Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Turkey? Vulture? Turkey Vulture!

    The other day I was on one of my daily walks and saw this large bird pecking at a carcass along with a raven. I could not identify the bird. When I got close, the bird flew up into a tree. Was it a turkey? It has a red head like one. Was it a vulture? It was eating road kill. Turkey vulture! I had to look that one up. Never seen one up close so I took some pics. [1][2]

  • 🔤SpellBinding — BUEKLRC Wordo: OKAYS

  • tremble

    not much light left in the night

    reality a colourless static

    my mind bursting with the illusion of life

    of lust and longing

  • Messianic Christology Summary

    I am studying the excellent book by Dr. Arnold Fruchtenbaum, "Messianic Christology" (1998) published by Ariel Ministries. The purpose of the book is to identify and explain all the passages in the Hebrew Bible that prophesy concerning the first coming of Messiah, i.e., the life of Yeshua or Jesus.

    Prophecy pertaining to his second coming, i.e., his final victory and the establishment of God's kingdom on earth, are not dealt with except incidentally. On the other hand, passages establishing that he will be a king, and his royal lineage, are dealt with, as being relevant to his claims and credentials of being Messiah.

  • saw cars swim today

  • Goldilocks

    Oswald Spengler came up with a rather long story about how civilizations start young, become just right, then dodder off into too-oldism. Parts of the story may actually be true. Elsewhere there's the so-called "Goldilocks zone", or being just about right in space and time. Whether things are actually getting worse (that is, straying from a Goldilocks zone) may be the opinion of an old man yelling at a cloud provider, so it may take a few generations and then historical work or, more troubling for computers, archaeology to try to quantify if things did indeed worsen, and for whom.

  • 🖼️ xkcd — Bad Map Projection: Interrupted Spheres #3122

  • 🖼️ xkcd — Bad Map Projection: Interrupted Spheres #3122

• Technology and Free Software

  • Happy Hacking Keyboards

    I've used Happy Hacking Keyboards (HHKB) [0] for years, but I haven't bought a new one in a long time - probably 10 years ago I bought the last of the four I have. The oldest two are PS-2 models, and they all still work fine, although the white plastic has discolored over time.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • GiM's gemlog - 2025-07-31 Re: Re: Hello Gemini

      I am somewhat envious. There were BBSes in Poland starting around 1986, but TBH, neither I nor any of my friends used one. Public (dialup) access to internet in Poland started in 1995. I don't think gopher ever took off here, most people that had access to internet at the end of 90s, were using WWW (and ofc irc, e-mail, usenet). Still, I guess it won't be groundbreaking statement if I say that web back then was very much different from what it has become.

    • Re: Hello Gemini

      The big thing with certs is that they perform two tasks. The first is that it shows ownership of domains. Reading through the cert you can see that the entity owning `fu.br` is the same that owns `foobar.com`. Shortened URLs, secondary domains for specific services, etc. The certs help tie them all together.

      The second task is to provide a way to identify the content is from said owner. You know there isn't a man-in-the-middle passing you bogus content, trying to trick you or steal your information. If you trust my cert you know reading this post that it is me and two weeks from now when you read another post it is still me.

      The problem here is that no one actually reads the certs. We care about the little padlock on our browser and that is it. When an error pops up saying "Hey the cert changed and we are a little suspicious all we do is click ignore. We have no communial place to say "Hey, so GiM's cert changed, anyone else see that?" None of us seem to care that much because we are just here to read each others content and not hand over our credit card numbers.

    • Tag milestone #️⃣

      The tag crawler recently passed a million URLs. Seems like a Gemini milestone.

    • Small Web July - Conclusions

      July has come and gone! It felt both really quick and really long. I have been crunching for the past two weeks and my life has been... interesting.

      Outside from reading and exercising, which I continued to do consistently every day, I didn't manage to be consistent with journaling, yoga, or meditation. I was simply too busy (some days I only had 2 hours of breaks in the whole 24 hours!). My step count is really, really low, and I wasn't able to go for runs. On the plus side, I am off soon, so I can rest, recover and catch up!

    • New Gemini Stack

      I can now easily update my gemlog from my iOS phone!

      A text editor app called Pretext lets me directly edit files on the iOS filesystem.

      Then, I use the iSH app, which lets you run an Alpine Linux shell, to push to git and upload via SSH to tilde.club.

    • GiM's gemlog - 2025-07-31 New toys to test your gemini client

      I've made three tiny instances, to test handling of client certificates:

    • Re: On stagnation and burnout in the Gemini community

      Below is my thought or two on the topic that seemed to be a big discussion last month in gemini space when I was completely inactive. The discussion may have been touching topics beyond my concern, I could easily just skip it thinking it’s not part of my world. But then exactly solderpunk’s log reminded me how much gemini world is too small for any of us to think that our voice is too insignificant and all of us geminauts are part of a community just by adding our effort, time and creativity to it. So I decided to shortly add my perspective even though I never know if anybody reads. There’s a big chance somebody will I guess.

      Firstly I think solderpunk is quite right when he describes the two kinds of gemini users - developers, people who want to build apps, constantly thinking of new possibilities within gemini protocol, and gemloggers\gloggers including both writers and readers. Of course these two tribes are not completely separate, many of uf can be both but it looks like the burnout thing is specific to the former while not really concerning the latter.