Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Embarrassing injuries

    Today I sustained an embarrassing injury. Not embarrassing because it involves private parts, or the kind of bedroom activity where you need a safe-word; embarrassing because I really should know better at my age.

    It wasn't the most embarrassing injury I've ever sustained. That happened about twenty years ago, when I was teaching a karate class. I wasn't the regular coach -- just standing in for the usual guy who was sick. So none of the students knew me.

    Thankfully.

  • In Peace

    All of these fall under "privatizing profits, socializing losses" as someone else profits (a new server to hack, selling metadata, selling compute time, etc.) while many others get a shit sandwich and may spend copious amounts of time on firewall rules, log analysis, etc. to keep the network noise down to a dull roar.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Guix WTF

    Guix home configuration involves a .scm file full of Scheme that describes a home-config containing a home-environment where the home-environment contains (among other details) the packages that the user wants in addition to what’s defined to exist in the system configuration. To create such a package enumeration, the modules containing the packages have to be imported by way of use-module.

  • The WikiReader

    Here's another post that, like "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology", I've been sitting on for years. I'm on a bit of a quest to get as many posts in that category out the door as I can in the coming months, I'm gunning for one each weekend at least. This one is vaguely related, I guess in more way than one, to the last, although I can't actually remember which obscure old hand-held device I stumbled upon the existence of first, the WonderSwan or the WikiReader

    As the name plainly suggests, the WikiReader is a special-purpose portable device for being able to always read Wikipedia articles on the go. This is...not a device category which has necessarily aged well, but bear in mind the WikiReader was launched in 2009. Smartphones were very new, a lot of folks didn't have one, and mobile data was slow and expensive by modern standards. An offline reader made some kind of sense, at least I'm sure it did in the minds of the kind of people who thought it was important to always have access to Wikipedia. I'm kind of surprised I don't remember ever hearing about the WikiReader in its hey-day.