Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Two dog treats

    Sev loves being a beach town dog.

    He loves walking around the town - there's so much interesting stuff to sniff (good and bad stuff...), and he likes having people around, and bumping into other dogs to say hello, and all the shops that leave bowls of water outside are a fabulous perk since he's eternally thirsty due to the prednisone.

    We walked to the pet store on the way to the coffee shop - he selected a chewy bone out of the bins that are set at dog level, obviously strategically set so that your dog will browse through them and then you have to buy it for them because how could you not. So, after a few minutes of doing laps around the pet store sniffing everything, he selected his bone, gingerly pulling it out of the bin.

  • The exploration myth

    I wanted to build on Sandra's idea here a little bit and I have two load bearing metaphors for it, related to two of my favourite video games: No Man's Sky and Stardew Valley

    No Man's Sky may be my favourite game of all time, and it's one I've gone from being able to play for hours on end, to basically being unable to open. The reason I like it doesn't have to do with its story (which really isn't all that interesting, although it's gotten better over the years) and isn't because it's a particularly engaging game (I liked it even at release when it was basically a glorified, buggy walking simulator). The reason I like it is because there's a weirdly honest admission about what they game is *for*, buried deep within it that you can only really get a sense of after you've beat all the mainline missions, or else gotten bored and abandoned them. It's that your objective as the player character in No Man's Sky is to explore the galaxy, and exploring the galaxy is *incredibly boring*.

  • Dark hair

    Dream of my ex-wife who comes in bed with me, and I'm weird out by this. Feeling her excitement which turns me off. That was weird, and oddly familiar. I haven't dreamed about her in such a long time.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Running Your Own AS: BGP on FreeBSD with FRR, GRE Tunnels, and Policy Routing

    Running your own Autonomous System on the public internet sounds like something reserved for ISPs and large enterprises. It's not. With sponsoring LIRs making AS numbers and IPv6 prefixes accessible to individuals, and FreeBSD providing the routing tools to make it work, you can announce your own address space to the Default-Free Zone from a single virtual machine.

    This article walks through the complete setup: obtaining resources from RIPE via a sponsoring LIR, configuring a FreeBSD BGP router with FRR, building GRE/GIF tunnels to distribute prefixes to remote servers, and solving the routing challenge that arises when a server needs to speak from two different IPv6 address spaces simultaneously.

• Programming

  • Making JavaScript fun (or, how I learned to stop worrying and love web components)

    I am not a fan of JavaScript or developing for the web in general. I've been pretty clear on this opinion before. It feels like web development these days is so focused around making SPA-like experiences with little regard for performance or accessibility, and that's a world I simply do not want to be a part of.

    However, in my day job I face a unique challenge. I am generally not working with structured data at all, but instead with content written by technical writers. This means that my solutions have to work no matter what the author decides to throw at it. Working with Astro components makes the content part of this easy enough; you can simply slot the content in and your CSS/other Astro components just work. However, what about interactivity?