Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • worm fourth eve

    I went to bed at 20:30 and fell asleep really fast. Got woken up at 23:30, my daughter calling. It was sweet to chat more.

    I can't get back to sleep. There is an unfamiliar feeling, something from the past. It's not enjoyable, but I guess I need to go through it. I feel like I've escaped that feeling for the last couple years. And now it's there, like an old song I haven't heard for a while. Filled with melancholia, a sense of aimlessness.

    I am reminded of a reflection I had last week. These layers, that compound over each other. Each time something is not resolved and I move on to something more exciting, I create a layer. In order to remove these layers, I need to deal with them sequentially starting with the latest stuff. Once this is dealt with, the previous layer now come to the surface. Will I escape in something new or deal with that layer? There is a moment of choice, continue removing layers, or creating new ones? I guess I can also stall in the in-between, for a moment.

• Politics and World Events

  • SCOTUS strikes down Trump's tariffs

    I'm sure people will see this in the news, but Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs that he justified using the IEEPA have been struck down. I'm pretty happy about this, mostly on the grounds that it makes a much-needed check on executive authority. Plus the tariffs were dumb as hell from an economic perspective. I like stuff bein cheap, and whether you want to admit it or not you probably do too.

    Quick summary, IEEPA is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Trump declared a couple of national emergencies related to "drug trafficking" and "trade imbalances" that he claimed allowed him to use the powers granted to him in the IEEPA to impose sweeping tariffs on basically every country on earth at arbitrary rates for indeterminate amounts of time. SCOTUS in a 6-3 decision struck it down today (Feb 20 2026). The majority used the "major questions" doctrine in determining that the scope of the tariffs violated the scope of the IEEPA because it's Congress' job to set tariffs and the president's use of the emergency powers far outstrips anything the IEEPA authorized.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The ToothPaste Dongle Lets You Paste Your Passwords From a Trusted to an Untrusted Machine

    Pseudonymous developer "Brisk4t" has released a gadget, powered by an Espressif ESP32-S3, which is designed to securely transmit passwords and other secrets to any USB Human Interface Device (HID) compatible machine — by pretending to be a keyboard and mouse.

    "As a maker and tinkerer, I often find myself needing to quickly paste passwords, commands, or text snippets into devices that aren't connected to the internet," explains. "And sometimes I just don't want to login to my password manager on some sketchy makerspace computer. Or… I'm just lazy. This might be the real reason. And I just needed a reason to solder stuff and write some code. And then I went a bit overboard."

    The result: ToothPaste, an Espressif ESP32-S3-based dongle designed to pair with a trusted machine over Bluetooth Low Energy. Connect the dongle to a target device's USB port — anything that supports USB keyboards and mice via the USB HID protoocol works without installing a driver — and open the web app in a supported browser to connect via WebBLE, then simply type your passwords into the trusted system for secure transmission.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Progress on Hermes, a Misfin Server

      I've made some initial progress on a new misfin server named "Hermes." It's rather bare bones right now, but message receipt seems to be working, and a sending utility is planned alongside it (utilizing the same data path but not the same utility).

      [...]

      UPDATE: Lagrange, I discovered after writing this, implements the protocol! How nifty. Seems to work fine there too, so I'm a little more confident.

• Programming

  • Magic in Programming

    My father taught me Ruby early on, before I learned to divide. I remember distinctly a lesson on 'magic' in the language, how some things the language weren't perfectly apparent and happened like 'magic'. I was quite fascinated in understanding the magic, what was hidden from me?

    Ruby had a lot of magic, and some funny special characters like `@` to denote a global variable versus a local. I didn't have the resources to hunt down all of these peculiarities myself, I understood how most inferred casts happened; a tool every programmer ends up required to know and fix assumptions. I also learned some Python but found it had even more 'magic', and using whitespace as control flow hid when if and defs ended with invisible characters.

    I read Code[1], or most of it, a wonderful step-by-step of how computers and their systems were built from simple circuits to the C language. This book most certainly formed most of my opinions such as avoiding analogies where possible, and cursed me with truly loving programming. I remember making the circuit diagrams in Minecraft via redstone.