Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Confuse fesival

  • Social

    I have been thrashing my brains hard drive between wanting to isolate forever from all humans vs still communicating with others.

    Struggling with being perceived but also the fact that other people can alter the environment around me in ways I don't consent to, but I know that I shouldn't be so anal about things and that I have inherited it from my family and the fear of their reactions.

    For the first time in many years, I had a friend come around my house, and I think it was the first time ever where it was me and another alone. I was scared because I didn't know how to say for her to not do something as I was afraid of her messing physical things up where I would then get in trouble for from my parents when they eventually get back from holiday.

  • More Rally

    Another brief training today, because it was too warm for anything more, and I'm back to feeling fatigued.

    But the short parkour we did, we did alright. A few new practises in the parkour, more to train.

  • 2026-07-13

    had a good long weekend - partner and i went to the beach! drove up to the netherlands and avoided roughly half of the current heatwave back home. hotel has AC, seaside has lots of wind. alas, it came from the east which meant unpredictable jellyfish. and it was strong enough to stir up tall strong waves even very close to the shore. so there wasn't much swimming but a lot of wading and a few "endurance" dips (try not to get bowled over). generally lots of being outside, 200% nature.

  • Flipping through my old CD binder, part 1

    I recently dug out my old CaseLogic (tm) CD binder and thought it would be fun to flip through it and comment on some of my past purchases and obsessions.

  • Needs at least two weeks

    The work-rest cycle is a fractal pattern and requires maintaining balance across different time frames. Starting with short time periods and moving toward longer ones: While working, we take short breaks, stepping away from our work—whether physical, allowing the body to rest so it can handle further work, or mental (though in that case, the need is less obvious, and it’s easier to fall into the trap of thinking it isn’t real). Throughout the day, we work (I’m not necessarily talking about paid work, but simply the effort we put into various areas of life) for a certain number of hours, but in a well-balanced day, we set aside some time for rest and enough time for sleep. We understand that disrupting this pattern sooner or later leads to exhaustion, burnout, health problems, spiritual problems, difficulties with thinking and concentration, and poorer relationships with others, etc. However, in my view, the same principles apply to longer periods as well, and modern societies tend to downplay this need and upset the balance. During the week, we need a day or two for rest, to disconnect from work-related matters, for regeneration, spiritual renewal, and reflection. The traditional Sunday, if possible, or if needed, starting Saturday. If not Sunday, then finding another day of the week. And similarly in the annual cycle, it’s good to take a few days off once a quarter (holidays and days off help with this). And once a year, extend a break into a real vacation.

  • sand and pebbles

    I sink my toes in sand 
    and think of you
    
    
    collect a pebble 
    think of you again
    

  • It's been a tough and enlightening week

    My last post was June 28th. Today is July 5. A little over a week.I'm honestly going to keep part of the personal items brief. I've livede through them enough for the week.

    My daughter passed away from a suicide back on April 12th. I have been living with that evey day and will continue to do so. What has made it difficult was knowing her birthday was coming up, which was today, July 5th. I spend time with her mother and my youngest son planting a couple trees in he memory. I was tired (still am) because of the fireworks for July 4th went on into the wee hours of the morning, causiung me to get very little sleep. So yeah, I am a little sad and emotional today.

    To add into this, my step-sister passed away on July 2nd from canceer. She was only 47 years old and left kids and grandkids. We were not close, but she was still family. Her dad (my step-dad) is someone I care about very much and this is his second daughter he has lost. Both of his childred. Gone before him. I cannot even imagine. One has been heartbreaking enough for me, the though of my other two going before me? I cannot and do not want to even think about it.

  • Self-Advocacy

    Self-advocacy has never been my strong suit. And I've never really liked defining myself by my disability. But more and more I find myself in situations that strain my ability to manage my anxiety (I'm looking at you, Big Web).

    So I made my first attempt at using the ADA to request accommodations to avoid New York's push toward doing everything through a web portal that will no doubt exacerbate my anxiety with hoops to jump through.

