Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Rainy and windy Monday, where I contemplate much work and unclear future

    Much travel recently. We were in Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Italy, all within the past few weeks. The whole journey was several roundtrips: for every location, after going there, we returned back home to beautiful bezauberndes Bayern. It was utterly inefficient and spectacularly beautiful and fun. It was worth it.

  • Kim Stanley Robinson's drones

    I can't find anything - but then search is borked these days. I have taken to wondering if anyone else is making the connection between Ukraine's refinement of the use of drones in warfare and the drones in Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future.

  • Candles in the dark

    Candles in the dark,
    tumbling through space.
    
    
    Sometimes we collide,
    fueling our flames.
    
    
    Sometimes our trajectories align,
    just for a while.
    

  • cackle

    to step over that threshold
    from safe to strange territory 
    to go blind into the dark
    each step steadier than last 
    to be welcomed as whole 
    a hearty cackle released
    piercing the night
    

  • sick from the dust

  • spring cleaning

    I don't miss my ex-wife, I miss the family feeling. I was probably miserable during that time, but my selective memory tends to remember the happy time mostly. The hardest part is to only see my daughter half the time. Life is different when she is around, and then I am back to myself.

  • push up

    My push up practice changes my body. I kick higher, and go deeper in the forward bend. As simple as the forward bend might seems, it's a strange yoga posture.

• Politics and World Events

  • Dissociated Declaration of Independence 📜

    We hold these truths to be tried for pretended offences: For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies: [...]

  • Council Elections

    Yesterday was voting day for a third of council seats in the UK. All of Solihull's seats were up for election. Today has been a bit of an odd one. I tend to not look at council election results. I check local results and only care about those. I have firmly been a believer in voting for those who are local and do things, regardless of party. Well, within reason. I do not believe I could vote for Reform, a party led by frog eyes, money sucker, knob end, scammer Nigel Farage. He is scum and the sort of dangerously charasmatic scum who leads people to spite themselves. Reform has ended up winning a lot of seats. People are voting as Nigel seems to represent a change from the usual soul sucking political classes when actually he is a shyster who is in it for the cash. The party claims to check those who want to stand in elections but often they end up with racists, xenophobic or general nutters. After all, you have to pay to be considered to run in elections. More nutters = more cash in the party coffers. The party is also not ran like normal parties. It is a company with Farage and Richard Tice as the sole directors. They control the cash and so control the party with no oversight. Bloody ridiculous but people are fed up of the usual political parties and so end up voting for a party whose candidates promise to lower taxes and stop those pesky immigrants when running for council roles. Yes, those councils whose sole role is sorting out the local social care, schools, bins and other local services. At best, they might reduce council tax by sacking the diversity officer and so reduce council tax by 0.01p for each band A property, a minority of tax payers.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Android nostalgia

    I've been disillusioned with Android since 11. It was the latest version I had on my N0k1a 7.2 and I believe the beginning OS on my newest phone. Maybe not. Regardless, I started using the 7.2 as a sort of tablet and backup phone (VoIP). It just got glitchier and slower... Maybe not slower, but definitely glitchier.

    A few days ago, it died. It happened often enough that I didn't really care. So I plugged it in to charge it. Normal. As soon as I see the 0% of the battery, I turn it on. It boots. It gets to the lock screen. I punch in my PIN and use my fingerprint to unlock it and...it shows a black screen. This is just general sluggishness. I give it a little bit, maybe 20 seconds. I pull down the notification bar. The brightness slider is there...and nothing else. It soon reboots.

    And it kept rebooting. I had to unplug it and leave it in a drawer. It's my belief that somehow I started recording video in my sleep (easy enough when you have your wired headphones in it: it gets dragged under me regularly). I think it ate up all the available internal memory and destroy the system's ability to boot.

  • Out of town

    Recently I got a MacBook Neo and so I took it along with me. I said last year that I didn't think I was going to buy anything Apple anymore, but I've been a Mac user for about 30 years now. When the Neo debuted I was excited about it, and nothing excites me in the computer world anymore. I like macOS 26 Tahoe and the Liquid Glass UI, though everyone else hates them both. OS aside it's just a really nice object to hold and look at.

  • Switching to Guix

    I’m putting some serious thought into switching my main system (coreboot x220) to Guix. The barrier to entry is shrinking: I’ve figured out how to make a keyd service and from that I was able to extrapolate and make the Nix package manager work so I have Nix under Guix. If I move my x220 to Guix, I’ll be able to experiment just as much with Nix as I do now without my store growing out of control. I get the niceties of Guix and determinate systems without SystemD. It’s just NixOS that needs SystemD, not the packages I use. So if I switch, I get to keep all the cool stuff from Nix, keep on learning how that all works, and add in learning everything I can about Guix.

  • AI sentiment

    There was a time early in the AI usage increase that I struggled to find articles from writers who were speaking out against LLMs, so I collected as many as I could and saved them for the moments where I needed to share some of my reasoning for finding prolific AI use so troubling.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Welcome and Unwelcome Content on Antenna

      I knew this would happen, and I was not looking forward to it.

      I’ve deleted a feed from Antenna today, because it doesn’t fit the purpose of Antenna: helping to discover Gemini content. The deleted feed’s content was daily posts with links to WWW content.

    • Server Name Indication (SNI) is for selecting a service, not a certificate

      I added support for Server Name Indication (SNI) to the Gemini Protocol server I am working on, Ground Control, so that multiple capsules can be served by the same server with their own certificates. This is something Ground Control lost when I switched from OpenSSL to BearSSL. BearSSL explicitly excludes this feature because it's not a core part of the TLS protocol.

      The paradigm in OpenSSL is that the application developer writes a function that takes as a parameter a domain name and returns the key that should be used for that domain. This function is attached to the OpenSSL object, and is called by the library during the TLS handshake to configure a new connection.

    • LOST MY KEY

      I Use my GophHub service very regularly to browse GitHub repos, probably more than any other online service I've made. But keeping it online seems to be a game of annoying little breakages. I expected that GitHub would change their API and break things, but Tilde.club is actually the source of most trouble.

      One breakage was when they changed the user for running Gopher CGI scripts from the usual "nobody" to "gopher", whith the latter not having permission to write to files/directories created by the former, so the script couldn't write to the old temporary cache directory in /tmp anymore, and I had to make a new one.