Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Breather

    In-laws were just in - five days, left this morning. Next up is my sister and the nephews, arriving in a few days. I've been getting the basement set up, doing some between-visits cleaning that needs to be done, trying to take some time to just decompress a bit. Listen to some music (that isn't oldies radio), sit down with a guitar in my hands and mess around for a bit, start looking at some stuff I'll need for musical commitments for the fall.

  • The adventure of choosing a plant-based yogurt

    For years, I've had yogurt with muesli for breakfast. I like to add some red fruits or half a banana to it.

    I use plain dairy yogurt, and the muesli is the simplest type, consisting of rolled oats, a few hazelnuts, and some raisins.

    I decided to find out if I could replace the dairy yogurt with a plant-based alternative. It helps with animal welfare, the environment, and my health.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ACJKLWO Wordo: ROWER

  • to be loved

  • Six truths

• Science

  • Predicting forest tree stem abundance in unsampled size classes

    Most tree inventory plots have a minimum stem diameter threshold. Tree stems with a diameter lower than this threshold are not measured, because they are often too numerous to measure, and they contribute comparatively little to the total woody biomass of the plot.

    Different sites have different minimum stem diameter thresholds, though 5, 10 and 20 cm are common. If we are going to compare woody biomass stocks across sites, how do we account for this difference in methodology, which could otherwise lead to lower estimates of the biomass stock where the minimum stem diameter threshold is higher?

    One option would be to do nested sub-sampling, where smaller stems are measured within a small portion of the total plot area. Then you multiply up the biomass of small stems within the smaller subplots to the area of the whole plot. This method assumes that the spatial distribution of small stem biomass is consistent across the plot. Many plots don't do this nested sub-sampling, but I believe it is the best way to deal with this problem.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Cloudflare? No.

      @babelcarp@social.tchncs.de asked me about Cloudflare. I think their efforts to block bots and other forms of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks are commendable and interesting. But at the same time, I don't want to use them.

      Whatever tech they are using to identify bots is proprietary. Is it the list of user agents? The behaviour of certain IP numbers or networks? I mean, I try to do the same thing, right? But using their solution costs money and puts me at their mercy. This is problematic even if they give me their protection for free. If I can no longer defend myself, I'll be happy to accept their help. But until then, I'm going to look for other ways.

      As a society, handing over control over vast swaths of the web to a single US company is problematic, too. Sure, this gives them great power to find bots and analyse their behaviour across a gazillion websites. But when Cloudflare is down, a large part of the public Internet is down, too. If they censor a country, a company, or an individual, everybody using their service automatically partakes in the action.

    • Tootik - A Gemini Fediverse Client | 🏷 research

      I was recently playing around with a program called Tootik. Tootik is a fediverse client, like Mastodon, but instead of being over https, it's over gemini. This immediately peaked my interest because I had been needing to move instances and this client even had a migration feature to make that easy. So I set up Tootik.

    • Small Web July (but make it forever)

      The point: To spend July exploring the small Web and/or real life instead of spending time on the corporate/commercialized Web.

      I'm not sure designating July as a separate small-Web month helps me much. I started this process in January; since then I've deleted every personal social media account. I no longer watch YouTube; except for FloMarching, I don't stream anything at all. (And I can't realistically drop FloMarching in July, because July *is* DCI season.) I do still get my news from major sites, but I do it via my RSS feed reader and Refdesk:

    • Small Web July

      drmollytov[1] posted an article about the "small web july". There are several links to other pages which cover this idea in his article.

      [1]: gemini://drmollytov.smol.pub/2025-07-02

      The thing is to reduce or even fully stop using the big corporate web and their walled gardens and concentrate yourself on the smolweb and your real life.

      I really like the idea but I'm already nearly only using the smolweb. I don't have a google, facebook, instagram, X or whatever else account and never had. I only have a Mastdodon/ActivityPub account which I only use sporadically. And of course my email accounts, which I favor. I only use mainly FreeTube/ytfzf to follow some YouTube accounts. And I can't simply quit Netflix and Prime Video because I'm not the only person using these accounts. And sometimes I like to watch a movie or series.

  • Misc.

    • Long time no post, huh?

      Soon after I started this blog, I started working full time again. I got a job as a front desk host at the same hotel that my partner works as a head chef inside of. (the restaurant isn't own by the hotel, just located inside)

      Tbh, it's been pretty chill. While standing on my feet all day, being paid hourly, not having my weekends on the weekend, and dealing with entitled guest really fucking sucks. I can't help but admit how nice to work somewhere where I don't feel invested. Especially after 10 years of putting all my creativity into some company that would eventually throw me aside.