Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The damn flu still don't want to go away, its now about four weeks that we all are coughing...

    The damn flu still don't want to go away, its now about four weeks that we all are coughing, sneezing and all in all being some degrees of miserable... The doc keeps saying that this is not unusual (but why did we never experience something like this before?) and we should just try to rest and relax. Well... we have no other options i guess...

    Regarding the recent election of Trump and our own little difficulties i calmed a bit down i guess, it is what it is... Will Trump burn everything down? I don't know, but he will surely be an agent of chaos...

    The political landscape here in Germany is also a big mess: While nearly every party tries to win voters back from the AfD (lets just say its our version of MAGA) by using their talking points but not by crafting another, more positive perspective for the future, the greens just voted for Habeck as their candidate... something they should have done before the last election, now it will just kill his political career. All in all i am pretty sure we will have a CDU lead government after the coming elections which means (as an best case scenario) four years of stalemate or in the worst case a massive step back regarding reforms. But, lets see what will happen...

  • Better and worse sources, commonplace books

    Hmm... as I'm starting in my commonplace book adventures... (it's probably far too early to jump into conclusions but I want to write an entry) ... anyway... I'm starting to consider that some books are better for a commonplace book than others. So it can pay to pay attention when choosing your books, exploring them before delving in them. Generally, I'd be inclined to primary sources (what Plato actually wrote) rather than secondary sources (a history of philosophy boo). But I remember some "primary" authors can be incredibly boring (hi Kant) or really hard to read until you have actually learnt a good bunch of philosophical theory. Then a good secondary source can work wonders.

  • Monday

    Ah, it's good to be typing again!

    Grant it, there's nothing fulfilling in/about it. I almost always finish wishing I'd done something else. Except then also quickly realize I'd have felt the same regardless what I'd done. What I'd pursued.

    And I'm pretty sure that's because the ego game is in early stages of disintegration for "me". There's something about being (or, really, struggling to believe one is be-ing) one that *could* choose, and then actively perpetually imagines they're choosing (and then being either fulfilled or frustrated relative to desired outcome).. that wants to collapse into itself, as it were.

    It seems like something should be happening, and then something after that, it all that should be to - if not for! - said posited "me". Because.... well, because an individual/person/self is a something that anything but nothing happens to...?

    Anyway, this is just more of the same evidence of desperately struggling to hold onto the idea that a self could write words that other selves vibrate sympathetically with to the point of "getting each other", maybe to the point of organizing a community of even more such... and... and... (exhaustion begins setting in at the very thought(s)...).

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BCDKURO Wordo: ISLET

  • Extemporeality 1

    My best friend invited me to come out to his uncle's lake house, about an hour east of my place, on a Thursday night, and since I wasn't expecting to work the next day, I spent the night. He and I had some plans, so I immediately prepared myself for a kind of crazy evening. I talk about him a lot in my stories, so I should give him a name. His club nickname is Constable, so I'll refer to him as that.

    When I got there, he was just getting back to shore on his kayak, he was happy to see me. We had both been spending time out on that lake, exploring the western shore that had a very healthy and vibrant bog growing on it. Some of the most remarkable specimens I've ever seen of carnivorous plants, orchids, Ferns and all sorts of other plants were there, and we were attempting to document everything we could find. One of our plans that evening was to go back out there and see if we could step out onto the bog itself. This didn't end up happening until a later trip, but we made it a worthwhile stay anyway.

  • The Spirituality of Scent and Smell

    Several years back, I attended the inaugural Salem Witchcraft and Folklore Festival (originally called the Salem Summer Symposium). It was a great time, and among the highlights, I got to meet one Dr. James Dotson, who was sharing his understanding about the spirituality of smells and scents in the occult. He made something click for me regarding the use of scents in magic and spiritual work generally, a kind of olfactory magic into itself:

  • Thoughts on degrowth

    Thoughts on using todays capital to slow down our inevitable technological decline.

    I realized that by now I am convinced that humanity, or at least modern civilization based on technology, is doomed.

    Truely realizing that the resources on earth are ultimately finite and what that means for any lifeform living an unsustainable lifestyle has been …quite a trip.

    Our dependance on vast quantities of energy in the “high-tech” parts of our civilization has us deplete resources at high speed. We burn oil for its energy where it would otherwise provide us with raw materials for many products, plastics, medicine ingredients, fertilizer, …

  • Sick day, creativity

    I arrived at work today and felt a bid odd. I had some tea during the morning break and felt a bit better, but by lunchtime, I felt unpleasant enough that I went back home. I've caught some bug. Tea and honey, and I'll be ok. A bit of rest.

