Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: DEUMORH Wordo: WELSH

  • Do councils "oversee" populations now?

    A recent development in the ongoing controversy around asylum in the UK brought me to look into Cllr George Finch, who is apparently now the leader of the majority group on Warwickshire County Council. A quick Google shows that he's very young: [...]

  • The Inevitable Once-a-Decade Couch Shopping

    At our first house, just after we moved to the city, we got a very small leather sectional. Italian leather, white, the furniture store we got it at long out of business, as is the way with so many places that aren't retail giants. But it served us well. It was starting to go, so we gave it away on Kijiji when we moved out of that house, and into a larger one.

    When we moved into the new house, we got a sectional that fit our main living area. Which is a great room, so, wide open, lots of light, and the sectional needed to be bigger. We found one in bonded leather. It has...not been as good as the old one was. Four years ago, the material started to peel and flake. We didn't replace it then because we had just got a puppy who was, shall we say, very rambunctious, and liked to wedge himself under it and tear at the fabric underneath. _When he gets older and calms down, we'll look into a new one_, we told ourselves. Four years passes. So it goes.

  • Almost there...

    One more day of work tomorrow and then I will be off on annual leave!

    I am really looking forward to it, since the past few weeks have been really intense and I am absolutely burned out.

    I have no plans for what I will do on the two weeks I am off, and I am intentionally keeping it like that: I don't get many options to be spontaneous in my work and personal life, so I want to enjoy not having plans for these two upcoming weeks.

• Technology and Free Software

  • My computer broke, and it was the best thing to have happened

    My personal laptop broke. It was during the end of last semester of uni, and I had many assignments yet to finish. I tried to boot into it after I have gotten to the dorm, but only the fans would spin and the keyboard backlight would light up. I wanted to investigate the issue. From what I've gathered online, it could be many things from a faulty real-time-clock battery to a dead motherboard. Well, you don't even have to guess, it was the motherboard, or, more precisely, the gaping hole in the graphics card. I never repasted the computer, so the frankly terrible job the manufacturer did could have been the problem. Or maybe just a manufacturing defect, I saw it was quite common for the motherboard to die ~1/2 a year after warranty. I did not bother repairing the laptop, as I would have to replace the motherboard as a whole, which comprises a significant part of the original price.

    Now I had to assess available options. I had (still have) an assigned work laptop, your basic office model, i5, no dedicated graphics. But sufficient for civil engineering CAD and occasional 3D models of the terrain and infrastructure. I'm lucky to be a part of a great work collective, my boss was understanding when I came to him with a request to allow me to use the work computer for school. Well, that would be covered for now, I can finish my assignments. But what will I use for my free time? I don't feel comfortable with my activity being tracked on the provided laptop.

    [...]

    I unsubscribed from a lot of YouTube creators, especially technology channels, as the consumer oriented field has become too stagnant, with changes just for the sake of changes, or has unfavorable priorities to me, like generative LLMs everywhere, increased surveillance and data collection, unrepairability, and planned obsolescence. Then I moved my subscriptions to FreeTube -- a more private desktop client. It does not always just work, as YouTube regularly introduces obstructions, but that makes me more intentional with my use, and I go pursue some other activity instead.

    For once, I am thankful this has happened to me. I no longer think I need a powerful graphics card on my PC. Or a new phone. When you get to the device's limit, you can go two ways: upgrade or lower your consumption. I'd recommend to utilize what you already have before spending more money, and maximally adapt to the restrictions that come with this way of thinking. At least for me, the results are worth the hassle.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Website discovery

      People complain about indie-website discoverability. These seem like OK places to find indie content.

      Of course, just because something is merely indie doesn’t mean it’s any better — or even, in some cases, any different — than what you’d get on the globocorpo websites.

    • dragfyre at tilde~blog

      OK, looks like the setup is stable enough now that I can call this the official first post.

      hi! welcome to the tildeblog. this is my official return to blogging after a several-year hiatus which saw me mostly focused on getting disillusioned with most of the big social media sites on the, uh, “big web” I guess we’re going to call it, and beginning to explore smaller, more fun spaces that are a little gentler, less overbearing, and more human-sized. welcome to the “small web”.

      in case you don’t know me from before, i used to have a few blogs. the main one was doberman pizza, which ended up being one of the earliest and longest-running Bahá'í blogs on the web. the other big one was baha'i children’s class ideas, where I wrote about my experiences teaching moral and character education classes for children in different communities. I stopped due to being busy with IRL stuff, but lately I’ve been missing it, so here’s a new thing to play with.