Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Christina's questions for March 2026

    I've thought about this a lot! I would open a tsipouradiko, a place that serves tsipouro (among other drinks) and small plates. Tsipouro is a drink made from grapes that contains about 40% alcohol and is best enjoyed with some food on the side. Some classic plates would be marinaded anchovies, feta grilled with tomato, fava, or pork bites with peppers. Most plates will likely have some twists compared to their traditional versions because experimenting is where the fun is at.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Inkscape can copy & paste styles

    This functionality already exists in Inkscape. Copy the object with the style you want to reuse, then select the target and press Ctrl + Shift + V. (That's the shortcut for the menu option Edit / Paste... / Style.)

  • a keyd service in Guix

    It took a really long time to figure this out, but I can finally use keyd in Guix.

    I started out with a manually created keyd.conf file and I manually invoked keyd with sudo so I could get my default bindings. This also helped to verify some of the pieces worked before I started.

  • Kelvin versioning

    This will be a relatively short post which nearly got included as part of last weekend's "Lua as a practical "soft-bedrock" language", but at the last minute I felt like I was cramming too much in.

    I spoke in that post about software "cooling off", "solidifying" and "freezing". I feel like the visual timeline of Lua releases really invites this thermodynamic analogy, with the interval between consecutive releases quickly getting longer and longer. It reminds me right away of how heat energy flows between bodies in contact at a rate proportional to the difference in their temperature, so it starts off quick but then slows down, the hotter body exponentially cooling to equilibrium. Perusing Devine Lu Linvega's XXIIVV wiki a few years ago, I stumbled upon an idea which takes this analogy right to its logical conclusion: "Kelvin versioning". The idea originates with the Urbit project which is...some kind of weird blockchain-based P2P *something*, with apparent links to various politically unsavoury entities. The concept of Kelvin versioning lifts cleanly right out of that context, thankfully, although the extent to which it genuinely applies anywhere else is perhaps quite limited. It's more of an ideological than a practical tool, but I like it never the less.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Alhena 5.5.8

      Restore Tabs At Launch is significantly faster than previous versions. The feature should probably be called Restore State At Launch because it also remembers window sizes and positions. (To only save window state but not content, use Settings->Commands to set pagecache=0).

      The other big feature is proper detection of the emoji/symbol variation selector. This is especially important for expected appearance and alignment in games and art expecting a specific variation. A few examples being a chess piece or playing card suite.

    • The wonders of Wander

      So I've recreated a lisp desktop to browse gemini and listen to internet radio. Still I managed to also build the simplest of web browsers too because I feel like there is just so much more content on the web still.

      The problem is finding it of course, and that's especially hard given a web browser that doesn't even do POST and definitely knows nothing of JS and CSS.