Gemini* and Gopher

• Politics and World Events

  • reading the WSJ reshaped my view of economic class – but not the way my family thinks

    I have one of Those Uncles. You know. The kind who smugly inform you at every Thanksgiving that “if you’re not a conservative by age 40, you don’t have a brain.”

    Said Uncle has been consternated for decades that law school, a brief career in insurance litigation, and then starting my own business failed to turn me any more conservative. He looked genuinely gleeful when he found out I’d recently subscribed to the Wall Street Journal.

    Indeed, reading the WSJ daily for a month has changed my view of economic classes. But not the way he thinks.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Upgrading to trixie

    debian 13 codename trixie was released on August 9th 2025. I upgraded from debian 12 bookworm to trixie on August 11th with great success. How did I do it? That's easy: Reading the fscking manual just like I did with bookworm.

    I started using debian long long ago, with debian 3.1 sarge and wow, it's been a while now. Every two years I tried to upgrade to the latest release and usually it was a complete failure. I had to reinstall the system because there was some kind of a mess. This was not debian fault but mine. I hardly ever read the upgrading instructions and apart from that, I usually had so much software from third party sources that it was really hard for the upgrade to run smoothly.

  • A month with NixOS

    Yeah, it's been about a month already since I'd ditched Arch (namely CachyOS) in favor of NixOS on my main machine. And here are my impressions about this distro and personal thoughts about its possible future use.

    First, I realized that one really needs to give up on old practices in order to fully embrace the power of Nix. Instead of relying on profiles and flakes, just let the /etc/nixos/configuration.nix file do its job. This file allows you to configure literally everything that's not configured via the home directory dotfiles/dotdirs, including but absolutely not limited to the package list, hardware configuration and dedicated configuration sections for some popular services. These include a lot, e.g. Docker, Wireguard, OpenVPN, Tor, ZeroTier One, GPG agent and even Ollama, just to name a few. After making the changes, it's just a matter of running sudo nixos-rebuild switch to apply them, optionally adding --upgrade to upgrade any possible packages that have a more recent version.

  • The Canon Typestar 10-II electronic and thermal typewriter

    It's a little electronic typewriter from the late 80s. Runs on batteries 🔋 or plugged in 🔌, prints quietly on thermal paper (I use fax paper rolls) or normal paper if you have a ribbon cassette (as you can see if the photo above I have an almost empty ribbon cassette and a brand new still in original packaging cassette). Not exactly modern, but I'm finding it oddly useful, just like the little thermal printer my daughter received as a gift.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Discoveries, CCN Lite 📰