Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Devil Red: La Très Sainte Trinosophie

    IT is in the retreat of criminals in the dungeons of the Inquisition that your friend writes these lines which are to serve for your instruction. At the thought of the inestimable advantages which this document of friendship will procure for you, the horrors of a long and little deserved captivity seem to be mitigated . . . It gives me pleasure to think that while surrounded by guards and encumbered by chains, a slave may still be able to raise his friend above the mighty, the monarchs who rule this place of exile.

    My dear Philochatus, you are about to penetrate into the sanctuary of the sublime sciences; my hand is about to raise for you the impenetrable veil which hides from the eyes of common men the tabernacle, the sanctuary wherein the Eternal has lodged the secrets of nature, kept for a few that are privileged, the few Elect whom His omnipotence created that they may SEE, and seeing, may soar after Him in the vast expanse of His Glory and deflect upon mankind one of the Rays that shine round about His golden Throne.

  • Mythos easily explained

    Okay so in the fictional story Azathoth can’t write, can’t sing, can’t do anything, can’t dance, can’t walk, can’t even try to talk. And dreamed up this disgusting space-time continuum probably better known as Yog-Sothoth. And we have to live in that purposeless mess while being picked apart by Shub-Niggurath and Nyarlathothep and Cthulhu, i.e. by life and by death and by dreams of the world’s end.

  • Dragonfly

    Yesterday we went for a walk. We brought along the macro lens to take pictures of some mushrooms but when we got to the small pond we saw a red dragonfly resting on a stone and took a picture of the dragonfly.

    [...]

    Then we noticed a big blue and green dragonfly examining the reeds along the shore, occasionally fighting with another large dragonfly. We hunkered down and took about a hundred pictures. And finally the dragonfly decided to land right in front of us, posing for the longest time, looking as if it was depositing eggs. It was amazing.

  • investigating post replacement in plac

    quite the pleasant day of recovery from an arduous yesterday

    we were one of several bands helping a wine venue celebrate a year of existence

    three soloists occasionally joined us during our two hour slot

    trying out posting here again after yet another burst of posting

    a burst of activity faded to classic too good to be true embers

  • 28 October 2024

    While lying on the couch with a flu AGAIN (thankfully, junior is in daycare) i try to busy my mind by browsing the gopherverse, learning obscure programming languages and hanging out in IRC... sometimes, being ill at home feels like the miserable copy of life as a teenager.

    This year it really seems like nearly everyone catches some form of respiratory illness every couple of weeks, at work we were never at full capacity this year as far as i can remember. Its never something serious, but allways enough that you have to stay at home at least for a couple of days.

  • 2024 Week 40/41/42/43: Photos

    I've wanted to try using a hand-wound mechanical pocketwatch as a daily timepiece for quite some time. As they are now fashion pieces more than useful devices, new pocketwatches are often quite expensive. This watch, made by a Chinese company, was dirt cheap, but it has decent quality for being so economical. I've now used it for a month and I love it.

  • In Praise of Spiritual Routine

    Doing big rituals and carrying out experiments is great and necessary, but the real pleasure in an occult practice—and the real progress—comes from the daily routine we do. Daily meditation, prayers, offerings, energy work, whatever? That's where the real power of the Work lies. Big rituals and experiments are like going out to a nice restaurant and feasting, or going to a competition to push yourself and win big—but the daily stuff is the meals you make and eat at home, the daily workouts you do at the gym, and that's where it really matters.

  • People can be baffling

    It kind of boggles my mind that "a people" (in a tribal sense) on the one hand want to shift society in a direction more tolerant/inclusive of "their kind", and yet choose lifestyles and/or practices that guarantee there'll be less of them in the future than what might have been to be influencing that shift, including: [...]

  • A "post ownership" shallow dive

    Yeah, yeah... I get the historic yadda yadda about how a site owner can do whatever they like with it.

    But I'm wondering what others might think about an author at a site like this retaining controlling rights to their posts.

    My thinking on this was recently affected by an article talking about visual art and music creators losing control of their work through the miracle of copyright. The scenario goes something like a broke artist sells their work for immediate cash needs, but those in the position of buying get to set the terms for being in a capitalist position of greater relative power, which generally includes their becoming exclusive owners, and then the original creator loses all say in what's done with the art/music for all time.

  • AInight Pub?

    Still, reading more deeply into the article had me longing for interactions that might incur misunderstanding, but not judgement, ghosting, etc.

    So I'm wondering about the eventual possibility of a site that has a backend that can generate some specified number of characters, whose have specified character traits, and then be posting while reading their posts, replying to their posts and/or replies, etc.

    Or would specifying character attributes make it boring for having too much foreknowledge how interactions might go?

  • Cubicle Hell

    I've been working in a giant concrete building full of cubicles since August. It feels like I've been here for fifteen years.

    Literally, virtually everything I can see is beige. The fluorescent lighting is somehow too bright and too dim. I am very close to literally going crazy. I am about to smash something.

  • Activities

    Going exercising is always an exercise itself, an exercise in self-discipline. Once I get well enough there, all the mental barriers are gone, the apprehension and lack of energy I felt are gone. It is fun to do, with a great group of people around and a trainer to tell me what to do, so I can concentrate on doing stuff instead of worrying about the workout. I return feeling better than when I left. This happens every time, and every time I must battle myself to actually go there to get the feel-goods I know will be coming.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Watching Jellyfin videos with VLC

    Okay so if you wanna watch a Jellyfin video with VLC, go to your Jellyfin instance’s web view where you can copy a stream URL and it’ll look like this: [...]

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Preparing for end of self-hosting

      I have started preparing to end my self-hosting. My Gopher burrow and my website will be moving to a virtual server outside of the home network.

      It fills me with sadness.

      For over two decades I have been self-hosting on all kind of interesting hardware, like the original Acme-systems Foxboard, a so-called Slug (NSLU2), probably one or more Olimex-boards, a Raspberry Pi and of course, BeagleBone Blacks.

      The tinkering with these boards always provided me with great joy, and I learned a ton along the way.

    • hello

      might as well start a gemlog, he says in his best eeyore voice.

  • Programming

    • Stringify the Arguments

      but these take more complicated objects and mangle them into a sequence of bytes, plus other overhead. A less expensive way is to directly manipulate argv, assuming nothing else has mangled that memory. Also I'm pretty sure unixlike systems follow the following convention, but someone out there may not follow this standard, which is that the arguments are a blob of bytes followed by a blob of bytes for the environment. The pointers for each element of the outer argv array all (in theory, and by default) point to addresses inside the argument blob, and likewise the outer environ array points into the environment blob.