Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • break up

    A festival this weekend. I'll know a lot of people. I'm not too excited. Like old friends that I don't want to know anymore, this community has known me for too long. I want to re-invent myself somehow. Like old clothes that makes me look like what I was before, there is a crust, a habit that I want to shed.

  • bad friends

    A few more hours of waiting. I left the cafe, traded some sparkling water cartridges, made some money and decided to purchase a book or two.

    At the used bookstore, I saw her again. Her profile is a lot nicer. I didn't know what I wanted. Maybe if I could find some poetry from Lalla. A book on Chi, a student of mine asked me about what it means to cultivate energy, seems like an appropriate reading.

  • town day

    Energy is really high. Driving in town to get the car fixed before the road trip.

    Sitting in the sun on the ferry, I had a sweet talk with a friend. He is a pessimist, he knows that I'm an optimist, he correct himself a couple time.

  • Motivating the study of language

    I think connecting with your heritage is an example of a good, well-motivated reason to study a language. And I do believe you *need* a good reason, because language acquisition is a lot of work. It takes literal years of patience and practice to get to a point where you can comfortably communicate with other people. Lucky for me, I've studies French for most of my life. More than anything, keeping Acadian French just means using it. Improving my confidence with it. The hard part is over.

    The original title of this article was "Should I keep studying Toki Pona?" But before I attempt to answer that question, I want to talk about another language I've been trying to learn for a long time that I'm *not* able to "just use". Namely, Mandarin.

  • one of these days

    I watch you
    in lively conversations
    with everyone else
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • when the AI is less than helpful

    tl;dr: I’ve learned a little more about module creation as a result of the AI trying to make broken edits. As a result, I’ve cleaned up my module code and added a new feature, but the tests aren’t quite right.

    I was trying to make some simple fixes to my markdown navigate plugin. I wanted to have a function that would add new reference links from a Telescope live_grep so that I could more easily insert links. It’s sort of beyond the scope of something for navigating markdown, but I didn’t have another place or plugin to put it in, so I added to mrkdown navigate.

  • OCC 2026: DAY03of07

    This morning after sleeping on the brainstorming for my OCC project, I thought about it some more during my first cup of coffee.

  • OCC 2026: DAY04of07

    Day 4 I spent probably way too much time sifting through parts to put in this project. I had to stop myself from thinking about it too much or I would get stuck so I had to take action. I switched gears and decided to add the Raspberry Pi Zero.

    The Raspberry Pi Zero is not considered old in my personal computing timeline. It came out in 2015 and there have been many different versions of Raspberry Pi that has come out since then. Maybe in the timeline of single board computers it might be considered old. Time is relative.

  • OCC 2026: DAY05of07

    Today's OCC time was spent getting pinball and panchinko software loaded on the pi. The microSD card I used was only 8GB. That should be enough for now.

    The HDMI display I have does not have sound and is only 800x480 resolution. recalbox was not configured properly so the games would not show. The initial boot and menus would show, but when I tried to load any program it would just go back to the menus after trying to load. I had to do more digging on the surface webz for solutions.

  • Ephemeral update, HP Mini fail

    Update: My work shift was truncated to 8 hours (1:1 with a teen in psychosis), so I had a moment to briefly test the HP Mini netbook.

    Some e-waste, like the mini desktop and set top box I tested July 6, is anonymous. This HP Mini, instead, was discarded by my girlfriend Cassie when she moved from Kentucky to Missouri. She wrote tens of thous- ands of words of fiction on it before "something" caused it to retire to her shelf and be replaced.

    I'm most sentimental about netbooks. The category's lineage grew from the ill-conceived One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), whose demon finally enforced its will, at least on US children, in the distanced days of 2020. But a decade before, OLPC inspired the Eeepc, then a class of little, tough, underclocked 32bit "netbook" laptops like this one.

  • HP Mini's 127 brackets

    I pulled the bottom off the HP Mini netbook. Took the battery out, and there's a weird little orange lever. Fiddle with it, and voila, it starts unzipp- ing the tabs that hold the bottom on. No screws.

    4 screws hold in the hard drive caddy. I almost had to drill one out. The hard drive's right next to the dead cmos battery. Time to start it up with no hard drive. More cmos etc error messages, then a screen asking for input, but it gets nothing from the key- board.

  • 2026 Old Computer challenge: Day 7

    Didn't have time to do much today, aside from writing this and checking Fedi notifications with my scripts as I had a family event thing happening. I also had a message come in on Discord that I had to reply to today, so I cheated a bit by doing that on my phone.

    The week has been fairly fun, but I didn't achieve any of the "Make Something" aims I had at the start of the week as I didn't make any music or learn more about SunVox. I did, however, program more scripts for accessing Fedi, so that sort-of counts (though I could have done that on the older and lower-spec machine I've used in previous years). I wish I'd had more time and motivation to actually get to doing what I had planned, but it didn't happen.

  • The weight of history on forgotten machines

    My old computer challenge is finished.

    * My daughter has a 2011 netbook edutainment system

    * and a CD player that works

    * My e-waste is nicely organized and ready for more

    * I found a home for the Motorola ES400 PDA

    * This Dell Latitude is awesome

    * HP Pavilion dv9700 works-ish but suxx

    * Found my old Olympus digital voice recorder

    Honestly, yesterday I got into the weeds, by which I mean the cables. Before OCC I scoured the closets and drawers of the house and brought every forlorn cable, device, and SD card out here, to the garage.

  • implicit substitution in (neo)vim

    (Neo)Vim search and replace supports using whatever pattern was last used when no pattern is specified. It’s simple but powerful and I had no idea it existed.

    That is, :s//replacment/g (or :%s//replacement/g) will replace all occurrences on the current line (or in the current document) of the previously searched (and likely still highlighted) text with the provided replacement text.

    It never occurred to me to try this or look for this! Most recently, I wanted to change the link text in a reference link, but I wanted to do it with fewer keystrokes and with certainty I’d only be replacing the thing I meant to replace.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Nginx on Rob's Gemini Capsule

      When I originally set up my Gemini capsule, it was only accessible form the URI 'gemini://jsred5.org'. At the time, I didn't know much about networking or how hosting a service on the Internet worked, and I was also hosting my Gopherhole at the same URI. I'd always wanted to configure the capsule similarly to how Web sites work: by making it accessible by either 'jsreed5.org' or 'gemini.jsreed5.org', bot not by (say) 'gopher.jsreed5.org'.

      In 2023, I learned about Traefik and how some Geminauts had configured it to use SNI to serve their capsules. I downloaded it and tried to set it up, but I also knew nothing about Docker (which is its primary deployment scheme), and the configuration syntax was indecipherable to me. Worse still, Jetforce, which is the server I use for Rob's Gemini Capsule, doesn't support multiple host names. I eventually gave up on that track too.