Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🐻 A Bear Walks into a Bar

    Being chronically understaffed is a nightmare I can't seem to wake from. Not only did I have to close last night, but here I am, back before dawn, opening. I must have forgotten to lock the back door after closing, because when I walk into the bar, a bear is making its way through the garnishes, one jar at a time.

    Tart cherry juice— please let it be cherry juice —splatters the top shelf and dribbles down the liquor bottles. Broken glass shimmers across the floor. It looks like a murder scene, except the only one that is about to be murdered is me, by the bear, that just made eye contact.

  • Prepare For... What?

    Most of my life has been about planning of some sort. Jobs. Businesses. Investments. SHTF scenarios...

    But the only think I've learned is that no matter how well I try to prepare for the future, something completely different happens, completely blindsiding me. And in the end, I somehow manage.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Wake-on-LAN Script Update

    For context, I use Wake-on-LAN so I don't have to manually power on my cluster of Lenovo machines (worker nodes) every morning. The script checks the MAC addresses of each machine and sends a "magic packet" to wake them up.

    Recently, my script stopped working. My master node Tiny kept running this script but the workers didn't wake up. The reason is that Wake-on-LAN packets are sent as broadcast messages. Without specifying the broadcast IP, the packets were only being sent to a single IP, which doesn't always reach sleeping machines. This is why my machines stopped waking up.

  • Self-hosting remotely

    I'm leaving the country for a while, renting out my home out, with a room locked to visitors, where I'm hoping to keep a couple of servers running. One is a supermicro server running TrueNAS, another a RaspPi running Debian.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • on not scrolling

      I'm trying to stop using infinite-scrolling apps as a ready-made stream of distraction. goodbye bluesky, goodbye reddit, goodbye facebook and instagram. (I mean it's been a while for the latter two, but still)

      just taking them off of the home screen of my phone has helped a lot, it's easy to think twice when you've just tapped on the empty space where the reddit icon used to be. but my nervous system craves the ready drip drip drip of irrelevant knowledge.

    • Gemtext Emphasis -- Interpreting The Spec

      Many oppose this, claiming that it is against the Gemtext spec, and even the core ideals of Gemini.

      And I want to speak out *for* emphasis. By emphasis here, I mean _italicized_ and *bold* text. Alhena users can now see these in their full glory, by the way (as an optional setting). There are several factors in play here: minimalism, protocol inextensibility, and spec interpretation. This comes up a lot on BBS, and a recent Alhena-related discussion brought it up again, finally in a constructive way (Thank you for implementing this optional blessing, @Bluesman).