Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Fall Update and Back to Prepping

    The end of the summer and start to the fall has been mostly cooler - but still with not much rain. Fall has always been my favorite season, and although the dry spell has muted the colours a bit, the trees are still pretty. The wildfires I spoke of in my last post slowly came under control, and the parks and trails opened up again in early September. So we've been able to get out for more biking and hiking.

    Much of eastern Canada uses electric heat, owing to the relatively lower cost (especially with heat pumps, which are very common) as compared to oil or propane. But since we want to stay in this house long-term, we made sure to choose a house with a wood stove, which we haven't had since living in the States, but which we felt was important in case of winter power outages. Our other disaster preps have suffered as well over the years, so now that we're in a more stable living situation, we're trying to change that.

  • Us dragons

    A short post. One thought, one association has been on my mind lately.

    I have noticed a resurgence of interest in Tolkien in recent years. I’d use the word “fad” somewhat pejoratively, because I am not referring to the understandable fascination with Middle-earth and the rest of JRR Tolkien's work, I am not referring to fandom, works, debates, and more or less scholarly dialogues, nor the desire to constantly return to reading Tolkien's works, which I myself share. I am referring to a specific shade of this fascination, which, in my opinion, has appeared very recently (but perhaps I was not aware of it before). I see newer and newer, more and more frequent, more and more beautiful editions of not only the canon, but everything that this prolific creator left behind. All his notes and sketches are being printed, right down to his early drafts and ideas, and they are being printed because there are people willing to buy them, because... it's fashionable? Is it just me, or does it have a slight hint of snobbery about it?

  • Autumn blues

    I'm sick of the bullshit neraly every one produces out there. I mean, yeah there are still very nice things like the smolweb or LoRa, Permacomputing, Solarpunk,... but the mainstream seems to be more and more brain dead.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Programming

    • C IRC Bot

      The Bot::IRC perl module is easy to develop for, but brings in a lot of supply chain to be attacked, and isn't as light on resources as another script could be. Up next is an implementation that uses libircclient.