Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Pleasure

    "Nobody knows how to make me happy, like I do".

    This truth, somehow, gives me happiness and pleasure. Maybe because when I want to be happy, I only need me :-) .

  • curse

    are you a curse or a boon

    you've liberated me from all desires for the price of only wanting you

• Technology and Free Software

  • Brogue Statue Vaults

    The broken statue vault is trivial if one possesses a charged shattering charm, though more often scrolls will need to be use-id'd to break the statue down. Complications here are that you may read Summon Monsters, which could be problematic or lethal depending on the dungeon level, layout, your items, etc, or that you may read the Negate scroll, which if you are positioned incorrectly will negate items within the vault. So much for that blue loot! Therefore, if possible, position your character close enough so that shattering will take down the statue, but out of line-of-sight with any item within the vault, or elsewhere on the level, assuming you haven't looted those already. This however may not be possible depending on exactly what procgen coughed up.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • FTP - A way of distributing files too ancient even for Gopher

      In all my years using Gopher, it never crossed my mind that there is no official way to link from Gopher to FTP.

      I can understand why there are no means to link to the World Wide Web in RFC 1436, since it dates back to March 1993, and the first RFCs actually dealing with anything web-related appeared later (RFC 1945 from May 1996). Still, there is at least the non-canonical menu type "h", which in many clients can now point to an HTTP server, not just a Gopher-served HTML file.

    • Cluster Outage Postmortem #2 - Wife

      Yesterday, the 11th of June 2026, my cluster / capsule / gopher hole / http mirror / finger server were down from aproximately 10:50 EST to about 19:40 EST.

      Homelabers worry about disk failures, kernel panics, power outages, internet connection dying and ransomware. In reality, the greatest threat to a home cluster is neither hardware nor software - it's a spouse armed with a vacuum cleaner and absolutely no awareness that the mysterious blinking box in the corner is "production infrastructure."

      My docker cluster can survive node and power failures, but no amount of redundancy can protect against the WIFE holding a vacuum cleaner.