Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • A year later - appendix

    The elderly woman looks at me with a mixture of embarrassment and ironic pity. The latter is more of a mask she’s put on to hide the former—that’s how I assess it in a split second. I don’t know how to react to ease her suffering. So I smile slightly, nodding calmly, and say nothing in response. The woman walks with crutches, struggling to cover each meter. When I opened the door for her—quickly, too quickly, as if I’d misjudged her abilities—she said: - I don’t move that fast, you see. I still have to switch the keys to my other hand, and I still need to steady myself… - And that’s when she looked at me with that look that threw me off balance.

  • drops

    rain has stopped
    but water keeps dropping
    in a single spot
    outside my bedroom window
    a steady rhythm 
    tempting sleep
    I keep avoiding
    for no good reason
    except yearning
    always the yearning
    

  • I'm tired

    My (older) brother-in-law is a drug-addicted narcissist, my (older) half-sister is a hopeless stoner, my (older, adopted) half-brother gets out of prison in two? years for shooting his wife in the head (she survived), my (older, unrelated to the others) half-brother is following in the footsteps of our mother and becoming a horrible alcoholic.

  • Dirty Dancing (1987) and The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018)

    No, it's not a Marty/Lorraine situation, but the time travel scene at the end elevates this movie.

    The main plot has happened (up at the lake), and they're all gathered in the theatre in 1963, when a song from 1987 begins to play. This is not the soundtrack - it's diegetic. The old men in the room don't look impressed, but the kids are going to love it. Kellerman asks for sheet music - it's the new sound he's been looking for. Baby teaches Johnny to B Goode. The Doc is worried about Baby’s future, but figures what the hell.

    On the other hand, it could just be an amazing coincidence.

  • The significance of coincidence

    It will be about death, but without drastic descriptions.

    Yesterday before bed:

    I’m reading about Norwid’s belief in the significance of seemingly unrelated events that are nevertheless connected by a common meaning. I read, for example, about his friend who committed suicide. Just a day or a few days before his death, he made a mistake in front of him by misplacing the stress (emphasis?) in a foreign, Italian word, and instead of calling the waiter, he unintentionally shouted that he was drowning (he later drowned). Earlier that same day, someone next to me was talking about someone who had hanged himself.

  • Tarot and creative writing

    Turns out, you *can* have a daily tarot practice, without diluting it. Of course, nobody wants to end up asking questions like "Should I have papaya or mango today?", but there are many different things you can do with tarot. One must remember foremost that _Tarot is a deck of *playing* cards_, and so, you should do just that.

  • 3 seasons in one (portfolio, primary, and tomato)

    Like a good Boglehead, I rebalance my portfolio once a year. I do mine in mid-August.

    I...guess?...you could call my approach to my finances "barista FIRE," except I'm not (yet) withdrawing anything from my nest egg. I call it "insurance." The goal is to have my investment income be capable of replacing my earned income, so that I don't have to worry about What Happens To the Job Market. I'll keep working as long as I want to work, but I don't NEED to sell my labor to survive, is the goal.

    I use the mid-August rebalancing every year to learn something more about finance, as I'm still a baby at this. This year, I decided to properly understand bonds.

    I don't know why, but I've always found bonds hard to wrap my head around. About 30 percent of my portfolio is bonds, but I don't really understand bonds? I don't like buying things I don't understand. And since I'm about to spend An Amount of Money With a Comma In It on bonds, I figured it was time to understand them better.

• Science

  • You might as well be walking on the sun

    When we talk about solving climate change (ration energy, leave the fossils in the ground, any DACCS and BioCCS should be funded directly instead of as an excuse to burn more fossils, fix market capitalism's bugs or replace it outright, tax the rich, get money out of politics) what they hear is akin to as if we would’ve said “Oh, why do you need doors or windows? Just walk through the walls with ghost powers” or “Why do you need stairs? Just stride up the clouds”.

    [...]

    When I was little music only came on records and tape and I lived through mp3, GNU, Debian, Wikipedia. And fridges and hairspray were eating up the ozone layer. And Berlin was split by a wall.

    Even most of all y’all reading this has lived through the pandemic era when streets where empty once more.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Fun with locator maps

    One of my most favorite things that I've made for Gemini Space is Where In The World?, my geography guessing game.

    [...]

    I really wanted to add these to WITW, to show you where a country was at the end of the game. The good news is Wikipedia often has one of these. The bad news, I ran into multiple issues trying to gather these from Wikipedia at scale.