    A friend of mine had a few years ago written a poem. Or, as she described it, it just dawned upon her in a moment of sudden clarity. She wrote it down, and drew a comic to go with it. That comic is lost to time, but both of us still remember the poem.

    Yesterday, while I was visiting her, through some twists and turns of memory and discussion, I ended up deciding that I should write a song to go with that poem. Bring it back to life, as it were.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Why I stopped using OpenBSD

    Last month, I decided to leave the OpenBSD team as I have not been using OpenBSD myself for a while. A lot of people asked me why I stopped using OpenBSD, although I have been advocating it for a while. Let me share my thoughts.

    First, I like OpenBSD, it has values, and it is important that it exists. It just does not fit all needs, it does not fit mine anymore.

  • OpenBSD httpd with cgi on FreeBSD

    A short description on how to setup an environment to run cgi-scripts using the OpenBSD httpd on FreeBSD.

  • Let's put Nix into a Pubnix (feat. nix-portable)

    The concept of Pubnixes is very common among the current generation of Gopher users. Pubnixes are public access shared servers running Unix-like (usually Linux or BSD) systems and offering shell accounts to users, either for free or at extremely low prices. They are great for those who can't afford or just don't need a VPS for their cloud shell activity. Sometimes they also are called "tildes", hence the name Tildeverse. In general, you are given a limited user account (although some projects like segfault.net will give you an isolated root account) and a limited amount of software packages available for you to run. One of the Pubnixes called Project Segfault (that sounds terribly similar but has no relation to the segfault.net) gives you a limited account but offers a Nix package manager to install packages in your local environment only. I thought: why not try and achieve the same in all other tildes that don't have Nix available or exposed to your user? Luckily, there already is a project to ease your life in such a case.

  • How I Got Into Computers

    Having just read stinkh0rn's "Linux Life"[1], I was inspired to write something similar. But the concept morphed into something else while I was writing it, so I never actually got to the Linux part. Here then is the story of how I got into computers.

  • Do you really need a VPN

    This blog post is sponsored by NordVPN. Are you tired of hackers getting ahold of you SSN or equivalent? Do you want to be cool and feel like a hacker? Then you need a VPN! All joking aside, this isn't sponsored by NordVPN, and they probably wouldn't want me to since I don't like them. We have all seen the ads and honestly, most people here are probably familiar with a VPN and already know what I am talking about, but for the other people who are seriously considering one or who aren't familiar with the concept, this is for you!

  • Internet/Gemini

    • In Favor Of Low Uptime

      The first point may go under "containerization", and frequent reboots will more quickly reveal any local state that (maybe?) should not be there. If the system is left to rot, who knows what will end up where it (maybe?) should not.

      The second point usually involves hardware failure (it no longer boots) or a software issue (the software does not come up to a correct state). Either case, perhaps, is better to learn about during a scheduled outage, not at 03:00 in the morning when the on-call has already had too little sleep and too much work. And, yeah, the plutocrats somehow managed to get you classified as overtime exempt. Have fun, and enjoy the wage theft!

      The final point delves into "chaos monkey" type testing where random systems (or entire datacenters, if you're at that scale) are broken in random ways. This can be bad for the customer, as there might be lost orders or whatnot, but how else would you learn that the redundant routes are not actually redundant? Postmortem action items included: fixing the routes that were not actually redundant, adding monitoring to confirm that the redundant routes are actually redundant, better documentation, etc. One can theoretically detect that there is a problem, but it's often quicker to see if the ship actually floats, especially if the problem is one that nobody has thought to theorize about—this ship is unsinkable, but, whoops, icebergs!—or nobody paid close enough attention to the fact that all the payment processor connections were going to a limited set of remote IP addresses. How often do you pay really close attention over time to netstat on a cluster of systems?

    • Greetings

      I finally got a key!

      Wish it was under better conditions... I've been coughing my lungs out for almost two weeks. Ugh..

      But I look forward to late night muttering.

      I have an exam on genetics and cell reproduction this week. I should be studying.. my brain is too tired.

    • Being on small fediverse instances

      The fediverse is the network of social media instances that communicate via ActivityPub, mostly Mastodon but others exist as well. My own instance runs GoToSocial. The benefit is that nobody can force you to look at ads or sell your data.

  • Programming

    • Nachtigall: dev log 0

      I want to create a little program called Nachtigall, to make working with external music trackers easier. Its goal is to take a voice sample, detect the notes and print them as understandable strings