Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — AEITMSK Wordo: SPIEL

  • New Pen

    Today I received a new pen. Did I need a new pen.. No... However, this was an improvement on the Kaweco Sport Al that I use daily. In fact, it is a bit of a combination between the Sport, Supra and Liliput. Odd, I know!

    I got a Gravitas Quark in zirconium with a stone washed black finish. This is a pen which is about the length of the Liliput, thick as a Sport and with a size 6 nib like the Supra. Ooo I know! The pen is a short cylinder with a slightly tapered tip. The lid takes up most of the body of the pen. A short 3/4 turn and the lid is released from the body. The length of the body is pretty damn small. Essentially a grip and just enough length to fit a small international cartridge. This is just too short to reach the finger/thumb crotch with my small hands so I do need to post it. The lid posts with a 1.5 or so turn. When posted, the pen is about the same length as a posted Sport. The difference comes from a size 6 nib against a size 5. The weight is similar to an aluminium Sport and not as heavy as the steel Supra. When you knock the lid and the body, there is a delightful ring. This is one of the joys of zirconium.

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Service Outage #3170

  • Ridiculous research into the legal structure of Cambridge colleges

    I am ashamed to say that I initially paused composing this post because it seemed frivolous. I have recently digressed into investigating the legal structure of Cambridge colleges.

    Nowadays, they are all corporations with their own charters granted by the Crown, but they arose over seven centuries from a variety of other forms. There lots of interesting points of detail in how these processes occurred over time, but I want to focus, for this post, on a central question of the so-called "Foundation" of a college. A living-document version of this post can explore the other dimensions later.

  • Esperanto Music History

    Frank Merrick (1886 - 1981) was an English 20th-century pianist and composer. Alongside his musical activities, Merrick was also a pacifist, vegetarian, a prominent supporter of women’s suffrage and an active member of the RSPCA. As much has been written about his life and musical career elsewhere, this article will, as usual for this blog, concentrate on his Esperanto activity.

    Merrick learned Esperanto during his imprisonment as a conscientious objector during the First World War, at the suggestion of the prison chaplain. He was “overwhelmed by the skill and beauty of the language, as also by the driving force which inspired Zamenhof to create it”. His articles “Esperanto for Musicians”, published in the London Symphony Observer in 1950 and 1951, and “Esperanto in Relation to Choral Singing” in The Music Review in 1954, explain his thoughts on the language and its use in music, and his piece on “La Brita Muziko” in the magazine Esperanto in 1952 provides a basic introduction to British classical music for Esperanto speakers.

  • On "being" a shapeshifter

    If you've read my introduction, you know that I can change form pretty much however I want. If you don't know what I mean, my form is how I look like in our& head. In other words, I can take the appearance of a human, an animal, a Pokémon, etc., according to how I want to look like to myself and my headmates.

    You may have heard about folks who don't identify as humans (some of them defines themselves as therians, otherkins, or alter-humans for example). My case is a bit more complex than that.

• Politics and World Events

  • Yesterday, my city, Ternopil, was attacked

    Yesterday, my city, Ternopil, was attacked. The explosions occurred not far from me, about 400 meters away. Currently, they are reporting 26 dead, including children. Some people were burned alive. It happened yesterday at 7:20 am. We've been plagued by power outages for a month now, and recently it's gotten even worse. Now I can only get in touch to answer messages. After yesterday, my hands are shaking, and the apartment still smells of plastic. The fire was so bad we could see it over the horizon.

    Now, about the pressing issue: until this all stops, I don't know when the next magazine will be published. The hosting is still being administered, and everything is fine there. That person is safe and working.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Hacking the URL schema

      A while ago I submitted an article to the 2600 magazine. It was published in the Autumn issue of 2024. For those who don't know the 2600 magazine (2600 - The Hacker Quarterly), it's a publication about hacking and technology that has been around for 41 years

    • Fix CasaOS - Failed to load apps, please refresh later

      If you run CasaOS on your servers you might have seen that after the latest docker update to version 29.0.2 the apps under CasaOS no longer appear and an error is shown saying:

      Failed to load apps, please refresh later

      gemini://sava.rocks/blog/fix-casaos-failed-to-load-apps-please-refresh-later-after-docker-update-to-version-29.0.2/

      I've written this post with a temporary fix until CasaOS gets updated

    • Sava — Fix CasaOS - Failed to load apps, please refresh later - after Docker update to version 29.0.2