Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Walking the Camino de Santiago

    My wife and I recently spent a week walking a stretch of the Camino de Santiago, specifically the ~117km from Sarria to Santiago de Compostela (SdC). It was our second time on the Camino: in October 2024 we walked 280km from Porto to SdC over a couple of weeks. This second time was much easier, not only due to the shorter total distance but also the distance per day and, crucially, the weather.

    Fundamentally, and historically, the Camino is a Catholic pilgrimage, ending at the cathedral in SdC which is said to hold the remains of Saint James. However, in recent times it is popular not only with Catholics but with many others who are drawn to the idea of a long, tranquil walk through the beautiful Spanish countryside and its many small, historic towns and villages.

    I really enjoyed both my times on the Camino and we're already talking about what route we'd like to do next. If you are interested in undertaking the Camino, there are loads of websites out there with plenty of information. I won't try to reproduce the information you can easily find elsewhere, but below are some tips based on my own experiences.

• Technology and Free Software

  • A few notes on creating DOS floppy disks on Linux

    I've been installing FreeDOS on a 486 machine today using the floppy distribution (because the machine does not have a CD-ROM drive nor does it support booting from CD-ROM). Because I had to figure some things out the hard way, I'm writing down some notes for my future self and anyone who might want to do the same, even though I doubt there's people insane enough to want to install FreeDOS from 7 floppies.

  • Get ready for Junix!

    September is Septandy, December is DOScember, March is Marchintosh. Everyone knows this. But what not many know is that June is JUNIX! A month full of celebration of UNIX history.

    Bring out your PDP-11s, SparcStations and SGI Indy workstations and join the UNIX bonanza that is JUNIX!

  • Internet/Gemini

    • links page

      collecting non-tarot stuff from the internet!

• Programming

  • The Promise of Agentic Coding

    I have liked programming since ... always. In the early 2000's, in middle school, I was creating Geocities sites, assembling wee javascript codes to play music based on dropdown selection, hoarding cool gifs and divider images. Around 2018 I picked up Ruby, and then Rails, making web apps to do silly things like automatically send SMS Cat Facts to my friends, or track things in CRUD apps.

    Of course when it came time to stop screwing around and go to school (finally, at around 22 years old), I decided ... ya know, I can already do a lot of this stuff on my own, it would be a waste of time to have school teach me, and so I did mechanical engineering instead of computer science / engineering. (I would probably make a lot more money if I kept to the coding route and moved to the Bay... but... it was not my path.)

    I'm 35 now so... I've been doing this a long time, and I completely subscribe to the joy that comes from flow state noodling over a thorny problem for hours or days. Booting up a REPL or dropping into a debugger and exploring the state and what exactly does this function return and what's the data format and what do I do with it next... it's great fun and very rewarding.