Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The Man From ICE

    The day Renee Good was murdered in Minneapolis, I wrote a song. Just three tracks in GarageBand: guitar, drums and vocals. I shared it with my bandmate but didn't hear back. "Maybe that was too much...or maybe not enough," I thought.

    Yesterday, after Alex Pretti was murdered, my friend was inspired to finish it. In one day, he added 15 additional tracks and extended the bridge. He also recorded the hilarious monologue by Satan at the end. He sent me the mix and needless to say, I'm extremely pleased with the result.

  • Cold Perception

    The American Midwest has been hit with an extreme cold front, with temperatures in my area dipping to -20 C and wind chills exceeding -30 C at times. We received a small amount of snow, and with temperatures this low, it's not going away anytime soon.

    Four out of the last six winters here, including this one, have had cold snaps of this intensity at least once. That's unusual for us: we often gets winter lows of about -5 C, or maybe -10 C at worst, but not -20. Having such lows several years in a row is even stranger.

  • 2026-01-25

    Sunday, end of the week. It's been a packed week at work, and quite a busy weekend, but now it's over, only to repeat again in a few days. I guess it's good overall, feels like living.

    Food has been on and off. We don't have much time to cook, definitely didn't have it during this week, and it showed. I'm hoping to make a bit more space and time for proper cooking in the upcoming week.

  • Dog gets a pup cup, and I plan a moto venture

    Walked dog up to the coffee shop and back - that's after his actual first thing in the morning walk. He was a little confused why we were going back out, I think he thought we were gonna go in the car (since that's what we would usually do at parents house, take car up to starbies and back, even though it's the same distance.)

    There was some girl sitting at the coffee shop patio with her dog who lunged at Sev - he didn't bark growl, he was just ... not polite. I dunno lady if your dog is kinda reactive do you need to be sitting two feet away from the counter where people order? It was wearing a choke chain collar so, I guess that's her alternative to teaching it good manners. And there was a cop lady there with a grumpy face waiting for breakfast or something, Sev was obviously looking at her trying to get pets but she ignored him, stoic and bored behind her mirrored cop sunglasses, and then once we left I saw that the cop did pet the *other dog*. Hmmm ya'll are fuckin weirdos. Sev is obviously the best boi in this situation.

  • Take My Hand: Chapter 23

    Walt woke up to quiet. Well, relative quiet; Douxie and Archie's breathing filled his ears. He tuned out their sounds, and listened hard.

    Nothing.

    *Conspicuously* nothing, in fact. He was familiar, now, with the normal sounds of the night forest in the daylight world.

    Within a few minutes, some rustling started, then insect chirps and a few night bird calls.

• Technology and Free Software

  • How i fixed Postfix PTR lookups in Nginx config

    Yesterday I spent about five hours trying to figure out why Postfix couldn’t resolve PTR records for the IPs of incoming connections (reverse DNS, i.e. domain name for IP address), even though all other DNS lookups (for example DNSBL checks) were working just fine. At first, I was sure the problem had to be somewhere in my setup: Postfix running inside a container, deployed in a k3s Kubernetes cluster, maybe some weird networking edge case. Turns out, I was looking to fix it in the completely wrong part of my setup.

    The real issue wasn’t Postfix itself at all — it was Nginx sitting in front of it.

    When Postfix is placed behind Nginx (using Nginx `mail_proxy` module), it doesn’t see the real client IP directly - it sees IP of Nginx container / pod, instead. And then it relies on the information that Nginx passes along via the `XCLIENT` command. The catch is that by convention in this mode Nginx resolves the client PTR record _for_ Postfix.

  • Software patches in NixOS for fun and productivity

    After using NixOS for more than a year, one aspect that I didn't expect to enjoy was software patching. In previous systems, my patches usually became stale (since I never manually pulled the latest release to re-apply my patch). With NixOS, I "just" have to integrate the patches into my config, to ensure that the patch is re-applied to every upgrade.

  • Briefly: xz Revisited

    A while ago on lobste.rs, I found a link to a preprint by Piotr Przymus and Thomas Durieux which gives a detailed rundown of the xz attack in which a malicious maintainer took over and added remote code execution capabilities.

  • More vi

    Okay so vi and ed differ on yet another point, that ",n" in ed (on OpenBSD, at least) the comma means "all the lines" while in ex-vi the comma instead stands for "only the current line". Or really most any combination of period with comma. Both support "%" for "all the lines", but shift+5 is a larger ask than , at least for my keyboard and the state of my fingers.

  • ASCII-art dumping ground

    First published way before I got into the habit of putting first-published dates on pages and I don’t care quite enough to go look up its original publish date at the moment. But it’s one of the oldest pages on this capsule, I tell you.

    Last updated January 24, 2026.

    I’m trying to embrace the ASCII-art aesthetic that gopher-type people around here like.

    Unfortunately, not everything I make is good enough to plop down on the front page.

  • Sunk cost fallacy

    As Microslop continues to make boneheaded decision after boneheaded decision, I still see a ton of people still clinging to Win because of some software program, many of which are related to the Ad0bee's services. To a lesser extent, I see gamers saying they "need" to play games with NSA anticheat.

    1. Ad0bee is not your friend. Friends don't charge you cancellation fees if you have other plans. Friends don't charge you every year to remain friends. Friends are there to help you, not extort you. Yeah, it kind of sucks getting muscle memory and learning how to use a shitty industry standard that uses that monopoly to coerce you into paying a frankly ridiculous subscription fee in order to steal your work to train bots to copy your work. That's what's happening and you still have these right-brain morons acting like losing Ad0bee is like cutting off a hand. My counter would be that hand is gangrenous and it will kill you if you don't amputate, but I digress.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • A January Question

      Christina asks, "What do you do when someone you don't know on a social or business network site tries to become a "friend" or otherwise connected to you?"[1]

      These days Mastodon is the only social network I'm on. I keep a pretty low profile so I'm not often troubled by suspicious follow requests (even Nicole, the Fediverse Chick, passed me by). Even so, I'm still pretty careful. I always visit the account of the person making the request, and evaluate their recent posting history before accepting. I would never accept a follow request from a stranger with a brand new account.