Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Holidays in the mountains, not great

    We’re up in the mountains again. After the first night we went on two long walks and I felt great. Late in the evening we decided to play *Radlands,* a two player card game. It went on for three and a half hours and ended with a stalemate since we played through the stack, twice.

  • chomp

    all this talk about feasts
    has me hungry
    and whatever I have at home
    won't be enough
    that one crucial chomp
    will stay missing
    

  • My love and fascination for history continues

    I am 60 years old. When I graduated high school I did what a lot of kids were sort of "expected" to do and that was go to college. I survived one semester and then said "fuck this."

    Instead, I joined the US Army. I learned a lot, served my country, experienced being an adult on his own, and to at least try and act like one.

    Years passed. Life moved on with all sorts of twists and turns...jobs, family, children, health, and responsibilities.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Old Computer Challenge DAY 06of07

    Since the RPi Zero is small, and the case is much larger, there is room to put other things. Even with all of the peripherals attached to the RPi, there is still empty space that can be used. So I did more brainstorming.

    In recent days, I have been spending leisure time putting together book nooks. These are kits that you can put together that are like dioramas or 3D puzzles for your bookshelf. They usually have some kind of scene, like a coffee shop or a library and have some kind of LED lighting in them. I enjoy assembling them and they remind me of playing with LEGO or model kits I used to assemble back in the day.

  • Old Computer Challenge DAY 07of07

    And YAY, got through to the last day of OCC. Too many ideas going on in my head right now and I don't feel like writing much so I will do bullet points today:

    - Fussing with Circuit Playground Classic and Neopixel sticks - Cable management - Added speakers - Better speaker placement? - Putting things together - Applying decals - Action pics

  • Old Computer Challenge Epiphlogue

    The Old Computer Challenge 2026 is over. It ended on 7-ELEVEn Day. Fun times were had and will continue even after this.

    This year, I started with the thought of an old PC case as a shadowbox. Much of the time in the first few days was spent wondering what I was going to do with the case. By the third day, I had some direction. The case was going to have a pinball and pachinko theme!

    From there, I just kept playing with the case, adding parts, removing parts, thinking, trying different things, etc. It was like a game of, "what can I build from my collection of parts?" Maybe this should have been called, "Old Computer Parts Challenge," for me.

  • Trial by Fire

    I was laid off from my last job in February. Almost four and a half months later, I finally started a new job two weeks ago on Monday.

    The industry is exactly the same as that of the company I left for my previous job; in fact, one is a customer of the other. I'm not thrilled by that fact, since prat of my motivation for leaving that job was a lack of interest in the industry. But in the wake of 18 weeks on unemployment and over 200 job applications, I was ready to take almost anything that would pay the bills.

    [...]

    The upside of all this work, however, is that my supervisor is giving me significant freedom to research and implement better systems. We know that what we have is unsustainable, and we need to build something more robust. In a sense, I feel that I've already proven my skills by taking things on so quickly, and based on my previous experience, my supervisor is open to my suggestions. I've already been given a Linux sandbox server that I can build and test tools in, such as Zabbix, Ansible and Apache Airflow.

  • Out of the Quiet: VCF East, a Public Beta, and Batch 6

    The last time I posted here in earnest about FRST, back in December, I was "exiting stealth mode" -- taking preorders, promising EVT boards "in a few weeks," and cheerfully imagining decks in backers' hands by Spring. And then the phlog went quiet. My apologies for that -- but the quiet wasn't idleness. If anything it was the opposite. I disappeared into the lab, and I owe you the story of where I went.

    The short version: I took FRST to VCF East, and then I spent the spring making the software genuinely, unreasonably good. The longer version is below, and it's a big one -- grab a coffee, or, you know, just skim and drop to the TLDR; below. ;)

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Using SCGI to serve dynamic content over the Gemini protocol

      In this post I want to explain how you can serve dynamic content to Geminispace using the Simple Common Gateway Interface (SCGI) protocol. I'll start by giving a brief explanation of what SCGI is, then we'll talk about how to set up your Gemini server to work with SCGI applications. Finally, we'll look at how you can actually write an SCGI application in Python.

      For the purposes of this post I'll be assuming some basic familiarity with the Gemini protocol, Python 3 and the Linux operating system, but not too much (indeed, my own knowledge of these concepts doesn't run all that deep).

      Much of the experience I am sharing here I gained while writing Remini, a Gemini proxy for browsing Reddit. When a client requests a page from Remini (using the Gemini protocol), it fetches the corresponding page from Reddit (over HTTP), converts the content to gemtext and displays it to the user. That's just to give you an idea of the kind of thing you can do using SCGI.

    • What are folks using for gemlog generators?

      I added my backlog from the last 5 years (and some) over from http blog all by hand, and while I enjoy the manual process (I am a control freak, maybe) and it works great, and gemsub even works... I have seem some with category/tag indexing as well, and that would be really useful due to the broad range of things I rant about. I mean write about. Finding all my photography sprinkled across the years is curently not easy, for example.

    • 2026-07-14

      No way! Communication service… VPS updated to FreeBSD 15.1 😈

      Unbelievable, in 7 months I did not published anything on the diary… 😟

• Programming

  • ai is coming for my job (but not the way the boosters think)

    my employer keeps laying people off and expecting the rest of us to be able to handle what's left with Claude Code. I already see the standards dropping in the slopful tickets and even more slopful code.

    we were struggling already, hence the layoffs. but this dependence on LLM coding tools feels like it's going to hasten the end of the company. it'll destroy my current job, not by being good but by being bad.

  • Pipelines

    Less expensive than (maybe?) a ls(1) alias, awk(1) to get the last column, and sed(1) to remove something the (maybe?) ls(1) options added would be to simply glob the files and then used the (more portable than the nightmare that is echo) printf(1) to print the filename line by line.