    Just a few minutes ago I tried to write a message in Japanese to a Japanese person I met online. I installed Japanese language from "Language" section in settings, went to a text box on a website and... it did not work. [...]