Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ABCKLPS Wordo: VOGUE

  • Solderpunk's gemlog — qrencode

  • Burn Art

    An essential part of my purging of the house is my wood stove. This weekend I've burnt journals, drawings, paintings and art pieces, mine and my daughter's.

    This process of elimination has always the effect of keeping the best for what I have. By burning old pieces of art, only the best is kept, making my 'portfolio' always looking better. I want to create a book of my stuff at one point, simply to get rid of even more stuff.

    When my uncle died, we lost a lot of his art, nothing was classified, or photographed. A lot of his painting got given away, some were lost in moving, I am not too sure where is the crux of his collection.

• Politics and World Economy

  • 2026-01-03

    Happy New Year! Here's hoping that 2026 will be better than 2025...although that is looking pretty unlikely geopolitically...sigh.

    I saw on social media that there is kind of a challenge going around for January which is to not go to the grocery store and to eat the entire month of January on whatever you have already in your pantry/fridge/freezer.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Productivity systems and outboard brains

    There are people out there who ask “Why do I need a personal wiki when my collection of text files are fine”?

    It is not assumed that a system will revolve around a single program such as Obsidian or Emacs’ org-mode, although many people quite reasonably swear by org-mode and put their entire lives into it.

    Here’s what to look for in a good system.

  • I tell you that task-specific uses of personal-wiki software can be useful (as opposed to a fully-general Notes About Everything bundle).

  • Getting an LLM to generate an Obsidian Base tracker for soulhacking

    Back in the day, I went cross-eyed trying to figure out who was good for what in X-COM: Terror from the Deep. I ended up whipping out Excel and using its newfangled conditional-formatting feature to help me with this. I was still awful at the game and only got within 20,000 leagues of T’leth because of someone else’s very fancy graphical save-file editor (and not updating to the new version that makes it so giant underwater Lovecraftian horrors aren’t mind-controllable), but at least I wasn’t flying blind when it came to figuring out which aquanaut should do what.

  • emacs 2026

    I'm still using emacs!

    For most of my work, I use vim, in mutt, or any other text editing. But for gopher, I use emacs.

    I don't know emacs really well. I can't even remember how to change buffer! There are a lot of basic things I cannot do in emacs, but I've learned just enough to make my gopher posting really smooth.

    I work in the console. I used fbterm, which runs in the console but give me the ability to have a background image, and have better font support too. So my writing environment is really nice.

  • Stupid Memory Tricks with 64-bit Addressing

    I was messing around with the Hacker News data feed. Each item has a unique sequential number, and the number of items is approaching 47 million.

    To implement a cache I need to resolve some (very few) of these to addresses in storage. Most of the time it will be very recent indices, but in some rare cases it will be old, low indices. So I have a classic sparse array.

  • At the 39th Chaos Communication Congress

    Just a random post because I had much fun at 39C3. As per CCC's strict photo policy. Photos will not contain people unless they all concent to be photo'd. At least to the degree that they are not recognizable.

    I am not exactly sure what to expect when I handed in the Hamburg airport. This is the first time me being in Germany. I headed to the S-Bahn to get to my hotel. Ho...ly winter germany is cold. The aircraft maybe is warmed to 20°C. The outside is -2°C while all my winter clothing is in my luggage, I just had a thin-ish zipper jacket. Unsure if the following image makes any justic. But dang I am freezing.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • New Years 2026 Update

      The last few weeks of the year became quite busy for me. Just before the Christmas holiday, my wife became ill with flu, and we ended up canceling a holiday dinner with extended family. Immediately after, I took a week off my job to organize my clothes and clean our basement. Soon, we decided to remodel our entire closet while we were at it.

      Around the same time, I made a resolution to cut down on my smartphone screen time. I did so by splitting my apps across two different phones: communication apps remained on my main phone, and I moved all other apps--including my Gemini client--to my Pro1 X. Only my main phone has a SIM card, so the apps on the Pro1 X cannot access the Internet if I'm not in range of a WiFi signal. I found that my screen time dropped immediately, especially when I was out of the house, since I could no longer use services like YouTube, or even Gemini.

    • Hello misfin

      I just set up my Misfit server at misfit://liladi@liladi.site, but the inbox is sadly empty ;(. I’d love to receive a few messages— maybe someone would like to introduce me to this awesome smoll web community where you hang out, etc. :).

  • Programming

    • Drogon's CSP template system

      This blog relies heavily on Drogon’s CSP (C++ Server Page) system - think of it as PHP’s templating engine, but written in C++. It’s not the most modern choice in 2026, especially since CSP predates C++ coroutines. But it’s good enough for the static-ish pages I serve, and more importantly, it lets me avoid mandatory JavaScript without going with string hacking. An Tao originally built it back when the Drogon project began- likely for something resembling a classic bulletin board system. Consider this post being me writing a guide on what CSP does in proactice and well as me double checking my understanding.