Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • How to run

    I was in my late 20's when I first decided that I wanted to start running. There was a group of guys at the office that went on 30-40 minute runs over their lunch breaks, and I wanted to join them. Our office building had a full locker room, with showers and everything, so I thought that this would be a nice way to get some outdoor exercise in the middle of the day, with plenty of opportunity to get cleaned up for the rest of the workday afterwords.

    Before going out with the group, I did some short trial runs on my own, and they didn't go well. Just to provide some context around my starting point, I've always been a reasonably fit person: sports in high school, weight lifting in college, fairly active lifestyle post-college: lots of walking, hiking, some gym time, that sort of thing. Because of this, I assumed and expected that running was something that I could just start doing.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Announcing ROOPHLOCH 2026

    Dear Smol Friends, the Autumnal equinox draws near! Once again it is time for those who observe the yearly practice of ROOPHLOCH to venture outdoors, devices in hand.

    The Remote Outdoor Off-Grid Phlogging Challenge lasts for the entire calendar month of September in all timezones of Earth. If you choose to accept the challenge, you must author *and publish* a phlog and/or gemlog post sometime in September while not inside any permanent artificial shelter and without plugging your device(s) directly into "the grid", i.e. electricity and internet access must not come from a socket in the wall. Exactly how and where you choose to post and what you write about is entirely up to you. After making a successful post, please email solderpunk@posteo.net with the posts URL and you will have the mighty honour of being added, in alphabetical order of handle, to the official ROOPHLOCH 2026 participation list at the end of the month!

  • Announcing ROOPHLOCH 2026

  • How to create a Docker Swarm Cluster

    I have five computers in my living room. At some point, it seemed like a good idea to make them work together. So, naturally, I installed Docker and used it's swarm feature. My little cluster currently looks like this:

    [...]

    Tiny is an Ace Magician mini PC with a Celeron N5095 and 8 GB of RAM. The three Lenovo M53s are even more impressive with Pentiums J2900, 8 GB of RAM and 500 GB HDDs. And then there's the NAS, a Lenovo P510 with a Xeon and 16 GB of RAM.

    In other words, this isn't exactly a cloud provider.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Replying to smol.pub user posts

      So, a few days ago I joined kunulo on the geminispace bbs to discuss how and where to chat about smol.pub posts. It seems like the conclusion was...why not on the main feed itself?

      So, I'm going to try something a little bit different and use this post to reply to a few interesting questions or topics that have come up on the smol.pub feed lately.

      @fwdudu - RE: your question about writing gemtext, I too just use a text editor and treat it like the near perfect subset of markdown that it is. I made some mistakes in the beginning, especially with hyperlinks, but with a little practice I've gotten to the point where I don't need to edit my posts too many times after posting :) If anyone else out there has a more comprehensive or interesting workflow, I'd love to hear about it.

      @buster - RE: I think you're being a bit hard on yourself in your most recent post. There's nothing boastful or self-aggrandizing about your capsule, and I've found a number of your posts to be quite interesting! Even if it feels like you're shouting into the void, there are probably at least a handful of folks who subscribe to the main feed and read your posts, even if many of us are fairly quiet about it.

    • @nullish Re: Replying to smol.pub user posts

      I find it very reassuring to know that you don't perceive my writing that way and I am flattered that you find it interesting. I must admit I have quietly been following you on here for a few days and I find your perspective very refreshing.

      You know, it's funny, only the other day I read your piece 'