Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Happy New Year 2026

    OK, so here we go. It has been almost a year since I posted anything on Gemini. You probably thought that I wasn't going to do it anymore, but here I am, doing it again. I think about creating a new episode of Gemini Radio all the time, but for now it just seems easier to type something out to my gemlog. To be honest, I sort of forgot the process of how I created Gemini Radio episodes, although in theory all my scripts still probably work. I think I made a mistake by making the process overly complicated--upgrading it to a full-fledged podcast, adding chapter markers to the audio files, etc. It just made it all the harder to just record an episode and upload it.

    Additionally, there's no peaceful moments at home except for maybe after the kids go to bed. They used to take naps when they were smaller, but they don't do that anymore. It's kind of hard to make a good gemcast when kids are screaming in the background!

  • Dirty chaotic minimalist

    Chaotic Hoarder Dirty: Your typical hoarder, shit everywhere, you barely can walk in their home. It's a trip to visit these home, I had the opportunity to do so a couple time in my life.

    Chaotic Hoarder Clean: people who keeps on getting more stuff, but keep their house clean. It looks good from the surface but as soon as you look in the closet or in the storage you realize the mess. I think my ex is like that. They never can find the stuff they need therefore they keep on purchasing more stuff. I find that state to be very draining, very difficult to maintain, you never feel like you're done dealing with stuff.

  • How about a book?

    What if this year I turned my “Bolko” into a real book with my own hands? Is it even possible for me to put a book together on my own? I'm tempted by the idea, but I'm a little worried that this side project will take up too much of my time again. I’ll think about it.

  • Bad weather

    Yesterday although it was quite windy (force 5 southwest) around the island, i managed to find a north facing bay in the village of asos which was shielded by the wind. Even if it was protected, there was significant surf from surrounding storm. I entered the water and although the visibility was almost nil, and the surf was moving me and the fields of seagrass below me in a quite hypnotic way, i managed to pull a 30' dive at -11m. At some point i spotted two cinder blocks in some distance from each other

  • A simple start

    It was a fantastic start of the new year in the island of cephalonia where we currently are. The sun was shining, but it was still cold,so i took the chance to go for a quick shore dive. A lot of things in my equipment need a generous rehaul, like new bungies on my dive computer, some adjustments on my BCD and more. I went to the south of the island where lost in the tiny streets of an unknown village, i met another car with a guy that proceeded to ask me if i know where the person with the rocket is (?). I didn't want to brush off such an amazing question so i proceeded to learn that indeed there is someone who used to work at NASA and that he has built a human sized model of some rocket in his backyard in that tiny village. The guy left by exclaiming happily that we have everything in this island. indeed.

  • under void stars in gemini space

    Hey friends. I'm dsp, and this is my attempt to communicate with other humans over something nicer than the current state of the net. We all know it sucks so let's try to focus on the positive things.

  • Not paying attention

    I am sure more people suffer from the same problem, and maybe writing about it here is a way to exorcise it, so here it goes. Today i thought that i might be able to go for a little shore dive, although the weather around the island was quite windy (5bft). I looked at the forecast and saw that the wind was coming from the south west, so the east part should be shielded. Looked at a spot east of me that could be interesting, loaded the dive gear and drove there, only to realize that it was _GOING_. It was choppy as hell, but how could i have failed so hard? Well, the spot was definitely eastwards of me, but not really in the east part of the island. it was still in the south part and exposed. My eyes looked at the map, but failed to parse it in the correct way.

• Technology and Free Software

  • PSA: TP-Link WR3002X NEEDS more than 10W to be stable

    I carry a travel router when I am on trips. Part of my workflow needs high LAN bandwidth between my devices and hotel WiFi just doesn't cut it. I bought one from TP-Link for cheap expecting things to just work. It does.. sometimes. But sometimes the connection just doesn't work even imy laptop happly connectes to the same source WiFi. Weird..

    Until lately I finally figured out what going on reading labels and experimenting. The WR3002X _needs_ more then 10W of peak power to operate. Most USB power supplies are rated at 5V 2A over a typical USB type A port. This is enought to power up the router itself but no able to sustain it's operation.

  • Serving maps locally with CoMaps

    tl;dr: You can now serve map files for _CoMaps_ from your own servers, including local ones. I made a small and simple command-line tool to help you download the maps to your computer and serve them in a local network[1].

  • Toby's tinylog

    The Mastodon web interface is so sluggish on a #raspberrypi 4 that I decided to write a quick-and-dirty lightweight CGI script to display just the content and links to media (deliberately avoided embedding previews). Now I can read my Mastodon feeds anywhere in comfort, even on Netsurf or w3m.

  • Get Your 2026 DIY Projects Lined Up with This 3D-Printable Self-Leveling Laser Level Tool

    Pseudonymous maker "Z3_R0" has released 3D print files and a guide to building a tool that will be of considerable interest to the do-it-yourself enthusiast looking for a project to celebrate the new year: a self-leveling rotary laser level.

    "I am a mechanical engineering student and DIY enthusiast. I think most engineers (and others) can agree that lasers are pretty cool. That's why when I came across a nice laser diode module, I wanted to build something both cool and useful: a self-leveling rotary laser," Z3_R0 explains of the project. "Laser levels can come in quite handy for many DIY projects, including mounting and layout. For example they can make hanging pictures, installing shelves, and other home improvement tasks easy by projecting a perfectly level line of light on the wall. Most commercial off-the shelf laser levels are expensive, so I wanted to build one for cheap. While my device may not have all the bells and whistles or the same accuracy as a commercial level, it will most likely do the trick for around-the-house DIY projects."

  • Internet/Gemini

    • A small update on my spam situation

      The topic of greylisting [1] came up on Hacker News [2] and it reminded me—it's been eight years [3] since I last checked my greylist daemon [4]. Well, it still easily blocks 50% of the spam sent my way. Of the remaining spam that does get through, a majority of it is addressed towards my registrar email address. Years ago when I switched away from Network Solutions the first time [5], I created a new email address for Doster, but that was long before registrars even started offering redacted whois information for a price (and now it's pretty much done for free), so my registrar email address got picked up by every spammer everywhere.

    • QR Gopher

  • Programming

    • Inertial Music

      A random walk can be used to produce a random musical line, though such lines will generally lack the repetition, phrasing, harmonic context, and etc. of better composed lines. One improvement is to confine the notes to a particular scale or some set of notes, as this will prevent the random walk from maybe walking off the ends of the MIDI note range, or more likely beyond some acceptable ambitus that will be far smaller than the MIDI note range. The Music::VoiceGen Perl module is something like a markov engine for this sort of thing. The intervals include plus and minus two in addition to the usual Brownian plus or minus one because the scale has adjacent steps of that size.