Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • tar and theft

    I stole another line from you
    you absolved me of the first theft
    said it wasn't stealing 
    but I shouldn't make a habit out of this
    I need words of my own
    only my thoughts are covered in tar
    like yours lately
    I try to draw a picture with words
    but using the same crayon 
    can only go so far
    so when you give me another color
    unknowingly 
    the tar gets less sticky
    the picture more vivid
    words rearrange into lines
    lines fall into place
    I just might keep stealing 
    just a little
    

  • I Wish

    For the last year, I have been chanting to become strong. I wanted to become strong enough to try something new with my life.

    The new thing found itself through chanting as well. I have this image of many streams of benefit coming my way and connecting into me; specifically material things. Pentacles things.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Building a Fire

  • Feed me.

    Atom feeds! Imagine reinventing a whole new web & keeping XML. JFC.

    Atom & RSS came out of RDF, where XML encoding was just an implementation detail. Why not use something else, maybe even something better?

    I could make some new thing that looked like YAML. YAML, Markdown, & Gemtext are all designed for the benefit of human writers (& perhaps even readers). Does a feed need to be human readable or writeable? I'd argue yes for the readability part at least. From a functional point of view the summary of a site could be binary, but that way lies the madness of WASM. Looked at as part of the whole system where the web should be as readable as possible, it should stay text & at least as readable for humans as possible. (IMHO is implied throughout the blog!)

    But before reinventing any wheels it's worth considering that RSS & Atom already have an existing competitor in HTTP space: JSON Feeds.

  • Continuing the experiment. More.

    Having spent the traditional month or two second guessing myself, I've come to a temporary arrangement that satisfies at least some of my blogging needs.

  • Update for the 16th of July 2025

    Hola! Happy Hacking to all hackers, DIY, Creators and tinkers out there.

    So summer is here and with it comes the yearly updates! Let me start with the personal side of things: [...]

  • Start hoarding SD-cards

    SD-cards are mostly offered as micro SD-cards together with an adapter to the SD-card format. The cards are available in a wide variety of storage sizes, from 8 Gb to 2 Tb.

    Older devices often don't accept these and instead require low capacity cards.

    This week I discovered that my Palm TX supports only SD-cards with a low capacity. It recognizes a SD-card of 1 Gb, but not a card of 4 Gb.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Don't mourn the web, bring it back to life

      As a kid I learned python because I wanted to make videogames with the now long defunct Blender Game Engine.

      This was between 2008 and 2012 and it was very fun. Allow me to reminisce for a while.

      At the time, when I wasn't at school, chances were I would be on the computer with at least one tab open on the Blender Brasil forum, dedicated to (Portuguese-speaking) people interested in computer graphics with free software. This was one of [those PHP forums](https://www.phpbb.com) where you could add some markup with square brackets and emoticons and so on. We had about 5000 users, so that rarely 2 minutes passed without a new post or reply. But it was also a small enough place that a few mods [could easily keep up](https://danluu.com/diseconomies-scale/) with spam and misbehavior. There was a forum culture; when you got in, people acted a certain way, and you followed them.

    • Feed me now.

      Gemsubs! Gemsubs seem to be what people are calling feeds written in Gemtext. If I'd known that, or looked for even one more day I'd have found them.

    • I will stay on the small web

      After reading about half of the thread on BBS i got a little depressed, but that's maybe because of the dose of reality. I feel the stagnation and maybe decline of the Gemini Space too, and yes maybe it had it's peak in 2021, when I found about Gemini too. But I was so fascinated and intrigued by it that I short after my discovery set up a Capsule.

      And it was fun! And for me it still is! To read about other peoples lives, their gadgets, the building of interactive sites and all the interesting stuff. I believe round that time Station and BBS came along and serve since then as central meeting and discussion sites. There still was the "official Gemini Mailing List" which is now long gone. Now BBS could serve its purpose. And there also is a #gemini IRC channel on tildechat.

      But I feel the decline :( and it's very sad to see long active and important people leave. Now most people come and go. I don't know why so few people stay, especially the more technical interested.

    • OCC25 Back on ICQ

      Thanks to Andreas [1] I was able to activate an ICQ account.

      The last time I used ICQ is a very long time ago, it was a different world at that time.

      The service is provided at nina.chat, and you have to register a new account. You can choose any ICQ number (UIN) as long as it is not yet taken.