Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Synergetic disinformation

    This video brought an interesting dynamic to my attention: There is a synergy between Russian and Western information operations and ensuing attempts to mitigate the perceived threat.

  • The fake narrative about the Ground Rent Cap

    Ground rents are payments in return for occupying land on a long-term basis, often in addition to a large first payment (the "premium"). Some ground rents are so high as to render the asset unsalable. Retrospectively reducing these payments has often been proposed as a way of rescuing those assets and for other purposes. And the UK government has just won a case in court on capping ground rents.

    Nevertheless, journalists have been pushing the narrative that there *is* no ground rents cap.

  • portraits in ableism

    My parents couldn't get my childhood doctor to acknowledge that I was deaf. According to him, I was just mother-deaf. After proving my hearing loss to themselves via the "attempt to startle her by banging pots right behind her head" test, they went around him and had my hearing loss charted by an audiologist. He was apologetic.

    My parents decided to mainstream me. I never learned sign language, and did ten years of speech therapy to sound normal.

    A regular question I received from other kids was "What's that thing in your ear?" Also, "What's that weird necklace?"

  • 25 years of cloister life

    I saw a docu about a nun who’d spent 25 years in a Carmel cloister. Which for Sweden is unusual. Obv I was fishing for info about digital minimalism but the docu didn’t deliver what I wanted in that regard. She says at one point “We don’t have radio, TV, or newspapers, and we use internet very sparingly”. I was like “Internet?! Deets please! Exactly how many times a day do you refresh Antenna or sync your newsgroups? What’s your IRC bouncer, how’s your milter pipeline?” to no avail.

  • FromJason on the Moka Pot

    Enjoying FromJason's little ode to his moka pot, a device that has featured pretty centrally to my own life. Everywhere when I was growing up were the cheap drip coffee makers: at the mechanic's, at friends' houses, in our own kitchen. My parents had drip coffee in the morning, weekends featuring my dad carefully making the coffee in his ratty dressing gown, and then bringing a cup upstairs to my mother in bed. But after supper, a different ritual: coffee in the moka pot, a little cup each, a spoonful of sugar, often a cookie on the side.

    I took a long time to like coffee - it wasn't until I started working after university that I drank it regularly - and our first coffee maker was a drip machine as well. I remember buying the flavoured beans from the bulk dispenser. Irish Cream (at the time, my partner's favourite). But at some point, I saw a cheap moka pot on sale at Safeway. On for like, $15. I remembered my parents' nightly ritual. I decided to buy it.

  • PLEASURES AND PAIN IN THE NECK

    It took a full week for my neck to get right again to really start doing things again, so typically I went mad doing all sorts of physical jobs that were digging at me all the time I was stuck propped up in positions of slightly less discomfort on the couch. Now a few days later of course it's sore again because I've been busy doing all the things that probably hurt it in the first place. But such is only to be expected. It really is frustrating because I've been getting more determined with my many and varied DIY projects lately, and with the weather warming up and drying out it's finally practical to attempt more of them. But then trying to do that is exactly what breaks me. I called my father to see if he could give me a hand with something yesterday and he couldn't until Friday when the weather looks bad, so I even ended up moving another one of those heavy sleepers on my own again, which might well be what's set my neck off again. It's like I always say, the only peace in life is to sit on your bum and attempt absolutely nothing, trying to achieve things is hopeless, but I keep trying anyway.

    My weekend time limit doesn't help. I kick myself about doing non-money-earning things in work hours during the week, then Saturday comes and I'm too tired out to be bothered, or distract myself with something silly on the computer like writing for this phlog (which I've been trying to cut down, this morning I woke up early so I have some extra time). Then it's suddenly Sunday and I have a year's worth of things to rush into, none of which quite get finished, but a few things get close enough that I get distracted trying to make them work or packing up on Monday, which I kick myself about for the rest of the week.

  • Not my suffering

    These are not my sufferings, I realized while driving coming back from a deep meditation and chanting.

    These are not my sufferings. They are hers and I accepted them, but in the process I forgot. I forgot it was not about me.

    The sufferings became mine. I became the victim. I felt I was creating the suffering, why would I make myself suffer? Is it her actions that create the suffering? No, it's the churning of self emotional harming that I do to myself in the moment.

  • Did they move the ships?

    Three days ago there were a half dozen US Navy ships parked in blue water off the coast of Venezuela, including the wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima and a sub. The ships were leeward of the Lesser Antilles, except for a couple US Coast Guard cutters north of Puerto Rico. Onboard were a couple thousand US Marines.

