Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Nolo contendere

    I’ve sometimes been a li’l frustrated with how a nolo contendere plea isn’t more universal (for example, it's not an option here in Sweden).

    Maybe it’s because I’m so overly fond of that creepy old “Is that so?” Zen story.

    The absence of a nolo contendere means that someone who is innocent will have to lie or fight.

    Yeah, yeah, I can see how maybe it is the duty of all citizens to fight their case since the purpose of the justice system shouldn’t be punishment, it should be validation, and the guilty having to acknowledge their guilt is a central part of that restorative process.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CIKLTSP Wordo: LEACH

  • Read and forget

    Is it acceptable to read and then forget what you've read? Acceptable in the sense that you're not going to blame yourself, telling yourself you've wasted time, that you'll have to start again.

    It's a problem when you're studying a subject that you're going to need to return to afterwards: for an exam, a professional application, or to practice something that's particularly close to your heart in one way or another. It's embarrassing or dangerous to realize that we're missing the basics in these situations.

    It's perfectly acceptable in any other situation. It's perfectly acceptable to learn about a subject and then forget all about it. Moreover, the forgetting is probably only conscious, and the act of reading permeates our memory, our mind on several levels: we may find it difficult to retell precisely what we read years ago on a subject, but the reconfiguration of our neural pathways has taken place nonetheless, and we have retained things from these readings. Sometimes, the work of study has even enabled us to see subjects, other than the one studied and forgotten, in a different way. In short, it's possible, it's common and it's not a failure.

  • Christian sex sell

    Apologies in advance: sex is still awkward to talk about for this American. Also I accidentally overwrote one of my glog entries in creating a new format that has the filename at the top. I've since made the function less destructive.

    I was looking for something to watch in the background while playing games on my PC and ran across "7th Heaven." It's a show about a pastor's family with 5 kids (more added later). What's odd is that in a time and religion that preached abstinence until marriage, there was a whole lot of sex or at least sex talk going on in this show in regards to unmarried people. It seems almost hypocritical and really weird that a show with that subject would talk so much about sex. There's certainly no nudity, but it's still weird.

  • Sci-fi London 2024

    I love short film programmes and this weekend there was a programme of sci-fi and horror shorts in East London. There were a few themes that recurred such as on-demand clones, the climate catastrophe and time manipulation.

• Technology and Free Software

  • words of a weirdo

    Ah, Sunday morning. Breezeless, though, and muggy.

    I have the budget made, incl the ASUS monitor and "floating" stand for it (overpriced stand, but...), as well as the NUCbox and other day-to-day items in my cart(s). I stopped Amazon, it became too much. Buy buy buy, retrun return return. Fuck that.

    I also compiled most of Issue 16 of Ctrl-ZINE, awaiting once last entry that I had stored on my x2600 laptop to be sent in. Once that arrives, and formatted, the issue is complete. Then `scp` it onto the server and see what people think :)

  • 10,000 hours

    I remember reading about 10,000 hours years ago. Without spending any time on a search engine right now, I believe it was an indicator (roughly) of the amount of time one had to dedicate to a discipline in order to be an expert or master in it. Then I think years later I may have read a sort of debunking that it mattered less the exact number of hours but how you spent that time.

    In any case, it came to mind and I was riffing on it recently when another professor called me a senior faculty member and it hit me that now I am. It doesn't mean that I'm the best, or that I can't still learn a ton and improve. They said it in the context of explaining that they were thankful for me mentoring them, and I realized how time flies, that others had been mentoring me what seemed so recently but was years and years ago. Especially as I'm now tenured and have received larger grants, I must be doing something right. Right?

  • Internet/Gemini

    • I moved my emails to Proton Mail

      I recently took a very hard decision: I moved my emails to Proton Mail.

      This is certainly a shock for people following this blog for a long time, this was a shock for me as well! This was actually pretty difficult to think this topic objectively, I would like to explain how I came up to this decision.

      I have been self-hosting my own email server since I bought my first domain name, back in 2009. The server have been migrated multiple times, from hosting companies to another and regularly changing the underlying operating system for fun. It has been running on: Slackware, NetBSD, FreeBSD, NixOS and Guix.

    • I moved my emails to Proton Mail

      Due to my emails being stored remotely and containing a lot of private information, I have never been really happy with how emails work at all. My dovecot server has access to all my emails, unencrypted and a single password is enough to connect to the server. Adding a VPN helps to protect dovecot if it is not exposed publicly, but the server could still be compromised by other means. OpenBSD smtpd server got critical vulnerabilities patched a few years ago, basically allowing to get root access, since then I have never been really comfortable with my email setup.

    • "Have you zine this boy?"

      I got the last and first entry this morning (I had the entry saved to the x2600 laptop, laptop died, I asked the sender to re-send, they did, thankfully).

    • also..

      I am going back to lurking, reading, watching, listening, downloading, creeping and crawling the WWW now that Issue 16 is out. I will write a thing on Midnight on occassion (<3 M.p) but putting out an issue of the zine takes a lot out of me. Too much short-term/mandatory communication. Not my bag