Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Toronto Blue Jays Lose the World Series (A Very Short Retrospective)

    It was a magnificent, unexpected, incredible, and almost-successful Series, the greatest I've ever watched, and thank goodness I was on the west coast for the 18-inning affair. Enough has been written about how close they were. I'm just grateful for the ride. Farewell to this team, to this whole year; may their offseason be fruitful, may they be back soon, & thank you for this wonderful season of baseball. <3

  • 🔤SpellBinding — DIPMNOL Wordo: JEWEL

  • Future housing problems in Kentucky

    In my last diary entry I wrote about the future of housing in Kentucky. It may have sounded like a cakewalk. In fact the instability in the next decade will be rough, as realities, regulatory frameworks, budgets, and the interests of varous social classes construct that future.

    The current institutional human warehousing arrange- ment will certainly continue for some time. Hundreds of thousands adult and child Kentuckians live full- time in a county jail, sober living, group home, nursing home, residential treatment facility, domes- tic violence shelter, prison, or immigrant detention facility. Hundreds of thousands more are frequent guests in medical, detox, or psychiatric hospital units, homeless shelters, and county jails.

  • Comic

    Soo... I decided to publish here my comics

    I'm both a technical and an artistical person. I like to work on both software and systems as in illustrations and comics.

    With my developer work, my interest in personal software development reduced quite a lot and this capsule was suffering this tragedy. This place prosper when I like to work on technical stuff because it was meant like it.

• Politics and World Events

  • My language doesn't allow goodbyes

    God be with you on this journey you are taking. I don’t know how you will fare, but _farewell_. These words are final. They give closure.

    My language doesn’t.

    There is no final parting word in Gujarati. When we part, we say આવજો (aavjo) or હાલો મળ્યા (haalo malya). First one means "come soon" and the second means "we will meet soon." Gujarati language flat out refuses finality. All relations are permanent — they may be stretched out across months, years, or even lifetimes. But they are tied together by a _haalo malya_ across space and time.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Homelab update v20251028

    My public stuff is on a Debian 13 VPS from netcup.de that resides in Manassas, Virginia, USA. From there, it can benefit from higher availability and uptime, easier snapshotting and backup of the entire VPS, IPv6, and it closes off an attack vector on my home network.

    Since I use Murena Workspace[1] for my Nextcloud and other cloud stuff, which integrates nicely with /e/os on my phone, I no longer need to self-host Nextcloud. It is therefore superfluous to have the DietPi machine running. I can just consolidate the Blocky DNS proxy and FreshRSS into the centralized monitoring machine. However, since my System76 Meerkat is now free, I'd prefer to use it for these tasks instead, as it is far more powerful. This means I can reduce four machines into two, namely the Orange Pi 5+ machines will be laid off and the Meerkat will replace them. Sad for the Orange Pi 5+ devices, but they're just machines without feelings, families, or survival needs, so they'll be fine if a bit dusty.

  • Homelab update v20251030

    Thelio Major is now running bazzite:nvidia. Just regular Bazzite; no custom modifications or builds. I don't intend to use it as a regular workstation, so no personalized software is installed. Just Steam, Lutris, MangoJuice, and a few flatpaks. I'm using the Firefox flatpak with sync enabled for minimally viable browsing. So it's basically like a glorified gaming console. I'm using the GSYNC monitor for this machine. It is configured to go to sleep after 60 minutes of idleness.

    Meerkat (meer9) is now my main workstation, with CachyOS KDE Plasma. I've also decided to run homelab monitoring stuff like Ntfy, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Promtail with syslog-ng forwarding on it. I don't quite see a sufficient reason to keep this monitoring stack separate from my workstation. I do everything there anyway, so the services might as well run on localhost. I can still connect to the Grafana dashboard over Tailscale from my laptop.

  • Mouse Keys / Pointer Keys

    About a week ago, my mouse buttons failed, sometimes it click, but sometime it does nothing, so I decided to give mousekeys a try.

    I often use keyboard for most task on my computer, so using mousekeys is not very different from using real mouse for me. One problem I have with mousekeys it auto reset back to numpad after some timer. To have always-on mousekeys, I use `xkbset mousekeys` and `xkbset exp mousekeys` to set mousekeys instead of `setxkbmap -option keypad:pointerkeys`.