Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CIZPTYO Wordo: SWING

  • countryside insularity - a culture of relentless "this way-ish-ness"

    I enter the rec center. A conversation carries on between leasing manager and resident. Both see/acknowledge me, without words or even a nod. I finally say hi to Flo, she says hi back, as blending the word into the ongoing sentence to the leasing manager. On they go. 5+ minutes...

  • Academiology¹: Institutional betrayal

    My school does this annual survey of the student body to get a pulse for of we feel about the Way Things Are. This year, they had students give a word that best describes how they feel about the school. The word we chose the most wasn't "failure," as I might have expected—I often feel like the school does fall quite short of what I believe it ought to be. This whole academiology thing is indeed me trying to reconcile the fact that the university is—must be—this sacred thing, and yet it demonstrably isn't. So, yes, I think I'd go as far as to say that the university is a failure.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Experimenting with FreeBSD and comments on the future of Invidious

    I've always admired the BSD family of operating systems even though I mostly use Linux. I currently run a Debian Linux server that hosts a bunch of alternative services like PrivateBin, Invidious, RedLib, etc. Most of these require the use of Docker and/or systemd. Docker doesn't seem to be a hard requirement, though, because inside the Dockerfile there has got to be a Unixy way to setup and run the services. So I'm planning on spinning up a temporary FreeBSD VPS on Vultr and experimenting with getting those services running without Docker. If all goes well, I will convert my main Debian server to FreeBSD. One thing I would miss, however, is FirewallD. BSD's PF (Packet Filter) firewall doesn't have a command-line interface to interact with firewall policies. As far as I know, everything goes into a /etc/pf.conf configuration file. I'd have to look into PF configuration options that are effectively the same as the ones I use with FirewallD.

    [...]

    It's currently broken on my instance because of Google blocking the use of the API to by-pass the ads. From what I understand, it's a bit of an arms race between the Invidious developers circumventing the Google blocks and Google catching on and imposing more restrictions. I'm not sure about the future of the project

  • In Defence of Install Times

    So I recently (as of writing, today) got a steam deck, and, as I sit here waiting for a game to install (elden ring, it'll be my first time playing) I realised the feeling I had while staring at the 2 hour install time was familiar.

    Now I realise that nobody out there is complaining that digital games need to be downloaded and installed, but I am going to defend them anyway!

    Do you remember being sat in the back of your parents car after a day out, you'd just got a new game, and you sit in your seat reading the manual over and over and over again, imagining how it would be to play the game, the excitement building? If yes, you may be entitled to financial compensa- Sorry where was I?

    Yes the feeling of waiting for your timely arrival back to a place where you could play these games is a similar feeling I have to installing a new game that I have been excited about playing. The main downside is I don't get a manual to read over and over while I wait, but the days of the physical manual are long gone, and sadly we must accept that.

  • FreeBSD Fonts

    I realized I have never installed standard M$ TTF fonts on my FreeBSD workstation… 🤦 The process is not as simple as in Debian but not impossible either!