Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • numbings, becoming a ghost, lament and an apology for the awfully negative feeling overall

    i am not feeling so well these days. the last week alone has been humiliating. i really need to get out of here but i dont know where to go, what to do.

    for one- i am addicted pretty intensely to fentanyl, and the man ive been living with has been providing it to me. that is sadly possibly the only glue keeping us together right now aside from the fact that i get to have electricity and a place to sleep when i am here. ugh.

    i used to truly think that he loved me. how can you so heartlessly and relentlessly, over and over again- hurt the person you "love"? any time i speak i am punished, told that i am useless, that everything i do is destined to fail, told to kill myself, told to get on with it... mostly i was just trying to be useful or help out, but i guess he just turned me into someone to blame, hating and hating me more. making me the reason for all the wrong in the world. pariah. it scolds me still.

  • Notes on an overheard conversation while at dinner

    “No, I'm the one that goes ‘woo-hoo’ when you push my stomache. Woo-hoo!”

    “We have a weird and wonderful relationship.”

    “I'm weird, and you're wonderful?”

    “Yup.”

  • Back to Italy

    I have been back for a few days, actually, but this is the first time I have some time and energy to sit down at my laptop and write.

    I had planned to write more often during my time off from work, but I severely underestimated how little interest in sitting in front of a computer I would have.

    So here I am now, almost ready to go back to work, and finally writing an update.

    I spent most of my time off recovering as best as I could from my burnout: this includes not making any plans, taking things easily and walking a lot. I went to see a great concert one evening, of the Brazilian death metal band Crypta.

    I also walked around Old Town, met a friend from work one day, and visited the Royal Palace and the Marie Curie museum.

    In the Curie museum I bought this amazing book containing a collection of all letters that Marie Curie and Albert Einstein exchanged.

  • Summer... It's Gone

    And just like that... the temperature drops, the wind picks up and the sun starts its earlier descent.

  • I'm Back!

  • The siege has lifted, now 100 Days To Unwind

    For the last couple of years, I have mentally been in a sort of siege mentality.

    This has been because persistent ASB (anti-social behaviour) threatened to stop me and others selling up and leaving the neighbourhood. I had managed to get the problem contained enough to sell up, though I still live locally. However, the ASB started to pick up again.

    This week, in two ad-hoc meetings between my residents groups, the police, the housing association, the property managers and the developers, we managed to get agreement to end the ASB. It should not have taken so many years.

  • That 100 Days To Offload challenge

    On 18 August 2024 I tried the "#100DaysToOffload" challenge, wherein partipants attempt to write 100 blog posts over the next 365. I managed it exactly, with an hour or two to spare.

    I was never short of things to say, indeed, there remains some uncovered ground. I mainly stuck to my policy area, which is UK housing. What got written about was the "low-hanging fruit" of stuff that can be broken off into digestible chunks and addressed in a few hundred words. Most of the housing articles got folded gradually into my "digital garden".

  • Pike and Grebe

    Accompanied my brother-in-law to the lake for some evening fishing. Around five young Great Crested Grebes were splashing around a shallower area of water with one or two common seagulls circling around the lake.

  • Nepa Cinerea

    I spotted a strange creature trying his damnedest to enter the Baltic Sea on a beach in the Swedish archipelago yesterday. ObsIdentify came to the rescue as I had never seen nor heard of a Nepa cinerea or "water scorpion".

  • What the Fuck is a Bilberry?

    Sat at a bench at the eastern end of Långsjön near the park. I can hear the hammering of a Great Spotted Woodpecker. Merlin later detects a White Wagtail. As I try to visually confirm, one pops out of the bush at the base of the lake right in front of me. I also catch one hopping along the pavement outside my front door as I return home.

    Later, while visiting Gömmaren lake, I observed a grass snake (or "snok") walking along cliffs by the lake. Later, my daughter and I followed a hiking path a little ways into the Gömmaren forest where I came along a patch of what I thought were blueberries (blåbär). I'll admit they were a litte more oval than what I'm used to but they had a nice taste.

  • The brain is anxious

• Technology and Free Software

  • “I've got a bad feeling about this”

    While on the phone with my ISP (Internet Service Provider) [1], I was told I could just take the now cancelled “wireless service unit” to the closest UPS (United Parcel Service) [2] store, give them the account number and they would take care of returning it. No charge.

  • A first world problem that is partially my own fault, but I must also lay some blame to the Monopolistic Phone Company who took untold billions from the government for infrastructure upgrades, failed to do so while at the same time driving out other DSL providers

    Nearly a year ago I received the first letter from my ISP (Internet Service Provider) about it ditching DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) service [1] and replacing it with “wireless service.” To me, “wireless” is bad enough but to further state that it was easy to set up from a “phone app” was just XXXXX­XX icing on the cake. What if I didn't have a “phone” to put such a “phone app” on? So I kept putting the letters into the round file.

    Then a little over three months ago my router just spontaneously reset to it's factory settings and I couldn't get the DSL back up. I called the ISP and trying to get up and running again, I relented to get the “wireless service” only to realize after I hung up that I had use the wrong password. I was then back on DSL. Several days later the “wireless service device” showed up at our doorstep, but I knew that just be looking at it funny, the DSL would be immediately turned off and I would be forced to use it. So I put it into a corner of the office and pretended to forget about it.

  • 🐧 Debian 13 Temptations

    I've been running Ubuntu Server for a while now, but every time a new Debian release drops, I get that itch to switch.

  • Composition

    I've messed around with composing for a while, but not in any serious way. I'd do arranging of various pieces for the instruments I play, and this would've started...either in grade eight or nine? I remember a friends' parents were having a little outdoor garden party thing, and asked if their kid, me, and another friend wanted to play something. So we found some arrangements for flute/clarinet/cello, and wrote one of our own, arranging the Zozo theme from Final Fantasy VI. That was surely the first time I wrote any music, even if it wasn't my own original melody.

    But it was one of those lessons we get regularly in life, that you can do things, and all you have to do is, you know, do them. But at the time I kind of saw this as a one off, focusing on musical performance, writing, programming. One of us clearly learned the lesson. Within a year or two, my friend was making electronic music, and then other friends joined in. Maybe he joined in and the others were first. It was a long time ago.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: Re: Aggregators....back links

      As you may have noticed, all of us replying to each other (you included) post a link to the previous post we are replying to. This is a backlink. Obviously we do this for those reading our posts to know what conversations are going on and what we are replying to. But another cool thing people have created on Gemini are services that compile lists of these conversation chains via these back links.

    • SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL

      Economics as If People Mattered

    • Web Reposts in Gemini

      A few days ago, Jeff of sh0.xyz expressed frustration with the uptick of news articles being shared on Antenna, as well as on ActivityPub services like the Fediverse.^ Many others weighed in on the topic, expressing a range of opinions about automated and reposted content.

      On the Gemini side, it seems the discussion was spurred by a flurry of news articles that have been posted on Antenna by a user called ybaumy. After reading the articles personally, ybaumy archives them in Gemtext using a script, presumably hand-written. The articles are then checked into a Codeberg repository, mirrored on Gemini, and added to an Atom feed that is probably automatically submitted to Antenna once per day.^^

    • Re: Re: Aggregators....back links

      To my mind the issue is an unfortunate interaction between the implementations of these backlink services and how Antenna tracks users. Antenna doesn't use client certificates for tracking users, so its own "filter IDs" can leak out and confuse these other services. jecxjo presents an example of one single filter that by itself adds so much garbage to the backlink lookup results as to make them unreadable. This is probably best fixed on the backlink lookup service itself.