Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Observations from a hospital room

    Bunny was dozing lightly in the hospital bed; I was sitting nearby slowly falling asleep when the screaming started. A woman in a nearby room was screaming out in pain, pleading for relief that wasn't coming. The groans, sobs, and yelps made it hard to for both of us to sleep. This went on for nearly twenty minutes before things fell silent.

  • Invasive Grass and Politics

    Bermudagrass is one of the most pernicious, difficult to eradicate weeds out there. It seeds prolifically, it spreads from stolons and rhizomes, it can regenerate from the tiniest little piece of tissue, and it's virtually impossible to kill. Simultaneously, bermudagrass is very well-known for use in lawns, sports fields, and golf courses. Fewer people also realize that bermudagrass is also planted extensively for pasture and hay.

  • in your garden

    I want to sit in your garden
    have your famous cake
    and a drink or two or twelve
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • The “back and forth” I'm having with an LLM over a non-issue it thinks is a bug

    When I read it, I had a terrible though: What if my replies are improving its ability to work? And then I came back to my senses—what was I thinking? LLM's can't learn anything! I'll be surprised if the next time this makes a PR, it'll have generated any test input, ran valgrind and generated any valid C code that fixes the “bug,” and I'm putting quotes around “bug” because there isn't one! I've already tested the code it's complaining about with valgrind.

  • forgotten collection

    one of my wishlist items is a notebook to use next year as a planner/journal. i've been mocking it up in my current notebook to try it out ahead of time, to not make a pointless purchase if it's just unusable. so far it's been working out, even in my smaller format (b6). i think the bigger one (a5) will be even better - less cramped. supposedly the paper is also fountain-pen friendly, fingers crossed.

  • How an e-reader became my favorite web browser

    I recently decided to jailbreak my Kobo Libra Color and try out KOReader. When I decided to take a look at what plugins were available, one stood out: gemini.koplugin[1]. I had dabbled with the Gemini protocol in the past and in fact this blog is available there, but just browsing from my laptop or phone it never really became a habit as I'd most likely already be using a web browser for something else.

    But after trying it out on the Kobo, it turns out Gemtext really shines with the reduced distractions and client customization of an e-reader. As that plugin autoconverts Gemtext to a KOReader-friendly HTML page, everything behaves just like an e-book for rendering and page navigation, links are handled automatically and the custom gestures and UI work pretty well. While I still feel like Gemtext supporting some minor things like inline links and images would have been nice QoL improvements and it's miles ahead of the experience of using the web with an E-Ink display or dealing with broken reader mode in some pages in Safari or Firefox.

  • What does "they" see if I enable telemetry

    For Android phone, they will know that the first thing I do is not sign-in and deny all permission for every app. Then I enable developer mode and usb debugging to sideload app from f-droid, replace default app (camera, message, browser etc.) with the sideloaded one. They try to make it very hard, but I will done it anyway. The only thing that prevent me from rooted my phone (and re-flash with something else) is the bank and government app, I doesn't need them yet but maybe I'll need them soon (If it turns out that I'm not, they will see me disappear).

  • Vger Voyager / Gemini (OpenBSD)

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Oh behave!

      It boggles the mind all the shenanigans that people are up to on the Internet. I've come to understand the number of bot request has long surpassed that of actual human beings. That is a sorry state of affairs. Is this the way of the ruling class to make sure we don't connect to each other and decide to move on without them?

      It would be the funniest thing if climate change was a hoax and it caused all billionaires to flee to Mars without an option to return. No I haven't lost the plot, I'm just extrapolating a bit. It's what you do after a long day filled with nonsense and a couple of glasses of wine.

    • Just saw this post pop up on antenna.

      It’s really crazy how many bots are out there on http/https and how many are straight up malicious. I swear, within an hour of putting up the web version of my capsule (that’s just a single page telling people they can only access content over Gemini) I had over 100 clearly malicious web requests: about half trying to take advantage of presumed Wordpress vulnerabilities and about a quarter trying to run payload injections by requesting ../../../../../bin/sh. Of course, I have robots.txt set up to tell well behaved crawlers not to access it (it’s one page with no content), but, yeah.

    • Crawlers Considered Evil

      I won't hide my feelings here. I don't like these.

      I get hit by these a lot. I don't know who they are. I don't think Geminispage needs these.

      My feelings come from several directions.

      [...]

      Gemini, for me, is about discovering places slowly -- following links and aggregators. It's building bookmarks and checking them because you want to see new content.

• Programming

  • Random MIDI