    Word was they'd escalate from sniping fastboats to launching tomahawk cruise missiles today. Nobody thought this was a good idea after Secretary of Defense Hegseth gathered the military brass to insult them two weeks ago, government shutdown means sailors and marines aren't getting paid and their familes aren't getting food stamps or daycare, and we're in the era of high quality active denial air defense, which Venezuela definitely has.

  • 🖼️ xkcd — Airspeed #3161

  • My burnout journey

    I have not written anything for a long time now, but there is a reason for that: my mental condition. Over the last six months, I felt increasingly overwhelmed by workload. I noticed avoiding and procrastinating tasks up to a point where I ran into problems with my supervisors and cooperation partners.

    Burnout is a common thing among academics. Working conditions contribute to this, because it is difficult to work in such a way that you don't take anything home with you. Overtime and weekend work are not uncommon—all unpaid, of course—and the prospects of becoming a professor are only good if you have regular, high-ranking publications.

    I did all that. But when I was invited to a hearing for a professorship appointment, I had the same problems: I procrastinated so much that I ended up preparing for the teaching demonstration the night before the lecture. The usual practice is to be ready weeks in advance and to rehearse, revise, and adapt all lectures with colleagues. Not for me: I more or less winged it, which is ridiculous for such a high-stakes situation.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — CFIOSRP Wordo: RUMOR

  • Picture Pages 🖼 — 2025-10-30

  • SOCK IN GLOVE

    Although I tend to fail, I try my best each summer to avoid getting sunburnt. One tricky aspect is driving in the car with the sun shining on my hands. Ideally I don't want to put sunscreen on them every time I drive (and recent revelations have pointed out how figures for comparing the effectiveness of Australian sunscreen brands have been widely meaningless anyway due to dishonest testing labs), so in an extra mark of strangeness I've taken to wearing gloves when driving. Yes I'm the last man standing who actually keeps gloves in his glovebox!

    But still there's a problem since while turning the steering wheel my long shirt sleeves get pulled back and reveal a gap of exposed skin between the glove and the cuff of my shirt. So I spend whole journeys pulling my shirt sleeve back or trying to hide my arm under a shadow.

    What I need are gloves with a long neck to cover my sleeve. Unfortunately there are few enough places that sell you regular gloves these days, let alone specialty ones. In theory there are gauntlet gloves, very thick things now sold to motorbike riders rather than medieval knights. Or masonic gloves, so you don't get your cuffs dirty if the secret handshake goes too far. Or American cowboy gloves which, for those of you thinking I'm a sissy, show that coyboys are sun-safe too.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Middle-Earth Roleplaying

    I finished reading *Middle-Earth Roleplaying*, Second Edition (or *MERP* as it is commonly known, or *MERP2E* as I'll call it to distinguish the edition) from Iron Crown Enterprises (I.C.E., the original company).

    I found the organization a little confusing when I started flipping through it, although once I settled down to read from the beginning to the end I could see why they organized that way.

  • Continuum Server: Epoll, WebSockets, and more!

    This article summarizes my experience learning non-blocking network I/O with linux's epoll[3] and Zig 0.15. I started this project for Texas Game Jam[4], with "Out of Time" as the theme I wanted to make a decaying game, where some players would find the world changing without full real-time multiplayer. As usual I want to feature playable in-browser games, this brought more complications that I *should've* known, and drove me to use OpenSSL through zig's c translation layer, epoll, and implementing a WebSocket server.

  • Frame contrast settings

    For a while now, probably two years, I wanted to have support for high-contrast colorschemes in KDE Plasma.

    Technically, this was already doable, by just modifying your colorscheme to such colors. However one thing was lacking: Outlines were calculated automagically with hardcoded value.

    Well, no more! Now you can set your own frame contrast value! And you may ask "Why not change the color completely?" which is a good question and I will answer that later.

    This feature will be in Plasma 6.6. Hopefully. Or if you use KDE Linux[1] you can already try it out. :)

  • Software Maintenance

    I briefly mentioned it as a possibility in my last post, but I ported ptf & x1804 from their own older copies to the reusable packages in scatcdsk_lib. This also exposed a few further areas for improvement.

    Firstly, using Alire for my own software works very well. For the changes described below, the automated tests that I previously added really paid for themselves (adapted from manual tests in the original packages).

  • The best tool for the job; is the one you have

    This evening I decided to have a look at the notebook options that exist for Linux. I wanted something that would allow me to edit my .gmi file with ease while also allowing for painless switching between documents.