Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • A Manifesto by The Dissident

    We were promised that technology would serve humanity.

    Instead, humanity is being reorganized to serve technology.

    We were promised liberation from exhausting labor, access to all human knowledge, greater democracy, and a world connected beyond borders. Yet the machines that were supposed to free us have become instruments of surveillance, manipulation, dependency, and control. The networks that were supposed to unite us increasingly divide us into isolated consumers, measurable profiles, predictable behaviors, and profitable fragments of data.

    The future is arriving, but it does not appear to belong to ordinary human beings.

  • already again

    the nights are getting darker
    I try not to think about it
    the air feels like a shift
    away from summer
    already, again
    

  • A year later

    I’m standing at the kitchen counter. I’m chopping vegetables with a Japanese knife. I’m smiling to myself.

    A year ago, as I was recovering from an illness that had confined me to bed and landed me in the hospital, that is, since when I was even able to look at a screen, I watched everything that caught my interest for hours and hours. I also watched a program about Japanese knives back then and decided to change up our home cooking, to finally invest in a good knife. I went to buy it as soon as I had the strength to make the trip into city. Since then, chopping and cutting has been a pleasure. Now, a year later, the sight of it brings back additional memories of that time. Combined with the smell of the sweltering air, the cries of swifts, and the taste of blueberries or cucumbers that I ate back then, these memories transport me back in time.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Shokz Headphones

    Same! Just a couple weeks ago (mere days before my jubilant introduction to geminispace and the smolnet!)

    Mine were somewhat over $150, and I generally don’t look to spend that much unless it’s going to have some _serious_ audio fidelity. So I was somewhat anxious to spend that much on a technology I hadn’t had an opportunity to try out for myself (unlike stack, who tried a friend’s first), and that is widely known for having a week bass-end. That’s actually why I wanted these, in particular, as they use both bone-conduction, and little speakers right by, but not actually on, your ears. And you can switch them to bone-conduction-only mode.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • GTL - Gemini Tinylog Reader: A new tag release which fixes the "missing entries" problem

      I've released a new version of the GTL Gemini Tinylog Reader. Version v1.3.0-fork primarily addresses the "missing entries" problem. Additionally, I've updated the required Go version to the latest 1.26.4 and brought the dependencies to their latest versions.

    • [Old] Fork: GTL Gemini Tiny Logs from bacardi55

      It appears Bacardi55 has stopped working on his GTL (Gemini TinyLogs) development. A few patches have been submitted to the developer mailing list, but they remain uncommitted despite being over 7 months old.

      Therefore, I forked the project and applied the pending commits. In honesty, I rather won't maintain GTL and won't be developing it significantly myself.

      However, if anyone sends pull requests with improvements or bug fixes, I will integrate them into the repository because I believe it's a good program and worth keeping alive.

    • What is a valid IP address?

      So you have what the specification(s) say, various interpretations of the specification(s) that may be variously buggy or correct depending on how various beings interpret (or explicitly reject various portions of) the specification(s). This is probably not the answer they want to hear on a test or job interview (especially at the lower tiers where they have 5,000 applicants to churn through and may not want someone who thinks too much), but reality may not fit well into a multiple choice format. Small test programs that take a variety of inputs and show the result might be a good way to explore what does what, as books or specifications or implementations can be wrong in various ways, and maybe nobody has tested these things, or maybe it is documented somewhere but finding that documentation may take longer than just writing a test program, similar to how meditating (can you sit alone for M minutes doing nothing?) may be better than reading some blog post about meditation.

    • Descendants: Wicked Wonderland (2026)

      We watched this on release day on Disney+ and oh boy was it painful, aside from /Dancing with the Enemy/ - the one good song.

      I hate to hate on big projects that must have employed hundreds of talented people. There’s nothing at all wrong with the CGI, the sets, the cinematography, or any of the technical elements of how the film is constructed. As an industrial process, all the parts are milled competently and to within tolerance. It’s just that none of it matters when the writing is slurry.

    • Gemlog - Testing out a new Gemlog system

      Nothing much of interest as of yet. I am testing out a new CGI gemlog generator I'm working on. It uses SQLite for storage and a few shell scripts for creating posts. I hope that this will be easier to use and still be mobile friendly via termux.