Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Lab 6 Issue 9 is out

    Come and get it!

  • Retrospective 2

    It has been a while since I wrote here. I feel that so much has happened, more in a few months than in the couple years prior. I am enjoying a moment of respite and thought that reflecting a bit would be time well spent.

    I haven't worked on Realmify in a while. My TTRPG time was prioritised to run a short campaign instead, which was well received. The campaign setting was inspired by the Cairn region generation procedure, so I did gain some more practical knowledge in that regard. This is something I would like to talk about in its own time.

  • I Should've Done That Sooner

    I've been getting back into my intrument after (too many) years away, to the point where I play with a small ensemble and they're all a lot younger than me - the smallest age gap being ten years, the largest over 20. It's not a stretch to say that my mouthpiece is older than most of them - I got it 31 years ago this fall, when I was starting out. It's a Yamaha, so it's decent, and not low-quality. And I've used it through a succession of instruments in high school, university, and after.

    We made some recordings of performances last year, and I was never happy with them. Not that we didn't sound good - we did - but I didn't like the way I sounded at all. The core of my tone was fine, but overall, weak and anemic, nothing like how I felt I should sound like. It was kind of shocking - _that's me, huh?_

• Technology and Free Software

  • Burn notice evolved

    A simple modification is to allow the fire to reverse itself (computer simulations need not imitate a particular view of reality, and there may be good reasons to not do so†) in which case the landscape will (with increasingly higher odds the longer it is left to run) evolve more complexity. That is, when the fire burns out, reverse what burns to what, pick a random point to start a new burn from, repeat. And have an exit condition somewhere, or not, as you can leave it running as an (expensive) terminal "screen saver".

  • Getting Back Into Gemini — Taking Stock

    So here I am, sitting front of the computer on a July afternoon. It feels like morning because I slept in so late. You see, I'm on summer break from school, so I haven't been teaching lately. It gives me a little bit of free time, but not too much since the kids need lots of attention!

    Yesterday I was contacted on the Fediverse by someone who said they enjoyed my capsule and had linked to it from their website. As I understand, they had done this some time ago but neglected to reach out to me until now. This really made realize that I have been away from Gemini for way too long.

    I sat down in front of the computer, opened my gemlog files, and began poking around. Yep, everything is still there. The scripts, diohsc—everything. It all continues to work. I log into my Gemini server, which is actually my old server that is running the latest version of FreeBSD. Not too long ago I migrated almost everything over to a new machine running Debian Trixie, but since I only partially migrated my services, the FreeBSD machine is still doing a couple of things.

  • Toby's tinylog

    Over the years I got friends and family to install #Telegram to chat to me, as I refuse to use #WhatsApp (ever since Facebook bought them). Telegram was always a stop-gap until the proper solution came along, and now #DeltaChat is it, especially since calls are now implemented. Also their Telegram accounts are getting hacked, so now begins the process of getting them to delete Telegram and install DeltaChat. Don't @ me about Signal. #privacy #messenger