Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • the next door

    I would tippy toe to kiss you
    nervous
    in the middle of a crowd
    
    
    and you would hold me 
    steady 
    all the way to our destination
    

• Science

  • Artemis II liveblogging: this entire post is just me being a nerd about SPACE

    I have been watching NASA's livestream since this morning. My cell phone carrier probably hates me for all the data I've used today. Anyway, some observations from earlier today:

    It's wild to me how sometimes one can look at a thing and just see how it was a labor of love.

    For instance, looking at the closeup of the white room from the outside, I noticed the Artemis II logo is painted on the side. It doesn't have to be. It does nothing for the mission, technically. It's there because this is a huge team of people who are genuinely proud of what they are accomplishing. It's there because even while doing the sciency-est of science, we are still human.

• Technology and Free Software

  • f3s: Kubernetes with FreeBSD - Part 9: GitOps with ArgoCD

    This is the 9th post in the f3s series about my self-hosting home lab. f3s? The "f" stands for FreeBSD, and the "3s" stands for k3s, the Kubernetes distribution I use on FreeBSD-based physical machines.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Where did March go? OFFLFIRSOCH post

      This year is the first year I've actually tried to participate in OFFLFIRSOCH, and I think I overestimated the time I'd have to work on it. It wasn't an unusually busy month, though I did have one offspring's birthday and a weekend mini-break with my girlfriend, so I did have some of my weekends AFK. The idea I had didn't seem like too ambitious a project, but around the 23rd, I found myself with only the basics of the project done. I've tried to make more time for it the last few days, but note that it is also Tax Season, so I've had that hanging over me [1], and I didn't quite finish. I'm releasing it anyway, even though it's not quite in a usable state. I'll finish it up over the next few weeks.

      [...]

      The holdups on the development, besides the other things going on in my life, have been two. First, although I'm pretty proficient with Emacs Lisp, I'm not actually all that familiar with a lot of Emacs's display features, like images, faces, and text properties. So I've had to learn how to do those for the output, which is still not quite finished. The other is that there's just a lot of data entry. I am pulling the descriptions of cards and their normal and revered interpretations from Arthur Edward Waite's _Pictoral Key to the Tarot_ because it matches the most commonly used Tarot deck, and because it is in the public domain. So to define a card, I find the card in a text file of the book, write out the (make-tarot-card) definition in my code file, and fill in the card's slots with things I copy and paste from the book. It's a pretty mechanical process, but not so mechanical as to be easy to automate, which of course makes it not the first leisure time activity I want to turn to. All of this means that as of today, I have finished the data structures and algorithms (the fun stuff!), have a proof of concept for displaying a single card, and have the Major Arcana and three suits of the Minor Arcana entered in. I guess there's about an evening's work left to go on this.

    • OFFLFIRSOCH 2026 round up

      Greetings, fans of offline computing who are temporarily slumming it online in order to read this! The first quarter of the year has already passed us by which means the window of eligibility for OFFLFIRSOCH 2026 had closed. Today I have published the official archival page of all the entries I'm aware of. If you participated but forget to inform me, or I somehow missed your email, please reach out to let me know!

• Programming

  • Great Circle Distance

    So various legacy web sources give the SEA to CDG airport distance as 8073 km (roughly 1605225 rods), though I cannot figure out where that number comes from, as it does not line up with any of the Earth radius estimates for kluging a great circle distance onto a not-a-sphere, or I've made a math error somewhere.