Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Cesium #3131

  • Observations on Modern Dating

    1. Technology has negatively impacted the way we interact with one another in person.

    Cornish notes that she might not have ever met her husband in our current reality. He was smoking a cigarette outside the building she was trying to find, and she asked him if she was in the right place. Today, he'd be doomscrolling and her phone would have already told her it was the right place.

    Obviously, I agree with the conclusion. In my prior post, I asserted it is unlikely to connect with strangers in public spaces. Everyone is lost in their own world. I didn't observe this prior to smartphones: even if you were listening to music, at least your eyes were up. Your eyes being up increases the chances of engaging with another human being dramatically. That doesn't seem to happen anymore. Not for almost two decades.

    Just as importantly, I wonder if the addiction to technology has had a more general impact on our behavior.

    While visiting the city I mentioned in my recent post, I wandered downtown for hours. I can't begin to estimate the number of people I encountered. I conducted an experiment: my phone was in my pocket. Even when others were not preoccupied with their devices, they avoided eye contact with me. Now, is this simply a function of city life (i.e., just keep to yourself and avoid the potential for some undesirable confrontation) or an indicator of a greater reluctance to engage with other people?

  • warm as a dream

• Technology and Free Software

  • Welcome trixie!

    Debian 13 (trixie) has been released on 2025-08-09. So up to upgrading! What could possibly go wrong?

    to do ...

    I did upgrade my main workstation at home a few weeks before the official release. Everything worked nicely. Of course, noone is going to port my electronic projects from KiCAD version 5 or 6 to version 9. That is to be left for lengthy winter nights, or so it seems. But everything I use daily (sway, foot, emacs, bash, firefox, ...) worked without a hitch.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Looking at web server logs

      Where are the files?

      If you use Apache on Debian, the current log file is in `/var/log/apache2/access.log` so look for something similar. If you use nginx instead of Apache, it might be a folder like `/var/log/nginx`. The log file itself might be called differently, too.

      Log format

      The log file format can vary, too. If you use Apache on Debian, the log formats are set in `/etc/apache2/apache2.conf` using the `LogFormat` directive, and each virtual host can pick one of them using the `CustomLog` directive. See Log Files.