Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Longing

    Difficult time getting to work. Drinking green tea, might not be strong enough for the moment.

    I'm sad. My imagination is wild, I know this is for the best, and I wished that into being. But still the pain, the suffering of the loss is intense.

    My body is sore from boxing yesterday, it's a good feeling. I want more of that, more of that physicality. Getting out of my head, I like the boxing culture, and when I look myself in the mirror I look a lot more like a boxer, than an artist, a computer geek or a yogi. I'm thrilled to get back into that world. I wish I could fight for real, for once. I feel like I've always held my punch, I've never given it all. Yesterday I could give it all, but only into the bag, not with someone... I've always curb my intensity, but not with her.

• Technology and Free Software

  • These Zinc-Based Circuits Can be Composted, Dissolved in Vinegar — Or Eaten

    Researchers from the University of Glasgow have come up with a new approach to building electronic circuits, printing zinc-based traces onto environmentally-friendly materials like bioplastics and paper — creating electronic devices which can be composted straight into the soil once they've outlived their usefulness, or even printed to chocolate and eaten at their end of their life.

    "One key aspect of our work is that almost any substrate material can be used, ranging from paper and bioplastics for more realistic applications to chocolate for tasty but probably not very practical demonstrations," says corresponding author Jeff Kettle, professor at the University of Glasgow's James Watt School of Engineering. "We are now exploring ways to adapt this technique to other fields such as moldable electronics or biosensing, which could also benefit from a cheap and versatile way to make high quality circuits with low environmental footprints."

  • Proving that you can do something 🎓

    I once did an open book exam. I could use the course textbook, and I could annotate it beforehand. I went for it and annotated like crazy. Then in the exam, I didn't read any annotations. Afterwards I couldn't decide: was the annotation a waste of time, or did it make me think about things I'd need to know?

    Sometimes I have to interview devs. "Can you do this coding task, please?" and you watch how they get on. Very occasionally, someone will ask "Can I google?" to which the answer is "Yes! Do whatever you would normally do." It's been while since we got any new people, so we haven't had anyone ask to use a chatbot yet. I guess you'd get to see if they're any good at getting it to produce something relevant, and how they decide it its output is any good.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Sayonara HTTP, Gopher and Gemini for the win

      As part of removing US dependencies early last year I dropped the Let's Encrypt certificate I used to use on this site, replacing it with one from BuyPass. Whether their free offering was always a bait & switch, or BuyPass was overwhelmed by people doing the same thing as me, or they just ended up thinking better of it, BuyPass dropped its free certificates. Awkward.

      I wasn't going to go back to the US, & the only alternative I found was in Italy, which is arguably worse. So for the "web" version of this site I was left with either using a self signed certificate, dropping TLS/HTTPS, or dropping the web version entirely. I think I'm going to go with that last option. At some point before the BuyPass certificate expires next month I'm going to turn off nginx & close ports 80 & 443. Gopher & Gemini services will continue as normal.