Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • TWO HOURS IN TOWN

    Oh, the 11th, census night tonight. On saturday I was trying to match the adjustment nut position on an inner tie rod (AKA steering rack end, AKA inner ball joint, AKA steering link arm - I don't know how two mechanics ever know what part the other is talking about) from the Jag (#1) while I was surprised by a green hatchback quietly pulling past the shed. Usually the only vehicles besides my father's to come in here are a few brave couriers. It turns out this one was driven by an older lady handing out the census papers. Luckily in this cold weather I wasn't up to doing my backyard mechanic work naked, and in fact have taken to looking rather professional in overalls (which I've discovered help a lot with keeping warm too). Mind you she was sufficiently lost in the routine of the census-delivery process that she might have hardly noticed either way, as she ran me through the instructions already written on the census form for how to fill it in online or complete the paper copy. Of course I avoid any government website like the plague, so I'll stick to the paper form, which they're obviously still providing by default to me. All the same as last year I suppose, home alone, unsure whether I'm an Atheist or a "no religion", leaving the name field blank to make it a little harder for any future totalitarian government to blacklist me on the basis of my responses, then into the mail box in town on Thursday to fate unknown somewhere inside the Australian Bureau of Statistics. What is a bureau anyway? Dict.org reports via DICT, somewhere between a writing table and a fancy American chest of draws, that it's probably a government department. I think people these days would actually be more willing to inform a statistically-curious piece of ornamental furniture than the government. At least I do remember reading on the ABS' website that there are statistically slightly more women than men in this country, so that gives me more hope for finding a woman myself at least.

  • Vietnam

    The sky looked like a fresh Windows XP install when we landed in Hanoi. We arrived after having flown from Frankfurt via Lufthansa to Shanghai and boarded there a Plane of Vietnam Airlines.

    It is interesting to observe the differences in flying style of those two airlines that came only to my notice after flying back to back with both: Where Lufthansa is trying to minimize the discomfort passengers may get during maneuvers, Vietnam Airlines Pilot are seemingly forgetting that they are piloting an airliner and not a fighter jet: They like steep climbs, high banking turns and rapid acceleration. Well, i like those things too, junior also and my wife is... my wife and therefore rather stoic regarding such things.

    It was hot the day we arrived with an unbelievable humidity. Lets just say: Not something you like after spending nearly two days in Airports and planes.

  • What the fuck is my problem with gay men IRL?

    Recently I've been thinking about my neighborhood and the people who live within and how we live together. And we're *neighbors* and not friends (at least most of us). I have the luck that the neighborhood is nice and quiet and sometimes we have some (small)talk.

    But something made me think recently, I'm not sure why this came to my mind but it did. There is for example a pair directly above my apartment, who has a child and may also be already divorced or in the process of it again, I'm not sure. But the woman is a VERY beautiful person, like a model or something with a very sunny spirit. This kind of woman, a man would love to put in a cage to have her for him alone. These women are always a problem, because you'll *NEVER* have them alone for yourself. The kind of woman everybody likes (at least heterosexual men I guess and maybe some lesbian women).

    In any case, even myself can't resist her beauty and nicety and her overall sunny appearance. I hold the house door open for her and she smiles which makes me happy. But don't worry, I'm not an IDIOT! I'm old enough to not fall for her. And as I said, we're neighbors not friends. But her friendliness is contagious and it makes me happy to hold the door open for her.

  • upcoming tarot projects

    let the cards teach me more about the cards - do readings on meanings of each card, perhaps invite others to participate with a hashtag? i'm curious. write up a document? kind of miss having a "general" tarot journal in the old style of one card per spread, all my journals are now deck-specific to address the imagery

  • Stargate 1994

    Rewatching Stargate for the first time since its release in theatres. It’s basically Hail Mary for the first 20 minutes but better looking. Loved Hail Mary’s visuals fwiw. Very much worth the rewatch. Hope we get a 4K release eventually.

• Poetry

  • Stargazer (poe/en)

    you are the brightest star
    you're so fragile, i don't
    want to feel lost again
    
    
    who am i to decide
    who am i to become?
    i think standing in the rain
    

  • Verse of the day

    A little one shall become a thousand, And a small one a strong nation. I, the LORD, will hasten it in its time.

  • Rain (poe/en)

    looks deceive, your
    mind obscure with fog,
    regardless, it rains
    a bit of happiness today.
    gather around, grab
    a bucket
    a glass
    a spoon
    -- oh, no matter!
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • Patch your friend in air-gapped environments

    For the last 2 years I'm focusing on air-gapped (no internet) environments.

    My main task is to make our codebase work in such environments, and not simply work, but support any possible client configuration.

    And when we explicitly ask customers to use Ubuntu 24.04 as the base OS, often I find that some "interesting" customers will use a minimized version, or somehow on a VM that was created 2 days ago the OS version will be 24.04.2 and not the latest 24.04.4.

    It's really a challenging thing to support. And because we mostly use Ansible as the provisioning tool I also have to deal with the Python dependencies - but that is a different topic and deserves a separate post :)

    My dev-machine is just a simple MacBook Pro, tmux and nvim, it covers 99.9999% of my needs. No AI autocomplete, or something, I discovered that AI is really bad at infrastructure or automation code (and it's strange because this is code and I constantly hear that AI is really good at code writing).

  • CrowdSec protects request limits

    Recently my management decided to migrate from JFrog, and to keep the support for Maven apps they wanted to use Nexus, but the free version.

  • Xezim Promises an "AI-Native" SystemVerilog Simulator

    Project founder and lead developer Bondan Rufen has written to alert us to Xezim, an "AI-native" SystemVerilog simulator written in Rust and released under a potentially-unenforceable permissive licence.