Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Still Mostly Dry

    A few months ago, one of my friends had a health escalation that had them in the emergency ward, and by all accounts, pretty near death. Their health had never been good, and was declining, and despite this, they drank - a lot. Not afraid to call themselves an alcoholic, either. They tried quitting many times, to degrees of success. I remember them telling me that during the pandemic, they were drinking a bottle of whisky, every day.

  • 2026-07-06

    y'all, partner and i had a wonderful surprise this weekend. they discovered that the belgian public tv was livestreaming the werchter festival! most of the acts!

  • distanced

    there's a particular sadness
    to witnessing life happen without you
    pictures of happy moments 
    yourself not included 
    because you wanted to believe
    

  • Zone II, NGO's and why I quit

    Between 25 and 30 June, a sign was placed on the "heart" of Zone II, intentionally on a small patch of lacy phacelia that was yet to be harvested. The sign declares this field to be part of "Via Natura 2000", a project dedicated to connection Natura 2000 sites with each other. Not only was the sign set up during the peak of the heat dome that resulted in temperatures climbing up to 40.1°C, meaning whoever put this sign up drove through the area with a car and thus risked a fire due to the heat having dried up the place, they did it without ever talking to the farmer who owns those fields.

    Just today I came across "David" whose real name actually is Norbert. He barely talked and was just as frustrated as I was, only saying that this sign "was suddenly there". He read it, too, and probably noticed that the sign claims that his property isn't his own but allegedly belongs to one of the two agricultural businesses in our village. This business already receives roughly a million in subsidies and thus is unlikely to be responsible for this (they also got nothing to do with Norbert at all and their own fields are on the other side of the village, so not even close to Norbert's).

• Technology and Free Software

  • OCC MMXXVI

    So last night, I decide to fire up mastodon to see where it is at and find that today is Day 01 of the Old Computer Challenge (OCC). [1] It got me thinking and I have decided to participate again this year. This year is again, no rules, and the theme is about making something.

  • OCC 2026: DAY 1 of 7

    The Old Computer Challenge is here! I've been thinking of what to do that would be fun and different from the past challenges. I haven't really been doing anything new or different lately with my personal computing so this gives me an opportunity to do something different.

    Recently I have been cleaning out some of the stuff in the lab and reorganizing things. It is hard to work on projects and find parts with so much clutter, so it got to the point where I had to do something about it. Since the lab is in a better place, I have the appropriate work area where I can do the OCC without the clutter overhead.

  • Old Computer Challenge 2026, Day 1

    I chose graphics as the topic for the challenge. I will create different versions of the same picture using different techniques, maybe different computers. The picture is my tattoo, a double snake in an infinity style loop. It’s a popular Scandinavian theme from the iron age, Merovingian or Viking design. I drew it about 25 years ago from an arcaeology book to give to the tattoo artist as reference and due to sheer luck or my mad archival skills, I was able to find the drawing.

    Today I started with doing a small solid ASCII art version of it on Amiga 500. I have never really done any ASCII art, just some PETSCII graphics on Commodore 64, so this is all new to me.

  • GoToSocial upgrade

    I recently did a GoToSocial upgrade to v0.22.0 Shrubby Sloth 🌿 – every new index takes 30–35min. "This release also contains a long-ass database migration …" is not kidding. 😅 The migration took 15h.