Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — BHIORTU Wordo: BRIEF

  • plaids of the republic

    "republic" is a computer-using group I belong to. Each member is called a "sundog"

    Each of these plaid patterns is based on the sundog's name. They are drawn by a computer program. Their plaid is theirs, unique to them.

• Politics and World Events

  • Israel, once a month

    I'm kind of glad I promised myself to write about the situation just once a month. That means I can look away most of the time and still feel like I'm looking away completely.

  • [Repeat] The future of housing in Kentucky

    Something uncomfortable is happening to college- educated people in my country, to people in the professions, people in management, civil servants in the public bureaucracies.

    They're becoming acutely aware that history is happening to them. History has for so long been something my country made happen to people in dis- tant lands, or at worst, something that happened to the professionals' clients, the managers' markets, customers, or the employees of their contractors.

    It happened to them in one way during as pandemic lockdowns, furloughs, work-from-home, deaths, and disabilities rearranged their work and family lives, and now it's happening again. The rearranging will continue, one way or another. The future will look different from the past.

• Technology and Free Software

  • 2025-11-10

    If you want to get into IT and need to build a homelab, where can you get actually cheap compute?

    I thought about this the other day when talking with some "younger folk" who wanted to build up some skills. Since I'm an elder millenial, I have literal closets full of old laptops and computers I've collected over the years. All of which can be cobbled together to build quick linux or BSD server farms.

    I actually just installed the latest LTS Ubuntu on a Core 2 Duo laptop I had sitting around to test some python and golang stuff. Works perfectly fine.

    So just "run what you brung" is probably the cheapest method of getting quick homelab compute going. Getting old computers from your family and friends is cheap and easy. As long as it is running a 64-bit x86 chip, it is pretty much useable to install Linux and learn basics like web-servers, containers, python, k8s, and whatever you want on a standard linux install. The downside of course is space and power efficiency and noise...oh god the noise.

  • KeePassRX Manual Now Available

    The info page and manual for the app are a work in progress, but there is enough information there now that it explains how to use the app. The biggest missing thing right now is a set of screenshots that put pictures to the words. Hopefully I will get around to uploading some soon. This page will serve as the official documentation for KeePassRX, beyond what is in the git repository.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Slashes

      I thought about calling this page “Slash”, mainly because it’d be funny in a who’s-on-first way if the URL ever were to be spoken out loud. Then I visited the above link and saw that “Slashes” is popular enough to at least be mentioned there.

    • Self-promotion