Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Response to Sloum's 'O Pioneers Post

    Thanks to Sloum for the mention [0] of Willa Cather's "'O Pioneers!" [1]. I had not heard of this book before, but it looks interesting to me as someone who likes historical fiction. I found it is part of a trilogy of books called "The Prairie Trilogy", all of which were written in the early 20th century, and are in the public domain in nicely formatted versions from standardebooks.org (just do an author search). So, downloaded and on my to-read list!

  • Summer Update

    Summer has not been too hot here, although there continues to be been quite a bit of rain, my wife and I have still been able to get out for some outdoor activities. Yesterday we went river kayaking, and were lucky enough to catch sight of a bald eagle in a tree on shore. There was a nearby nest with a youngster in it, we assumed this was the mother as she did not stray far when we were passing by.

  • Wet bike 🚲⛈️

    It takes me maybe twenty minutes to cycle home from the station. Not long after I set off this evening I heard a loud rumble of thunder, then the rain started: a few huge drops crashed down. I put my waterproofs on. It was soon pelting down. The roads were awash. I wished my waterproofs were more waterproof. As I got home, the rain stopped and the sun came out, which was annoying.

  • Understanding subjective things

    Generally speaking (at least within my framework) there are 2 ways to understand something, either building upon existing assumptions, or creating them from seemingly out of nowhere.

    Most of the time it is preferred to understand through an existing assumption, or multiple of them, but point is that one may work through how something is the way it is by combining building blocks together so eventually they reached to the understanding that they have.

    But what if the assumptions are wrong?

    Usually when they are wrong they can be proven to be wrong, but what if it can't be verified?

• Technology and Free Software

  • What does "Clouds about .05" mean?

    I recently finished reading "My First Summer in the Sierra", by John Muir, specifically the edition published by the Standard Ebooks project. I highly recommended it to fans of nature writing! I found it something to enjoy in many relatively short installments. The sheer intensity of Muir's exuberance in nature, and his poetic rendering of it, is such that you can't really just sit down and plough through it. Your mind kind of by necessity desensitises to it a bit if you try.

  • VPS exploited

    One of my Debian 12 virtual private servers was exploited and given the time of year, I didn’t even find out until weeks later. I have since re-rolled that VPS with NixOS and a pretty solid configuration that I’m fairly happy with.

  • Math finds

  • Internet/Gemini

    • self hosting

      I like running hardware/software. And the blinky lights that come with it.

      There was a thread about self hosting content and instead of trying to squeeze all the details into a text input box, thought it would be easier to write it down as a log entry.

      Currently I run three FreeBSD "servers", my router and a production and development machine. These are all tiny pc's of varying brands. Buying these secondhand provides the best price/performance and power usage tradeoffs. You get the ability to use proper devices, fast DDR4 ram and decent cpus, all with a small physical and power footprint.

    • Fear of View

      For now at least, this is a Gemini exclusive -- I'm not advertising it by any other means. There's a shared highscore board if you play on the server, and I'd be happy to see familiar names there! The game autosaves each turn, so you can quit at any time and continue by sshing back in. If you prefer to play locally, you can try to compile the Haskell source.

    • What do you self host in your homelab?

      Think this would be nice. How about we each share the services we self host in our homelabs.