Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Things that will see me out

    I had a strange realization recently.

    It started while shopping for a backpack. I bought my last one from a military surplus supplier about twenty years ago. I don't much care for spending money, but my old pack was falling apart, and twenty years -- and probably twenty thousand miles -- isn't a bad service life for an inexpensive backpack.

    As I was paying, it occurred to me to wonder when I would next have to shop for a backpack, and the answer hit me hard:

    Never.

    If this new pack lasts as long as my previous one, the likelihood is that it will outlive me. It's statistically possible that I'll still be around for another twenty years, but I doubt I'll be stamping around in the Carpathian Mountains with a full pack in my eighties. No: the chances are that my new backpack will just be another piece of junk for my family to dispose of along with my mortal remains.

• Science

  • DIY Projektor für die Sonnenfinsternis am 12.08.2026

  • Astronomy

    On August, 12th you can witness a partial solar eclipse in some parts of Europe. I published a gemlog on how to build a simple projector and discussed some design aspects (German): [...]

• Technology and Free Software

  • Writing about writing

    I have written so much, and yet so little. I am thinking about getting all my posts together and then putting them through the shredder and just take the good bits and put them together in a single post. It will probably leave me with 100 words or less.

    That way, someone may actually read it. Because my walls of text are so painful that I have so far just gotten an LLM to read them for me. I make the point to ask it to praise my writing but it keeps finding flaws in it. You just can't have nice things.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Comments on Formatting Gopher Posts

      Sava.rocks talks about formatting gopher posts with 'fmt' [0].
      
      
      The fmt tool does work, but is simplistic in its formatting - a more
      featured tool is 'par', which like fmt, operates on a STDIN/STDOUT
      stream. Here is a basic usage example, which formats 'file.txt',
      left-justified to a width of 68 chars:
      
      
          par 68 < file.txt > formatted-file.txt
      
      
      But par (and fmt) are best used from within your editor. Here is how
      to format an entire text file from within vi/nvi, left-justified to
      a width of 68:
      
      
          !Gpar 68
      
      
      Use '68j' if you want the text to be fully justified (all lines will
      be exactly 68 chars wide).
      

    • Moving this site

      Just a quick update that I've moved this gopher site to tilde.team. For those of you who host aggregators, here is the new phlog link: gopher://tilde.team/1/~thinknix/glog

      Why the move? I'm trying to reduce my self-hosting footprint, and I've had a mostly unused tilde.team account for a while, so it seemed a good place to setup shop. The content here will stay online for a while, at least until I get rid of the VPS hosting it. I copied all of the content over, so the new site is essentially a clone, apart from some of the selector hostnames.