Gemini* and Gopher

• Travel/Photos

  • Urwaldweg Bödmeren

    It’s times like these when I have my doubts. If I take the train at 10:00 I should arrive at 12:11. There should be a restaurant at the stop where I get off so if it rains a bit longer, that should be no problem. The hike is 3h 30min so there is a tiny chance for a little rain later but that should be OK. One of the days I am happy Switzerland pays for expensive weather modeling.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Moving to NixOS

    I recently migrated my (main and only) system from Alpine Linux to NixOS. In this post I will explain why I made the switch and why I consider Nix to be -- currently -- the best Linux distribution available.

    Nix is a project that has been on my radar of quite some time now. It is a system designed around the principles of reproducibility, build-isolation, and declarative design, while also boasting one of the largest and most up-to-date software repositories in the Linux world.

  • Insights in living without a smartphone

    I have not used a smartphone for about 5 years on-and-off (discounting of course the years as a child where I didn't need to worry about silly things like this). It started in the summer of 2019 when by best friend gifted me his old Nokia 8110 4G (more on this later). Since then, I only had a smartphone for about a year. This device burnt through its charging circuitry a month or-so ago, so I am back to the dumb-life, though now with more insight into how to do things.

    In this post, I will be sharing the insights I have accumulated over the years. Just as a warning, the advice provided in this post might come across as ultimately unsatisfying. While it is definitely possible to live off of the information-grid, that is not the type of life I can live currently. Therefore, a lot of my insights revolve around using alternative but highly similar solutions to having a smartphone. The main difference being that you don't or can't bring these devices around in your pocket.

  • Keyboardio Preonic

    This keyboard arrived a couple weeks ago. Still loving those box white switches! The key caps feel a little flimsy though, after using my much cheaper th40 for a while. I’ll have to see how things go.

    It has a knob in the upper right corner next to the any key and the fun key. The knob was not mapped to anything, despite the documentation claiming it would be volume up/down. I’ve only added console font size increase and decrease to the knob so far. It pleases me greatly. The any key rather hilariously inserts a random key when pressed.

    So far I’ve remapped some of the same bindings I use on the th40 on my Preonic, despite that it has dedicated keys for some things (like hyphen.) I just don’t like to make my fingers travel as far to reach things. Though on the topic of remapping, embarrassingly, I have no keymap backups from anything, it would seem. And aside from the obvious ones, I can’t consciously recall what keys should be where. Instead I go to smack a key I expect to be in a place to do a thing and it doesn’t happen. Then I have to sit and think about what I’ve done and what I meant to have happen and locate the help docs for vim to find out what key would have done the thing I was trying to do. Then I launch Chrysalis and remap a few more keys.

  • Differential Equations, Analog Computing, and Emacs Updates

    My apologies for the long delay since my last post: as far as outdoor activities, there was a combination of personal and work distractions, along with weather issues — such as forest fire smoke — that made it difficult for several weeks to get out for my usually summer lunchbreak walks. I spend some of those lunchbreaks hacking Emacs Calc, trying to implement a feature that I requested as a wishlist item. I haven't made much concrete progress on that, however, so I won't discuss it further at the present time.

    Last week I was distracted by an arduous ordeal involving muscle spasm, brought on by an accidental blunt force impact to my back. It was a less than pleasant experience overall. But I was glad that, during the experience, I was able to continue trusting the LORD and not get angry, bitter, or despondent, despite several days of intense pain. Faith is the victory, as the old hymn says!

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Gemini Style Sheets

      As a preface, I currently use Lagrange as my gemini client. Lagrange auto colors gemsites with a random color pallet by default. This got me thinking, what if the capsule author could control that to an extent. This lead me to the thought process of gemini style sheets (gss). Inspired by css[1], gss would be a simple way to control the color of your gemsite on graphical gemini browsers. In the style of the smolnet it should be simplistic. Nothing too complex. Maybe just a way to set the color for the background, headers (separately), body text, preformatted blocks, and links. Inspired in part by the emoji favicons[2], the gss file would only be at the root and named something like gss.text or something to that effect. I’m not a specifics person so I doubt I would be able to write up the exact specifications but I am suggesting the idea to see if the gemini community is interested in anything of the sort.

  • Programming

    • Switching to Codeberg

      I have recently switched away from GitHub as my codeforge to Codeberg which includes the hosting of this blog. In this brief post, I will cover my reasons for switching and briefly describe the process.

      I have been using GitHub at least since 2016 (possibly earlier, I was using a different account at the time, so and cannot see exactly when I joined). Back then, I wanted to host some code I was working on, and GitHub was (and still is) the most popular choice for doing so. Since then however, many things have changed, notably the acquisition by Microsoft, the increasing social-media-lisation, and now: The AI [1].