Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Unreal

    One random thing I have been thinking about lately is a confrontation with the unreal. Think about your life. Every day you just go around seeing things that are normal. You might sometimes see something that is out of the ordinary. Maybe some kind of accident or strange behavior. These things don't happen often, but they still fit into the view of reality that you have. Take, for instance, someone riding a unicycle down the sidewalk. You may have only ever seen someone ride one at the circus or something. You may have never seen one in real life, up close, ever! But the unicycle is still a part of your base reality. You know that it exists, and a close encounter with it is simply one of the many possible realities you can imagine.

  • 9 🔤SpellBinding: AGYLSTH Wordo: BUNKS

  • 2025-03-28, like ten minutes later: Expresso opinion

    The top two post types (I’m not sure how much overlap there is) probably accounts for 90–95% of all posts I see.

    I saw one Geminaut’s post on Nostr once. His post was in the “neither of the above” category. I was pleased.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Things I hate in games I love

    How you’re rewarded for giving away the most coins, it’s completely counter-intuitive there’s a rewards/conveyance mismatch that fights affordance. And the less coins you have the better your chance at winning is; so the best tactic is often to pay to dismiss interruptions instead of weaving them in, which would’ve lead to a better story.

  • Automated Letsencrypt Certs with Dehydrated on Devuan/Debian

    I read ratfactor's excellent guide to setting up dehydrated on slackware with Letsencrypt [0], and did something similar to setup automated certificate renewal on my Devuan server. I use Apache with GnuTLS, but below I also provide the config directives for OpenSSL.

    [0]: http://ratfactor.com/slackware/dehydrated

    As expected, there is much less manual config needed on Devuan (or Debian), for example the apache config can be done with a simple package install, and the default dehydrated config will work fine for most uses (it worked fine for my purposes).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Less YouTube

      I don't normally watch YouTube on my MacBook. I keep it to my phone, which sits off to one side on its stand while I'm at my desk. I initially made that decision in order to get myself to stop endlessly scrolling through videos, and stop letting myself use it for background noise while I do other things. But looking at my watch time stats, that wasn't having as much of an effect as I'd hoped. What I want is for my attention to be on what I need to do when I'm working on something, rather than distracted by the moving pictures off to my left. If I'm going to watch videos, I want to actually watch them, likely with my uncle or mates, depending on what's being watched.

      That's partly why I decided to rely on my phone for stuff like that. I have a system set up specifically for watching videos with family, but I only use it for that purpose when I'm intentionally doing so. I don't use it for background noise or anything, and in fact, it normally acts as a bit of a file server while idle, allowing me to take advantage of its HDD for videos I want to save. And it being an iMac, I can just connect with my MacBook to watch videos stored on it remotely if I'm in the mood to catch up on Super Sentai or Kamen Rider, since I watch those on my own. I can throw on my headphones, curl up in bed, and enjoy watching the goofy WTF of Gozyuger or Kamen Rider Gavv when I'm not in the middle of other things.

    • Station

      Today I have signed up for Station gemini://station.martinrue.com. That is a neat capsule and looks like a lot of nice people are there. It seems like a slow social network with a fewer people than traditional fediverse sites.