Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Why Can't I do Anything

    Depression mostly. But that doesn't make a good post does it? So what better therapy than going too deep in to my own psyche to figure out just what my problem is.

    I have lots of things I want to do, I have a list in fact, but every time I go to start one of them I'm left feeling like someone is holding a gun to my head that will go off if I try to start it. I imagine that it's half decision paralysis, half my parents judging everything I ever do if they see me doing it, and half being scared of failure.

    My problems making 150% aside, how to tackle things? To everyone saying "just start" go reread the first sentence of the previous paragraph. Yes yes I know that the most logical thing to do is to just START something even if it's writing one word on a page or watching a video on the thing I want to do, but when I can't even bring myself to do that, it's impossible to know what or how to tackle anything.

  • Rabbit holes

    I have varying degrees of distraction. I need to figure out how to communicate the degree of any given distraction that I am currently talking about.

    Did performance review things yesterday. Goal setting is an awful thing. Knowing roughly where I want to be with my work in a years time is easy enough. Describing that in clear, concise language is an exercise in frustration.

    One thing we talked about, or at least came up in passing multiple times, is my tendency towards getting distracted by interesting things. There are to many interesting things in this world. In another part of the conversation I mentioned the passing interest in getting something like Deepseek running locally, nominally so that I could compare outputs from various different models, practically because getting something like that running locally would be fun. This was not interpreted as a mild distraction of a day or so, rather it was interpreted as a something that would interfere with my larger plans for the year.

• Science

  • Two videos on how we figured out our solar system just based on obversations alone, long before we left the surly bonds of Earth

    The video “Terence Tao on how we measure the cosmos [1]” was very interesting to watch, as Terence goes into depth on how people in the past, and by past, I mean the distant past, figured out the earth was a sphere, how big that sphere was, and even reasoned that the earth went around the sun, long before the Christian Church even existed! And the method that Kepler [2] used to figure out the orbits of Earth and the planets, when at the time we didn't quite know the distance to them, and all we had were positions in the sky to go by.

  • Analog Explorations: Simple Gravity

    My progress toward improving my breadboard analog computer has been delayed by lack of funds. There is a bucket list of parts I want to purchase from mouser, in particular the somewhat expensive multipliers ($20 USD/ea), some solid state relays, and a few other components required for building comparators. After paying the last set of rent and utility bills, there is no comfortable margin for buying electronic parts. But I'm hoping to place an order after the next paycheck comes in.

• Technology and Free Software

  • I never got the memo on “copyover servers”

    Somehow, in all my years of programming (and the few years I was looking into the source code of various MUDs back in the early 90s) I never came across this method of starting an updated version of a server without losing any network connections. In hindsite, it's an obvious solution—it just never occured to me to do this.

  • Gabbro 0.1.3 and the woes of TLS

    It just returned me a error about TLS connection even though the capsule had a valid cert and was opening with Lagrange and Amfora just fine.

  • Guys, I need your advice again as maybe I found the bug in the Gabbro (Gemini Server) or in my client (`ggemini`) implementation.

    The problem is my client reading server response by the chunks (to prevent memory overflow and calculate the bytes total) But recently found, that some capsules does not loading in Yoda with error `TLS connection closed unexpectedly`. After some time of digging, the reason of this message was that Gabbro server closes the connection after first read request from socket. In other words, it does not support stream, but Lagrange able to open this capsule as load it by the maybe one step.

  • Sending and Receiving Webmentions with Kineto and nginx

    I'm developing a little bash script to send Webmentions manually. You can use it if you use for example kineto as a gemini2web proxy on your site and inject the webmention entpoint link at the beginning of each page. This is possible for example with the "subfilter" command in the nginx config. This way you can send and receive webmentions. Of course you need a webmention.io account first.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Moving domains

      I'm in the process of migrating away from Namesilo for my domain hosting. They've been good for me for a long time, but it's time to break my remaining connections with the US. I've picked OVH Cloud for the new registrar since they seem to have good TLD support. But I'll serve my DNS zones from 1984.is as I've been doing. I like them. It's very straight forward.

    • WikiTok

      A different way to explore Wikipedia: randomly with pictures and a Tiktok navigation. It is quite a compelling way to spend some time and make some serendipitous discoveries.