Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 2025 Week 16-30: Photos

    It's been quite a long time since I posted a weekly status or photos log. In early May I accidentally dropped my smartphone onto concrete, and the lens cover for the main camera broke. I now have to take photos with my work phone, which is a nuisance and has discouraged me from photographing things. Nonetheless, I do have enough pictures to share at least one from each week, so I think it's time to catch up.

  • 🖼️ xkcd #3121

    > Detectives say the key to tracking down the source of the kites was a large wall map covered in thumbtacks and string. 'It's the first time that method has ever actually worked,' said a spokesperson.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CHYOPSI Wordo: RAYON

  • Seopyeonje

    Seopyeonje (서편제) is a film directed by Im Kwon-taek (임권택). Im is a prolific Korean film director. While not all of his films have been well received he is very highly regarded. Several of his films are considered classics of Korean cinema. Seopyeonje was both well received by critics and a commercial success. Released in 1993, it is from the later half of Im's career.

    The plot of Seopyeonje spans several decades. It starts with a scene in the nineteen-sixties following a middle aged man named Dong-ho searching the Korean country side for a pansori (판소리) singer. We soon learn the singer is Song-hwa, Dong-ho's sister. This opening sequence serves as a framing device, with the bulk of the film depicting Song-hwa's life chronologically from childhood through to early middle-age in the nineteen-sixties.

  • 2025-07-28

    You ever look at something and in that moment realize that the world has completely changed and that "something" you are looking at will no longer ever have its place in the world again?

    As an elder millenial and xennial, I've had that moment plenty of times for all manner of technologies. Some things you might miss and have a nostalgia for, but other things you say good riddance and welcome your new technology overlord.

    I had another one of those moments when I was at my local thriftstore the other day. I was browsing the book section and saw an entire shelf full of O'reilly technical books that someone had donated. Many of them were 1st or 2nd editions from the 90s to early 2000s. I instantly flashed back to my earliest days working as a junior engineer in the early 2000s. I remember pouring over books like "Programming Perl" or "Unix Power Tools" among others. For my entire early career, O'reilly books were always on my bookshelf and believe it or not, we actually read those things. When we didn't know something, we would actually grab a book and crack it open to the index and look it up. Crazy right?

• Politics and World Events

  • There's No Objective Reality in Media

    I've just had a sudden realization about how people view fiction that I think might be one of the biggest gulfs between how “normal” people and people like critics or even just normal film/TV/book nerds view media. And is one of the few drivers behind why most new big-budget stuff now is just remakes and sequels and such.

    Note that for the sake of giving examples and to avoid distasteful but generic terms like “consume media”, I'm going to be talking about movies specifically; but this absolutely also applies to TV and books and video games and such too.

    The key difference is many people's perception that there is a fully-formed, objective reality associated with the fictional world, and that if something isn't shown it's because the filmmakers are “hiding it from everyone”. Rather than because the artists involved in the production just… didn't write or sometimes even conceptualize it. As such, when a crappy sequel is made, they get excited because “Ooh, we get to see behind the curtain, all the things they didn't show in the last one!” Not realizing that it's not like this is something that exists in the world but they didn't show in the previous movie; in this sequel they can do literally whatever they want because there is no objective reality beyond whatever the writers decide on a whim. Worse, with crappy cash-grab sequels it's rarely the same screenwriters or director so it's going to miss all the things that made the original film good.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Mobian for PinephonePro

    Mobian for #PinephonePro has been steadily improving. I installed a weekly image back in December 2024 and have been updating it, watching the progress. The #phosh UI improvements have been amazing, and the phone runs as slick and smooth as any Android phone I've used. Recently, I noticed #OrganicMaps app is now available on it, and the Camera app, if installed from Flathub, actually works! I can finally take photos with both front and back cameras, and scan QR codes. This is massive for daily driving the phone!

  • wayland-current-status

    Anyway, when you don't do sandboxing to begin with, it hardly matters if you're using Wayland or X11. `ping` can read my SSH keys. My terminal can. `ls` can. `jq` can.

    If Wayland gave me a huge boost in terms of security, it would be worth the sacrifices. We're not there yet.

    This whole situation reminds me a lot about my efforts to switch from Windows to Linux some 20 years ago. I tried to switch to 100% Linux many times because it was interesting and supposedly better, but it just wasn't what I *wanted*. There were too many things that caused pain.

    Only when I eventually got sold on the philosophical/political/moral idea of Free Software, I was able to think: "Okay, this is worth it, I'm gonna push through. This is what I want now."

  • audio bookshelf

    I am using bastille for jail management but its not important. Setup a new jail and mount your audio files inside the jail, due to the way my disks are setup I am also mounting the config and metadata directories into the jail. So /mnt/audio /mnt/config and /mnt/metadata live outside the jail.

    Once your jail is setup and the mounts exist, exec into the jail and run the following. At the time of writting this, I am running FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE. The port 3333 is being exposed outside the jail.

  • Thoughts about AI [sic] / Some thoughts about LLMs [Ed: Faking one's language isn't a legitimate use case, no more than cheating on one's homework is a decent skill or an advancement if the actual goal it to learn and improve knowledge; if a person 'talks' "in" or "via" LLM slop, then it's not that person talking but a stochastic parrot or a machine without comprehension (less than an actual parrot); it might even count as plagiarism and not improve one's language in any way, instead promoting laziness; "that LLM can still be smarter and have more comprehension than the average human," as MinceR put it, "and that gap will grow, not because LLMs are becoming better, but because humans are becoming stupider".]

    I read canfoods recent article about how, sometimes, you suddenly feel like an era is over and something new begins. This is a feeling i can very much relate to. For me, such moments where when the Berlin Wall was teared down (at that time i was a bit too young to get the weight of what was happening... but it felt like a massive change), the next such thing was when i first chatted with a classmate (who at that time was an exchange student in the US) back in the early 90s over some BBS (or was it already IRC?) - it felt like the world got much, much smaller in an instant.

    My wife, who is from vietnam, has many, many talents. Learning languages is not among them. She struggled since her arrival for studying here in germany (about 16 years ago) to this day to get fluent in german. Yes, she can get around and finished her degrees absolutely well - but it is a thing that is constantly bothering her. At end of last year she tried out ChatGPT and since then her german began to improve massively.

    [...]

    Not as a tool for faking competence or replace the knowledgeable human, but as a lever for acquiring knowledge better and as an enabler to ask questions to an author far away or even gone entirely.

  • Not gemini

    Its not gemini but audio bookshelf is pretty cool. Just setup an instance inside a freebsd jail

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Weird website ideas

      ’90s website vibe (think Geocities) but it aggressively uses P3-only colors in large solid blocks and not just in passing (like in photographs of flowers)

    • project yeet broadband: broadband yote

      After two whole weeks of never turning on the modem-and-router power strip even once, I disconnected the modem and router entirely over the weekend. Packed them into a box and put my clarinet case in the space they used to occupy. (I really love this, because now the case is right next to the piano.)

      I was going to wait until after band camp week to cancel, but then I realized: I won't be here during daylight hours for band camp week. So why would continue paying for broadband I won't even be here to use?