Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 2026-01-25: Sunday is a fine-looking day

    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.

    Gave away several items of furniture for free. No time to deal with eBay and stuff, and I think even if people won't treat it as well as if they did if they paid even a little for it, it's still of higher utility than this furniture ending up in the dump. I'm actually quite happy to give stuff this way and help people save some cash to feel a bit better about buying their kid a small present or something.

  • Our new lunch menu

    I was struggling to figure out what to have for lunch on days when we are busy with schoolwork. In the week before New Year, I realized I needed to change something because we had ramen every other day in December. I found a big bowl of hot ramen to be comforting on a cold winter day, but felt uneasy about eating it as often as we did. Schoolday meals need to be quick, easy, and inexpensive. I decided to assign a simple meal to each day so that I wouldn't revert to ramen all the time. This is what I ended up coming up with:

  • New year, new cars, new testing programme 🏁

    Mercedes are said to have exploited the same loophole, and they have done a huge amount of test mileage. Their only complaint has been other teams' issues on track occasionally halting testing. All the teams say they're working on reliability, not lap time. But when people have suggested that Mercedes and Red Bull are fastest, no one disagreed.

    Williams haven't turned up for the first test at all. They stopped work on last year's car extra early to work on this one, so it's pretty bad that it's not ready in time. Aston Martin have turned up, but they're missed a day.

• Technology and Free Software

  • 2026-01-27: Quite a hectic Tuesday

    Yesterday I said "Why not" and extended ox-gmi emacs package to deal with exactly the structure of the notes that I personally prefer (small collection of large org files, each around a specific topic). Then I retrofit this capsule's content into the org files, rendered them into gmi, uploaded, and here we go. And because I use the most stupid stack of all, which is essentially rsync over ssh, the old links will remain functional, even though they're orphaned and no longer can be reached by surfing. In general, it was a fantastic evening, which I continued today for a bit to fix a few bugs. As of now, the setup is working really well, all the content is in its right place, and I'm back on emacs.

  • Appendum

    Actually the vi append (and change and insert, which are all handled by a shared "aci" routine) do allow for arguments (or an argument), though like a shell command must be the last command listed. I'm pretty sure I'd come across this in the source and forgot about it, perhaps to preserve what are left of the sanity points.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Announcing Crossyword

      I made an online daily Crossword game, with leaderboards and puzzle archive, over Gemini. Built it as example usage for my gemini application framework, it's still fairly new but ready for you to try out! Feedback and comments welcome :)

    • I still don't understand this SYN attack, but now I can't block it easily

      I did not get the memo that Windows uses an IP (Internet Protocol) TTL (Time To Live) of 128.

      On the one hand, I was able to avoid that weird SYN attack I've been under for six years, quite a bit of spam, and less bad web bot activity for the past 24 hours. On the other hand, any legitimate traffic to my web site from Windows users was lost. On the gripping hand, is anybody using Windows to read my site? I don't know, but it was worrisome enough for me to remove the filter.

    • The Usefulness of the brouter web page

      Sometimes, things turn out to me far more useful than it appeared before trying it.

      For me, this was the case with the brouter web page at https://brouter.de .