Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Big pumpkin

    Keeping with the season’s theme, we decided it was time to harvest the biggest of the 3 or 4 pumpkins we had growing this year.

    So, yeah, no big life changes. As I was telling a friend the other day, my life these days is “comfortably dull”. But, hey, we got a big pumpkin.

  • How to Maximize Your Positive Impact

    I'd like to cite Aaron Swartz¹ as a source of inspiration for this entry. I don't have heroes², but if I did, he'd be mine. He is deceased now, but he was more like myself than any other public figure I'm aware of and he had very similar long-term life goals. Here's a collection of quotes from him I picked that I believe best exemplify his outlook on life: [...]

  • We Protect you From..

    We protect your privacy, and uncensored your freedom & protect you from entity of system which make decaying/contamination at sequence, intervention by technocrats and internet network industry mafias, and also mailicous, manipulation, stealing, scamming data and information from the internet biome,the Specimen buzzer & media mouthpieces of Globalist, & AI as a dangerous spectra, through our network fractal as catalyst on rizom which do fragmentation in our social & tera community.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ADEIQRU Wordo: SAGAS

• Science

  • Compile card game review

    Compile is a game-with-content since the basic ludemic operations (flip, shift, cover, draw etc) are concatenated in various combinations into cards so that they can sell cards endlessly. I don’t like that. But for a game-with-content it’s unbelievably bland. Cards don’t have their own flavor or even their own name.

    But oh, how fun and good the core game play is inspite of that (and the off-putting AI theme). I love playing it.

  • Checking in – October 2025

    I have downsized my planner. I used to have a daily planner and a weekly planner, one to hold events and logs and one to hold statistics, but I have now combined them into one weekly planner. I have noticed that I hardly have enough things to fill out the daily pages and having two books is a bit annoying. So now I don't. As of time of writing (27th) I have merged the two together.

    Unifying to weekly allows me to see more at a glance, but now everything is very cramped. It seems like being able to see more makes me want to write more, so that's surprising. But it's fine; probably after the excitement of a new planner wears off everything will settle in fine.

    It's interesting to me, when I realised it as I am writing this, that the paper planner I'm using (Jibun Techo, since 2015) is younger than the digital planner that I'm using (org-mode, since 2009).

• Technology and Free Software

  • The Wrong Gemini On My Phone

    I browse Gemini on my smartphone using Deedum, but in my apps list, I've renamed it to simply "Gemini Client." This weekend my Samsung Galaxy A15 received an Android update. Aside from the usual UI changes and security fixes, a new app appeared right next to Deedum--but instead of being a Gemini browser, it was a stub for Google's Gemini AI service. That was frustrating enough, but to make matters worse, Samsung installed the stub as a system app, which prevented me from removing it by normal means.

    Luckily, I could use ADB, an elevated permissions app called Shizuku, and a rootless uninstaller called Canta to remove the stub. But the incident highlights a bigger issue for me, especially regarding smartphones: we are not in control of our computational resources anymore.

    It's often said the devices we carry in our pockets every day are more powerful than the Apollo flight computer that landed astronauts on the moon. That's a true statement, and it's definitely impressive to think about. But what can we do with all that processing power? Here I refer not necessarily to what we choose to do, but what we're allowed to do by the device manufacturers. To what activities are these computers limited, by the necessity to use apps made by for-profit businesses?

  • ASCII Art and Artist Attribution

    While browsing through Gemini space and looking around at your lovely capsules, I noted that there was a good amount of ASCII art. These images that were oh-so-popular on the forums and in text messages, a few years ago, are still around. I have always enjoyed stumbling across them and didn't really give much thought to the artists that make these art pieces.

    If you buy a painting, I'm sure that you take the time to have a look at the artist's signature. This has fallen by the way side when it comes to ASCII art. I saw a post today that reminded me to be more mindful in this regard and pointed me to the "Respect ASCII Artist's Campaign".

  • Make computing personal again: return to the roots

    Digging out old (or otherwise weak) hardware is extremely useful sometimes. It helps you rememeber what's really important and what's just bells and whistles. For instance, after successful tryouts of Alpine and MX Linux, the next candidate for my old MacBook Air A1370 became Bodhi Linux. Yes, it's based upon (an older version of) Ubuntu LTS, but the system itself is revamped enough to consider it quite an independent distro. I'd say, despite some idiosyncrasies, it's just as capable as MX for "reviving" such old laptops with 2GB RAM and a weak dual-core CPU. But that's not my primary topic of today. It's just a case when I, after installing this distro, started thinking about which software I really need in my day-to-day life.

    The first thing is, of course, a good terminal emulator. As I probably already mentioned, ligature support is a must for me (Fira Code font in particular), so I use patched st for X and Contour for Wayland. Inside the terminal, my workflow revolves around three things: a nice shell (usually, a recent bash or oksh), a nice text editor (modern Vim) and a nice session manager (tmux). All these things require additional configs and plugins that I have used to move from system to system. This is complemented with a few other third-party CLI utilities such as grep, curl, aria2, rlwrap, jq, fq, fzf, mpg123, ffmpeg, sox and the imagemagick package. That comprises like 90% of what I use from the generic perspective, besides the browser, the mpv player, LLM-related stuff, VPN-related stuff (like ZeroTier CLI), Android platform tools and some proprietary messenger apps.

  • find glob

    These are mostly the same, only that find(1) takes more key presses (though a wrapper script could help with that) and includes a directory component with the filename. We're using printf(1) as a portable replacement for echo(1) but you can use echo if you do not care or know that the usage is safe. What else is different?

  • Programming

    • DSSSL with varargs

      This is so jank but I was frustrated with how the rest parameter redundantly has all the keywords left in (unlike stragglers in define-options) so I did a grobian solution at least for now: [...]