• Science

  • All news are climate news

    For example, whenever there’s a beef subsidy or like a sale on beef, they should have called out how bad that is. How the Earth’s 1⅗ billion bovines, almost ⅖ of our mammalian biomass, a creature with remarkable, unprecedented trophic inefficiency (240 times worse than beans) that humans selectively bred out of aurochs; where each individual emits 50% more methane than an aurochs did and 8000% more methane than a non-ruminant mammal of equivalent size does, and where the sheer number of them are hundreds of times more than there ever were aurochs at their peak (a few million), and uses up somewhere between fifty to a hundred times more land than eating beans.

    Or when the rich are being celebrated, instead show how they emit 30 times more CO₂e than a normal person; to clarify, that’s only for the top 1%. Normal rich people; the richest person in your neighborhood. The billionaires emit one million times more.

• Technology and Free Software

  • That's neat (by ~moendopi)

    Well, three silly things. I half distro hopped today. I have a secondary SSD in my laptop left over from years ago. It became my distro hopping drive. I've been using Fedora 43, now into 44 for a while. It's the longest distro I've stayed with consistently as a daily driver. I had, and kept forgetting, EndeavourOS on that secondary drive. But today I decided to put Tuxedo on there because I just wanted something new.

    I've used Tuxedo a few times, but always on an older laptop, with a shitty keyboard, but I've liked the distro, but being it was on a second, old laptop, I never really put a lot of time into using it. Well, it's making me question sticking with Fedora.

  • Homeworlds Strategy: More Observations

    I've been playing turn-based Homeworlds game on BGA for about three weeks now. The games are usually set for one turn per day, though I can sometimes get in a few extra moves on a game each day, if the other player is also able to make extra moves. I generally keep five games running simultaneously, unless I know I've got an extra busy week ahead in my personal life. So, I've played a fair amount now, though certainly not to the expert level.

    Something I've picked up on is that a lot of the struggle of the game revolves around setting up what I will call "launcher" networks. If you have some medium or large yellow ships, then you can sacrifice these ships to lob other ships far across the galaxy, into whatever enemy territory you want. This has a suppressing and/or slowing effect on your opponents ability to build up his fleet, because he will have to be careful not to build up too many ships of one color in any system, watching out for threats from an overpopulation attack. If you can suppress your opponent's development in this way, this will allow you to get ahead of your opponent in building a more numerous fleet with a greater number of the large ships.

  • Never Assume...

    I put a line in both my IPv4 and IPv6 allowing all connections to port 1965, before any blocks. My feed was fetched fine via IPv6. So I started searching for a matching blocking rule. Didn't find one. Hmm.

  • Unveiling Hexai: An AI companion for Helix and the terminal in general

    I have been using Helix as my main editor for a while now. It is fast, modal, and stays out of the way. The one thing I missed was a bit of LLM help without leaving the editor or opening a browser tab. So I built Hexai.

    Hexai is an AI add-on for Helix. It speaks LSP, so it also works with other editors in theory, but I only test it with Helix. It gives me inline completions, in-editor chat, code actions, a terminal CLI, a tmux popup action runner, and a small task manager for agent work. It is written in Go, lives on Codeberg, and is configured through plain TOML files.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • When the world could change

      I’ve been reading 1960s news (my grandpa saved a bunch of news yearbooks) as an alternative to internet and so far the most striking—and this goes for other books I’ve lead from fifties through nineties was that it was from a world of hope, a world that could change.

      Yeah, there were doomy pockets like the 1962 Cuba crisis or the 1979 Détente collapse but in the day-to-day the world was a changing world; civil rights, gay rights, the rise of feminism, new inventions that actually helped people.

    • Having a blast

      I owe a serious thank-you to 4am (Apple II hacker extraordinaire), simply for linking his SDF gopherhole, thus making me aware of its existence. And thereby, SDF itself, and its community of gophernauts. And through those, the SDF Gemini capsules, the existence of Gemini, and the idea of the SmolNet.

    • The Internet Is Dead: How the Web Lost Its Human Soul

      The internet is not dead in the technical sense. Its servers continue to operate, billions of people remain connected, and an almost unlimited quantity of material is uploaded every day. Yet something essential has disappeared. The internet that once promised freedom, creativity, knowledge, and human connection has gradually become a controlled, commercialized, artificial, and deeply lonely environment.

      The machines are still working, but much of the human spirit that once animated the network is fading away.