Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Odds & Ends

    I'd just like to reassure ... whoever, someone (possibly myself) that I have not in fact gone off the deep end. That thing, whatever it was, that I wrote last time [1] - let's call it a work of surrealist fiction - was intended to be exactly that. Well it started out as some musings on my retreat from corporate social media, but I quickly realized what I had to say wasn't that interesting. Or at least, wasn't up to my usual standard, however interesting (or not) that might be. So, I decided to use my imagination instead of sticking to a strictly factual recounting of events. I don't know how much fun it is to read, but it was fun to write.

  • Little Women (1880)

    I have started reading Little Women, by Lousa May Alcott. This is a book that is available on Project Gutenberg:

    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37106

    The version on Project Gutenberg has many illustrations by Frank Merrill. It makes the book that much more precious. I'm very early in the book, and I'm getting to know the women, and they are sweet and cheerful, though also sad due to their father being away in the army. They are also poor but their good humor and imagination make up for that.

  • Respectful Platforms Manifesto

    A manifesto for respectful platforms that respect the rights of their users rather than trying to exploit them.

  • Mementos

    The other day I was looking for something, and as is my way, I turned the entirety of my focus on to finding it. It wasn't in the bedroom; wasn't in the guest bedroom, either, up in the closet. And at that point I was out of good ideas, but knew I wouldn't have thrown it away, so I went to my last resort, the big plastic tote we keep under the stairs in the basement, with the empty boxes for packing Christmas presents and the potatoes we dug up last fall.

    And I found what I was looking for, and also something that I wasn't. I was looking for a little ticket stub I'd kept from years ago, wanting to confirm a date that had been floating around in my mind. But in there, behind a grade twelve picture of a friend (on the reverse: "keep in touch!" - whoops), was another picture, of another friend, a picture I had forgotten, and if I'm being honest, don't remember ever receiving.

  • The London Mithraeum

    Not many people seem to know that London has a decently preserved Mithraeum, the sacred space of the Mithras mystery cult. It's free to visit and periodically has a projection around the remains to try and give a feel for what a ritual may have been like in the space.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — EHIKLPO Wordo: SERIF

• Technology and Free Software

  • Hand-made QR code

    Out of the six ways for me to store a QR code (in this case a yearly entry pass for a local museum), the one I chose today was the worst, most unreliable, least efficient, but way coolest method: I drew it by hand in the back of my Techo Weeks paper planner. It took one hour but that includes starting over because I messed up the first attempt.

    It was a 21 × 21 module grid and I used 1.5 mm modules, using a 0.5 mm pen for the corners and single-module areas and a 0.8 mm pen to fill in bigger areas. The Weeks has 3mm grid paper so I made modules one quarter the actual grid size, freehanding that half of them while following the grid lines where they did align. Maybe a ruler would’ve been good, I didn’t think of that.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Internet Archive

      I'm bored, so I decided I'd go through gopherspace... Man, Ben Collver is the fucking man. I had found his gopherhole a while ago. I bookmarked a subdirectory to get text directions from GMaps. But after perusing some of his(?) text glog entries and going down a link rabbit hole, I went back and could hardly believe my eyes: a gopher front-end for the Internet Archive [0].

      I guess technologically it's "no big deal." I mean I guess mirroring or translating HTTP to Gopher isn't super impressive, but I have to admit that Gopher just does things, like downloading files, better.