Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Postage Increases

    I subscribe to a couple of small presses: for $75 or $100 or whatever it is, I get everything they produce in a year. The bigger poetry presses (still small by press standards) have similar sorts of deals, but it feels more varied and interesting when I'm getting a dozen or more chapbooks instead of a handful of books.

    Recently I got a big box in the mail from one of them. I realized then it had been a while since I'd received anything from that press. I opened the box: fifteen chapbooks, probably about a third of its output for the year, and an apologetic note that this format may have to be the future for them, as the recent postage increase of 30% would have added $6000-7000 to the press' annual operating costs.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ADGHLYR Wordo: PATTY

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Physics Insight #3154

  • William Gibson’s Count Zero

    So this review is going to be very spoilery so please just go read the book; start with other Gibson books (like Burning Chrome, which is referenced and spoiled here in Count Zero) before this one, though, unless you really want to jump in the deep end first.

    This is the kind of book that makes me happy all day because I know I’m soon going to get to get back to reading it. Like “Lalala I’m washing the dishes and existence is pain but that’s okay because soon I’m gonna get to sit down for a few chapters of Count Zero so it’s a good day.”

  • That drum and bass mix

    There is a drum and bass mix on Youtube, posted in 2012, with a fancy painting of a blossoming cherry tree hovering the top of a cliff in the sunset, with lava flowing from the rocks. I like to listen it from times to times, the first 30 minutes are okay, and it gets more and more entertaining and focused after that. The whole second hour is bliss.

    I remember listening to it A LOT around when it was published, while I was still at university, especially during the finals period or when important graded work was being due. It would be the perfect soundtrack to grinding through my biggest code projects back then, somewhere in the middle of the night, in my room in Rennes. What the hell were we trying to build for these classes? Were we using Scheme? Or was it OCaml?

• Politics and World Events

  • Israel: So that we won’t say we didn’t know

    We are travelling through Portugal these days. I brought a bunch of newspapers along – to read should I manage to put down the phone. I just read Kollidierende Realitäten, starting with a B’Tselem meeting, with quotes from Yuli Novak. She says she assumes 95% don’t know about their report, Our Genocide.

    I see Israelis trying to so the right thing and I am reminded of the time I stood at the Paradeplatz during lunch hours, for a Just Peace in Palestine. It was so long ago. It didn’t help. The vigils are still ongoing. I no longer go.

• Technology and Free Software

  • An Opportunity to Consider Linux

    Microsoft is ending support for most versions of Windows 10 today. There have been announcements all over the Internet for months now, and almost everyone I know has already upgraded to Windows 11. But if you're one of the many who still hasn't, your version has likely reached EOL today.

    Not every version is being sunsetted right now, but only LTS (long-term support) versions, which are based on Windows 10 Enterprise, will continue to get updates. 1607 LTS is no longer receiving active updates, but it will continue to get security updates until October of next year (2026-10-13). 21H2 LTS and 21H2 IoT (Internet of Things) LTS will both be provided active support until January of 2027 (2027-01-12), at which point security updates will also end for 21H2 LTS. 21H2 IoT LTS has the longest support schedule, with Microsoft supplying security updates for 21H2 IoT LTS all the way until January of 2032 (2032-01-13)--almost six and a half more years.

    Of course, LTS licenses are very expensive and are closely tracked by Microsoft. They are generally only available to enterprise customers, so unless you activated Windows through "unofficial" means, you likely don't have one of these versions installed. In particular, all Home and Pro versions of Windows 10 will no longer receive security updates, so if you have either of those versions, you should upgrade to something else.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Dammit Charter/Spectrum!

      I finally got arguably decent internet hooked up at my house* today, and oh boy has it been a journey through complete and utter bullshit. Many folks has warned me that the new-to-my-area ISP, Charter/Spectrum is extremely difficult to work with, and boy were they not kidding. Throughout the entire ordeal of dealing with them, I have reiterated dozens upon dozens of times that I do not want NAT or Wi-Fi; imagine my surprise upon the install being completed when the installer tries to give me a Wi-Fi password... Now, to the installer's credit, the support site does say to call business support to deal with Wi-Fi provisioning, no problem I think, I call them... Everyone tells me that the Wi-Fi cannot be disabled. What. The. Fuck.

      So, just to see what the hell I am dealing with, I do indeed login to the Wi-Fi, just in case it has a captive setup portal or some other crap that allows the Wi-Fi to be turned off, no dice... Oh, and it has NAT. At this point my only options to deal with the Wi-Fi would be to either open the router up and physically remove the Wi-Fi card (not a bad idea) or to remove the router altogether... But... Spectrum EPON customers with static IP are absolutely required to use the Spectrum supplied router; because it uses password protected RIPv2 to provide the static IP. Great.

    • Simple IRC Client

      What follows is too simple. In particular various RFC mandated features are doubtless not present (to say less of any sort of error handling), and looking at the raw protocol, while educational, may not be for everyone. Also lacking is SSL support, though that could likely be wrangled through `openssl s_client` or similar, and SASL auth might be nice to have though would complicate matters. An even simpler option is to type things up in telnet(1) directly, but then you have to type the PONG replies yourself. Barbaric! It's also difficult to make progress when most of your time is spent keying in stuff you've already figured out. Hence, expect(1).