Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — BHILYSO Wordo: KIKES

  • Silence.

    Hey ~bartender, can you get me a... coffee? No, tea. Black tea and.. condensed milk? Yeah? Awesome! Something sweet would do me good.

    I need silence. Just silence. I brought a book, also, but what I need most is silence. Not silence from sound. Sound is fine. Noise is welcome. I need to not be looking everywhere for everything.

    Let me explain: I have kids. I have two kids, a 4 year old and a 1 year old. We have decided not to school our children, at least for now. It's a decision we made and we'd make again (well, we did make it again for the second, right?).

  • No snack for you 🍕

    I did NOT want a snack until I remembered that I couldn't have one. I'm on antibiotics with time limits before and after where food is not allowed, and the reverse psychology is really beating me up.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Zenity: how I made my shell scripts useful to my wife

    My wife uses online tools to generate marketing material and I found that the assets she downloads (images and videos) are generally way too large for use on social media or web. "Easy!", I thought, I'll just teach her to use the terminal and then she can use my shell scripts to resize images and videos to perfection!

    Well I started to teach her about the shell and tab completion, and pretty soon I realised that for someone who never uses the terminal, this is too user-unfriendly. I also wasn't sure I wanted to write GUI apps using C++ or Python when my shell scripts were so close to what was needed. Maybe an ncurses or other TUI interface? Then I discovered Zenity.

  • The Ephemerality of Our Digital Lives

    Last month, a post crossed my Mastodon feed. On Josh Renaud's breakintochat.com, it linked to a simple obituary that informed about the death of one C. Learn Jr. C.G. Learn, as Josh knew him, ran a public TradeWars 2002 server, and Renaud ran a gateway to it from his own BBS.

    This was not just a novelty post-1990s, this was something important to Renaud and his family. His daughter passed away in 2020, and when she was growing up, he set up a family BBS (a lovely idea) which had message areas, games, all the trappings the online experience of 1993 had to offer.

    She grew up on it, somewhat: posted messages to the family, but mostly (like, I think, a lot of us) she was there for the games. TradeWars 2002, like some other games, has mechanisms for leaving messages, and as he was processing the grief from his daughter's death, Renaud asked C.G. if he still had that server, to search for any text his daughter Jadzia may have left.

    C.G. did in fact still have that server, and he brought it back online, allowing Renaud to hunt further traces of his daughter's short and ephemeral online life. It's a touching post, and one that reminds me that a lot of what I was doing years ago could be (but realistically, isn't) archived on an ancient drive in an aging sysop's closet a province west of here. It reminds me also of the so many things I've necessarily forgotten as I've aged. Who was I talking to? What about? I remember a few aliases. A few conversations. One of the most exciting eras of my life, but also, without a doubt, the worst. I'm here, barely.

  • Summer of upgrades (Part 1 Desktop upgrades)

    On June 12 I bought a new GPU for mini-ITX Streacom PC. Meanwhile I thought to fix the cabling in my pc, from a complete cable mess I went on to PSU cables from Cablemod so the cables would fit nicely in the case without a unmanageable overflow.

    I installed both the cables and GPU (a Powercolor Radeon RX9070 Hellhound) only to find out Linux Mint was not compatible with it. Let's be honest, I never really liked Mint, I used it because it was the best of the rest. Gnome 3 and further never felt like a reasonable choice anymore since the Gnome 3 overhaul, XFCE was my choice if I would run a low end pc and my KDE experiences dated back from 2011 (If you know, you know). So Linux Mint was my choice out of misery. I was still using it several years later until the Radeon RX 9070 rendered that choice useless.

  • Summer of upgrades (Part 2 Server host machine)

    These days, most PCs are using Solid State Drives or SSDs. My petrosian Server did not fully use SSDs. The main OS (Proxmox) was installed on a SSD. However the VM data was stored on conventional hard drives. 2 drives using a ZFS mirror. The reason for this was because my motherboard only had space for 1 SSD. But there are ways to make that more. But it's not as simple as it seems. You can buy a Asus Hyper M.2 card. But which port can you install this? It requires a x16 PCIe port and my motherboard had 2 of those. One was already used by my way too overpowered but broken Quadro GPU that I got for free. And the other one was empty. There is a difference between both. The bottom one was connected to my chipset, the upper one to my cpu. The chipset one goes to the CPU at x4 speed which means putting the Hyper M.2 in that one will lower the speed from x16 to x4. That is not good. Additionally The bottom one was also not connected to the full x16 bandwidth so useless anyway. This one I found out pretty easily. Men do read manuals after all /s.

    After some considerations I bought 2 Lexar QLC drives. They were advised by a serious website called tweakers which is a reference in Belgium and The Netherlands. Afterwards I also bought 2 smaller SSDs. Since the Hyper M.2 card could fit 4 ssds I added a slog and cache drive for the ZFS raid. The slog and cache drives added some extra speed however I have to admit that this one is quite overthought. In real life it doesn’t add much beyond nerd points.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Summer of upgrades (Part 3 Guest services on server)

      Personal website and gemini capsule

      My personal website was already some years old now. The design was made using dall-e and It was OK but not great. At the same time I wanted to get rid of the symfony setup. I was too much for what I actually did with it. I started using a static site generator called 11ty. The design is very basic but OK to me. I don't think I require Jony Ive certified design. I just want a design.

      Since I had a static site with just html I thought it would be nice to have it hosted on something esoteric. I thought about the Hurd. The kernel intended for the GNU operating system before Linux took over that role. Still 30 years later there is no stable release and the primary distribution is not stable. Moreover, a lot of packages can be built but not installed because of missing dependencies. I was able to install Apache, and Python can be used as well making it usable for the stuff I wanted to do on it. Tinkering with solutions is also very rewarding.

    • 🧨 Cluster Outage Postmortem: Missing Keepalived

      This outage was not caused by a power failure, kernel panic, or misconfiguration.

      It was caused by my wife shutting down my main server ( Tiny) while vacuuming the living room.

      Tiny was not just another node