Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — BCHYORI Wordo: MULEY

  • Our Forgotten Future, "Indefinite Ends"

    Name your price, so, $10 USD. Albums, like games, and like so many other creative outputs over the past twenty years, have been devalued by the way the internet and its predatory services shape expectations. Bandcamp isn't bad, but think of things like Spotify, Steam, etc. $10 is $14 CAD for me, which is a little more than half a book. I read a lot of half a books; that seems like the minimum to pay for something like this.

  • Panning for Tunes (Nov 2025 Edition)

    The first year of Panning for Tunes is over (unless I manage to come up with 4 banger albums in the space of a month, which seems unlikely). It's been a fun project, and a pleasure for me to share the musical treasures I manage to find. Long may it continue.

• Technology and Free Software

  • I didn't get free Disney+ 📽️

    Someone in Mississippi signed up for Disney+ which isn't very remarkable, except that they gave the wrong email address, and I got the messages. I assume we have the same name.

  • The Cure for Slop

    I know I daydream about throwing away the internet entirely but for this one post let me pull back on that fantasy, almost all the way back, and instead just make a much more reasonable and smaller request:

    Give up on all “push algo” apps. Yes, all of them.

    You can keep all other apps if you want, including “subscription” type apps where you get stuff from the people you follow and maybe even things that they (real humans) “boost” to you. You can subscribe to a thousand people for all I care, or just friends and fam. You can stay entertained for all time watching hours and hours as long, any kind of screen, brightness set as high as you like, headphones on too, why not, as long as it’s stuff you actually subscribed to.

    What I mean by push algo apps are the ones that have a robot that “recommends” things for you to “explore” and “discover”. Stop using them entirely.

  • The tiny Rapsberry Pi Zero 2 W is great

    The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is the second generation of the Raspberry Pi Zero series.

    Measuring only 65mm × 30mm, the Raspberry Pi Zero series are tiny.

    Compared to the 'normal' Raspberry Pi boards, the Zero lacks a wired network connection, it only supports wireless network. It also consumes less power.

    The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W features a quad-core 64-bit 1GHz ARM Cortex-A53 CPU and comes with 512 MB RAM.

    The board is not only tiny, it is quite affordable. In the Netherlands it is sold for about 18 euro.

    The small size and the wireless network connection makes that when running headless, you can place it almost anywhere and it is easily kept out of sight. As long as there is a wall outlet for the power adapter close by, and the wireless connection is not obstructed, any place is fine, like f.e., behind some books on the bookshelf.

  • POSIX from Ada

    There has been a standard way to make OS calls for a long time, it used to be called POSIX.5. More officially, the ISO/IEC 14519:2001 standard, which a friend told me is on some service called libgen but I wouldn't know about that (if you're interested for $DAYJOB, just get your company to buy the standard). The current implementation is in Alire as crate "florist_blady". It's very complete, here are some snippets that illustrate simple usages.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Wikipedia as search engine in EWW

      The demise of the search engines and the embrace of untrustworthy, useless AI-generated results, optimistically referred to as "AI-powered" are upon us. It is time to rethink the way we search.