Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • A Night of Rain and Shine

    While cooking myself some simple ramen noodles, I took a look outside my dorm kitchen window and peered into the night to see what I could see beyond the screen wire. It was raining, and through it I could see a lamplight, shimmering in elegance like a full moon, and was casting its light onto a puddle in the middle of the parking lot two stories down.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CDEMNOW Wordo: LIKEN

  • Made 2 Oaths Tonight - ROOPHLOCH 2024

    It's after bar close currently. I made 2 oaths to the bartender tonight by the end of 2025. At the moment, I'm sitting right outside of my house on the sidewalk in the pitch dark of the middle of the night writing this so it can be a part of ROOPHLOCH 2024, as I hope all posts this month qualify for.

  • crossbreeds and creepy criptids

    crossovers, crossbreeds, fictional animals mated with other fictional animals. What is possible?

    Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, and Wilbur (the pig) from Charlotte's Web?

    Snuffleupagus and Ey-ore (Sesame St / Winnie the Pooh, respectively)

    Animal (Muppets) and Gonzo (same, Muppets)?

    Daffy Duck and the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man?

  • empty nesting and survival processing

    Man, it's still friggin' hawt outside. It's 114F right now so I ha to take refuge over at the library. Hope I don't get sick from goi in and out of A/C and being around the unhoused, who also take refuge up in har.

    Both child processes are away ingesting some higher education away from home. I am now an "empty nester." I do miss them, but so far it is ok. Unfortunately, my SO is having a harder time, so my job now is to be m0ar supportive and available. I'm still not so used doing those kinds of things since I have my loner tendencies and ju take care of myself most of the time, but having a family and dependents have given me much practice in not being so caught up in self.

• Food

  • Hazelnut/Praline Paste

    Nuts in general are a popular snack in the US, but for some reason I found that hazelnuts are quite difficult to find. So I ordered a bunch online and froze them. Problem solved.

    I wanted to make some kind of cake with hazelnuts and chocolate, so I looked that up and most of them were actually using hazelnut paste.

    It's not completely trivial to make, but it's not that hard either. Just don't burn the caramel!

• Technology and Free Software

  • The "project vs. product" problem

    A subset of the Agile community advocates, in their words, a product-oriented approach instead of a project-oriented one, or a product mindset instead of a project mindset in their industry (computer software).

  • WebDAV no more

    I must have implemented WebDAV two or three times in the last decade or two. Just now I used mod_dav for Apache to enable WebDAV for some directories.

    In theory, it's great. You can treat the web server as a file server, connecting to it and using your regular file manager and text editor, using your favourite shell to do things. And if your website already uses permissions to restrict access to some locations, you can use the same config files to handle the making of changes.

    In practice, however, the operating systems all have such brittle implementations that none of the solutions I had in production ever worked well. It doesn't matter whether it's Windows' File Explorer, macOS' Finder, the Gnome virtual file system via Nautilus or something else. The only thing that works is the command-line client cadaver. It's the best. It works. Sooner or later, however, I realize that cadaver is probably not the tool I can expect non-technical people to use. It has the same user-interface as the old ftp command-line client.

  • Upgrading a very outdated OpenBSD system

    Currently, the latest version of OpenBSD is 7.5.

    A system in my network that was still running OpenBSD 7.0 needed upgrading.

  • A Pocket Reform Appears

    So I've been quite on gopher lately as I've been preparing for the new term. I've gotten my vaccines (covid and flu) this past week and you might not know this about me but the covid vaccine wrecks me every single time. Just super sick for days, brain-sick for days longer.

    I'm finally out of the physically sick so I hiked up the nearest dormant volcano (mt. tabor, it's not a hike-hike there's a really long staircase that goes up it) and I'm typing this from my new pocket reform that I got literally seconds after getting home from my vaccination appointment

  • Getting my 5 year old laptop repaired

    I have a Dell XPS 13 7390 "Developer Edition," which means it was the Ubuntu Linux version instead of Microsoft Windows. I use this as my primary machine, now with Void Linux, after a bit of distrohopping 3 years ago (Ubuntu with Gnome -> RegolithOS (an Ubuntu spin with i3 window manager) -> Void. All this has been documented on my gemlog here previously. I purchased the laptop in fall 2019. I should be embarassed to say it was purchased on Cyber Monday, but I will tell you that it was and I specifically waited for that date to order for about 5 months and bought the computer at 23% off.

    My previous computers had always been refurbished Macs but I was switching to a dedicated Linux machine for the first time, and bought new, hoping that the machine would be fairly robust. I had read so many reviews before purchasing the machine. I also considered the beloved hacker classic Thinkpad laptops, but when I borrowed one for CCC fest in 2018 I hadn't loved how bulky it was. I was coming from having a small Macbook Air previously, and I know I like the 13" screen size. The XPS 13 was pretty much the same size and weight as my previous and in one review it said it should last "at least 3 or 4 years."

  • eBike for intra-city traveling in Taiwan

    I live in Taiawn and UBike, the bike sharing system in Taiwan, has been a godsend. You just need to register once and most cities in Taiwan have UBike stations. Not just popular places, but literarly everywhere, like ever 300m. It is the major reason I don't need a car or a scooter for my daily compute. Lately they introducted the new eletric bikes. The eBike is a bit more expensive but it comes with a motor that helps you pedal. It's not a full electric bike, you still need to pedal, but it makes going up hills much easier.