Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CHLMPSU Wordo: ROBIN

  • 2025-07-04 (an hour or two later): I’m boring but I’m at cruising speed

    I don’t want to write nontrivial Gemini apps because that’s too much like the day job

  • Introduction

    Hello, all. Welcome to my corner of Geminispace. Like you, I'm speaking to the universe in an attempt to foster a connection with someone who might engage in thoughtful dialogue. That's something that has been sorely missing from my life for quite some time.

    I am the quintessential Gen Xer, coming of age in a household where both parents worked of necessity to provide a lower-middle class standard of living. A latch key kid who spent most of his childhood alternatively roaming the woods in and around my small town, or playing Atari 2600 games on loan from a local public library. Summer nights of impromptu kickball games with the neighbors followed by catching "lightning bugs" (fireflies) in a jar and camping in the yard. I shit you not--this is how we lived back then.

  • early hours on the 6th floor

  • Like Flipping a Switch

    I am going to share two brief scenarios, two states of being. I can't recall how suddenly I transitioned from the former to the latter. It may have been slower than I remember. In my mind, it feels instantaneous--like flipping a switch.

  • smoothie

    Not all that smooth, and my path to happiness and health, seriously.

    I've been making some form of smoothie for about 15 years. It started around the time I became a runner and needed to add an extra meal to a day when I had been doing a lot.

    In the early days, things were simple, some sort of liquid, usually a frozen banana, cocoa, and peanut butter. It's a classic recipe, replicated the world over, chocolate, peanut butter banana. What's not to like. I had heard of people doing more involved things, but it wasn't for me.

    Green juice? No thanks.

    In the proceeding 15 years, I tried a number of things, of the original triumvirate, chocolate, and the banana remain, and the peanut butter plays a supporting role, outside of the drink itself.

• Science

  • BaseLibre Numerical System - Part 0

    For the last few years, I have been fascinated with a tool for calculation, called "abacus". This led me to the creation of the BaseLibre numerical system.

    After much experiment, and after many drafts, I am now settling with the Chinese Abacus. This abacus type is probably the most ancient today, and I now see why this, in my opinion, is the original abacus (that the East part of the World has given with to us).

    This BaseLibre numerical system derives from studying the abacus, and suits well for Logic and for abacus calculation. In fact, I have discovered that today's Math lacks much logic.

• Technology and Free Software

  • TUI Rant

    I have no experience in user interface design whatsoever. Frankly, I should be reading some materials on how its problems are typically solved, but that's boring! Instead I'm going to come up with some ideas of my own, then see how they do after implementing them in a project.

    For this project, I'm going with an interactive TUI (Textual User Interface) for use in terminal emulators, because I find them fun and they're easier to implement than non-textual equivalents.

  • the long road to wayland

    We are all forced to deal with the changes brought on by Wayland. As such, I'm revisiting this topic every now and then. My main driver is still X.Org, because it works super well for me and there is nothing that the still-young Wayland fixes for me.

    I'm also running the Wayland compositors labwc and dwl. I don't use them very often, but they are set up and I can launch them when needed.

    I originally wanted to switch from X.Org to labwc but soon found out about the many issues in the Wayland world. One of them being that the people in those circles hold very strong opinions. Naturally, I don't agree with all of them and I need some way to deal with this dissent.

  • decline of the small web

    Rather long comment thread on the bubble BBS touching on feelings of burn out and the rise and fall of geminispace, or at least the perception of such.

    As someone who is very new to said space, having only discovered the small web at the end of May, just over a month ago. I can easily be said to be in my honeymoon phase. I touched on some of what attracted me to this space in my inaugural post.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • small protocols static generator

      Did a pretty hefty refactor of my static site generator spsg (previously known as gismo), to remove a bunch of duplicated code. As I transitioned from just gemini, to include gopher, then nex. I had done a bunch of lazy copy&pasting. Then I added generation for a second set of indexes for the `log` section which was about to be more duplication, so a clean up was in order.