Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • I'm going cross-country skiing

    We just talked about *The Decline and Fall of the United States*. Are we ready to write that book? The fall might be long. So many thoughts swirling through the conversations. Allies no longer trusting the USA. Denmark having an official national security strategy that names invasion by the United States into Greenland one of the security risks. Russian and Ukraine continuing to bleed in the East. Right wingers on the rise, everywhere. Apparently, unstoppable.

    We talked about Iraq Body Count, the Palestine body count, how the terrible situation in Sudan and and Myanmar are terrible but further away but how the USA and Israel are in our midst, our trading partners, or "allies", investing in our economies, and we in theirs, tying us all to each other. And so, together, we begin to suffer like the rest of the world.

  • Peace

    The second candle of advent burns. Night's longer, light's brighter.

  • The Fellowship of the Ring movie is almost 25 years old

    "The Fellowship of the Ring" movie, the first of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, is almost 25 years old. It was released in December 2001.

    Time surely flies.

    At the time it was a big event for us. With a group of friends, all fans of the three Lord of the Rings books, we went to see the movie in the opening week.

    The movie didn't disappoint, although in your head the characters look differently, of course.

  • Anticipating

    I stop anticipating OSs 26.2 since I’m using them now, and am moderately disquieted by how I’m not anticipating anything beyond Christmas break.

• Technology and Free Software

  • GUI TUI CLI

    So these days most TUI or CLI run within some sort of GUI, and the closer you look the more the definitions may fall apart. GUI of course is Graphical User Interface, "from graphē ‘writing, drawing’" which may be hard to tell apart from a Text User Interface which typically (though may not) contain some sort of writing. CLI is a Command Line Interface.

    vi (or what passes for it these days) is a TUI. GUI tend to have more mice or screen gnats involved, though some consoles do have mouse support, and are drawing graphics (that would be writing, or whatever a fancy font file might contain, which could be most anything given Unicode or a custom font) but usually aren't called a GUI. vi also has a CLI, the ex commands from back when vi was ex-vi and the visual interface was a new and buggy and expensive thing. ex and ed are very much CLI, you give them commands, stuff happens. vi (when in command mode) is a TUI as individual keys rather than a whole line are the inputs. Compare mail(1) with mutt. CLI may be considered a specialized TUI, one that operates on whole lines rather than individual key presses or fumbling around with a mouse. SMTP is also a CLI: you say "HELO NURSE", the server responds to that line, etc. Is a LISP REPL also a CLI? You input code, the image responds, etc.

    CLI or at least the fancier ones may give you some means to reuse prior lines and a line editor of some degree of complexity, which TUI (that are not in some CLI mode) lack, where instead particular keys might be used to undo changes, or different keys pressed instead of reworking a prior command.

  • Hosting a Static Blog on FreeBSD with Bastille Jails and Automated Deployment

    Self-hosting a blog might seem like overkill in the age of managed platforms, but there's something deeply satisfying about controlling your entire stack. This article walks through how this very blog is hosted: a FreeBSD 15.0 server running multiple Bastille jails, with automated deployments triggered by git pushes to a self-hosted Forgejo instance. The setup prioritizes security through isolation, simplicity through static site generation, and reliability through automation.

  • EmacsConf 2025 Video

    Wanted to mention that I did one talk for EmacsConf 2025, which was an introduction to Emacs Calc. The video with captions is available here:

    Basic Calc functionality for engineering or electronics

    I haven't been able to watch any of the other talks yet. Normally I watch quite a few of them before the conference, through my backstage access. But this year most of the interesting talks I wanted to watch were not pre-recorded. Hopefully I can catch up on some of those over the next few weeks.

  • up late at the terminal

    whoami, meow?
    cat head
    cat tail
    im lonely, we're lonely
    there's writing on the wall