Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Extreme automobiles, Ft. Lauderdale edition

    Bunny and I stopped by Josef & Joseph [1] to have them fix Bunny's watch (it turned out to just need a new battery). Inside is a large collection of clocks, watches and jewelry. Outside, however, was this!

    [A silver car, longer than a limousine with an assortment of ornamants adorning the outside] “That's not a limousine, this is a limousine!” [2] [3] [The frontend of a silver car with nine, count them, nine, headlights spanning the front grill] I don't think I'd want this barrelling towards me from behind at night! [4] [5] [The other side of a three-times longer than normal silver car with three baloon-like things leaned up against it] This is so unusual of a car that three aliens have come down to examine it closely. [6] [7] [Closeup detail of the car, sporting emblems from VW, BMW, and Cadilac, with a model air plane strapped to the top, all silver] I don't think those wings are capable of supporting flight. Probably for the best. [8] [9] When I asked about the car inside, I was informed that indeed, it could drive, so it's a working car, made of a VW, BMW and Cadilac welded together and painted silver. And it was delivered as part of an Elvis Presley [10] exhibit at Josef & Joseph. What Elvis has to do with a Mad-Max inspired limousine is beyond me. But it's there, and it's awesome.

  • Where I write about painting — some success

    Yesterday I had a pretty productive studio day. I took everything I had up on the wall above the painting-table with the idea to just sort of refactor what was up there, but I left everything off except what I made yesterday. Three sort of cosmograms, a map from a city with circular park at its centre, and a map of a place where the streets are made of lava.

  • NATMOS:R B5| LQ’s account of the end

  • another grab bag o' brain stuff

    One of my students was Astounded! In the Library yesterday. They asked where I kept our copy of Alex Haley's Roots. I walked straight to the book.

    Student asked, "Do you know where every book in this library is?"

    I said "Yes. But no. But yes."

    Yes, as in "everything is catalogued and shelved, so I can lay my hands on anything we have." No, as in "I do not have the precise shelf location of all 3,000+ titles memorized." But yes, as in "I can visualize where nearly anything is without needing the catalog."

    Of course I can. I spend eight hours a day here.

    I am magic.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CEHMUSN Wordo: WANDS

  • Where I write about painting — not so great

    I tried to make an A4-sized painting tonight, and last night as well. They were both garbage. Last night was like something I would expect a mentally ill child to paint. Which, now that I think about it, is a pretty accurate reflection of where I am internally as of late. It was blobby and had no sense of composition or structure at all. Tonight's was full of structure, an isometric cityscape sort of thing, but the color was terrible. No contrasts, just muddy and silly.

• Politics and World Events

  • Capping variable service charges

    Calls for capping variable service charges for residential property in England are covering a much broader range of circumstances than their proponents appear to intend. In some contexts it could lead to serious problems and injustice, and pro-landlord activists on Twitter are starting to weaponise the issue.

• Technology and Free Software

  • I stopped sticking to FOSS but immediately regretted that decision

    I more or less only used FOSS from late nineties until autumn 2021, where I got an iPad. This decision was partially prompted by frustration with Android’s open washing (I was stuck with an un-updatable Android tablet that wasn’t that old. By comparison, this iPad has received updates for way more years already) and partially in a rash angry moment after interacting with a complete jerk online who made me in one instant give up on the entire FOSS community.

    There was also the fact that I realized that I had already been leaking away my own FOSS-y values, that there had been one growing, frogboiling exception; video game consoles. Now, for a while when I was at my most freshly converted GNU-wly brainwashed, I didn’t use any. Then I rationalized that it’s not that bad to use a Game Boy or NES. The roms are runnable on widely available emulators (not to discount the incredible feats of engineering creating those emulators entailed) and often decompilable or simple enough to understand in machine code. I found them similar to Z-machine or Scumm VM which I already thought was OK. After all, the requirement was free software, not all free media. I could still watch normal movies, for example.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The Smolnet - What I really like about it

      Time for another meta post about the Smolnet and what I really like about it. It's not only the privacy and the advertisement-free, distraction-free experience. And it's not simply to have a Gemini Capsule, a Gopher Hole, or a finger server, and to be independent from the big web oligarchs that divide the web into their own silos, which spy on us all the time for some nefarious reason and squeeze out every little bit of information from their users for marketing, advertising purposes, or other malicious things.

    • TLS certificate lifetimes will "officially" reduce to 47 Days

      I am vaguely familiar with the tradeoffs that they've assessed. Some of it comes down to the programmatic availability of new certificates, which this move will promote, but which is not the principal/stated motivation.

      Obviously there is a spillover effect for those who are "commingling" their HTTPS and Gemini services, i.e., using the same certificate and private key for both. It will make the TOFU requirement of Gemini a bit hard on anyone who keeps accessing a commingled Gemini site.

  • Programming

    • Counting the Reals

      If we have a sequence of prime numbers, we can add in non-prime natural numbers “in between” in a way that preserves the ordering by making the newly inserted numbers be the products their neighbors.