  • thoughts on Homeworld (1999)

    I've just finished playing homeworld, and I'm brainrotting about it a little bit. It's kind of fun, because I remember receiving the game-of-the-year edition for christmas when I was around 10 years old? it came with a crazy-detailed manual that had huge written histories of all the clans and ships, but I never actually beat the game until today, at least 20 years later.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • doh

      For whatever reason I wanted to add a guestbook to my gopherhole. I had done it before on a different host. It's generally pretty easy... Or so I thought.

      I cannot get it to work here. It's a simple echo with the date and the post content (Item type 7) in a gophermap with a .cgi shell script. It's just using echo and cat and date. Every single time I try to implement this, I get a permissions error.

    • Losing my heart to the rogallo smolnet browser

      Rogallo is a new Gemini/Finger/Smolnet TUI browser written in Python, and has already a lot of features and niceties, although it's still in active development. Its really easy to configure and operate. And support for other Smolnet protocols like Gopher are already on Dave's TODO list, with Gopher being the most important for me personally. For now I still have to use the Telescope browser for Gopher, but if rogallo supports Gopher, I think I'll leave Telescope behind, because it has some shortcomings, which are a little annoying (no offence).

      Who knows, which protocols rogallo will support in future? At the moment I'm only using Gemini, Gopher and Finger, because that's all Telescope supports and I don't want to use a GUI client like Lagrange. I'm a CLI/TUI person. But maybe rogallo will support the Spartan, Text and Nex protocols in future too, which I don't use because the lack of support in Telescope, but that's no hard requirement for me. Maybe it will also support Titan and Misfin, which I (still) have no experience with. I know there are a lot of possibilities, and they also demand a lot of work and effort. But let it take as long as it needs. And too many features are also not the best.

      So let's give Dave some time. I can wait. I'm just so curious what rogallo will become! I just can wholeheartedly recommend to have a look at it and its features. I hope it will become *the* competitor to Lagrange for the terminal.

    • Gemified Internet RFCs

      I wrote some tools to convert HTML RFCs into gemtext, then hosted them up over at spartan://docs.addictivecode.org/rfc/

    • Feeling inspired by smol.pub and the indieweb

      A few brief thoughts as I wind down the weekend.

      Today I felt happy in a way that I haven't felt in a long time. Reflecting on that feeling, I attribute it to spending time on the indieweb, which has motivated me to learn, to create, and to connect with others.

      This has been SO much more rewarding than being a "content consumer" on a big tech platform, and I feel that this is something that has been missing from my life for far too long.

    • It seems I restarted the TOFU war again (and my thoughts on it)

      This post is going to be very rambly. TOFU has been a major point of discussion since I started my journey in the Geminispace. At that time I was also in support of TOFU to remove PKI as a Geminispace dependency. Back in early 2021 there were 2 major camps in support of TOFU (and Solderpunk's origin in the Gopherspace was a major influence, I believe, with the goal being making a better Gopher rather than to strip the web down to its bare essentials):

      * Those who wanted Gemini to be as decentralized as the early web (hence no CA, as they are a major point of failure)

      * Those who don't trust big tech and think CAs can be evil and could compromise Geminispace security

      ...the usual reaction to moving away from the web and removing its bloat. The points were valid at the time. But as of mid 2026, the situation has changed for me. AI has been getting uncannily better at catching bugs and hacking -- the problem has moved from whether CAs are evil to how resistant to MITM (and impersonation) attacks we are, and how to stop the bleeding after a compromise.

• Programming

  • What If “Junk DNA” Is Commented-Out Code?

    Anyone who has worked with an old codebase knows what it looks like.

    There are functions nobody remembers writing. Sections have been disabled rather than deleted. Old compatibility fixes remain because removing them might break something unexpected. A module marked “deprecated” still handles one obscure process on alternate Tuesdays.

  • HAL II: Now with 35% more pod bay door non-action, free!

    ABBA is related to the dictionary words deed and noon. One might also build a graph of what country codes are connected to one another by this relationship, e.g. GA and KE (Gabon and Kenya) are connected, among others. As always, an actual productive use may be wanting.

    Fiddling around with the input strings is not too difficult (ESC k 2 w C assuming a shell in vi mode) though can be improved on with a shoddy little REPL, where lines from standard input are passed to the program. Hit control+c to exit the while loop. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done and saves some typing.

  • some initial thoughts on F#

    So, F# is part of .NET, which means like Java it needs to have a bunch of project structure for the dotnet tool to compile it. I've tried to isolate the fsc compiler, but at least on my debian computer, it throws a bunch of errors if I try to compile a single file. There might be a workaround, but I let it go.

    It turns out, you can run simple fsharp files as scripts using the fsharp interpreter. Those files must be .fsx files, and have the limitations of interpreted programs; can't use functions before they're instantiated, etc. The dotnet interpreter has a noticable startup lag, which is unfortunate.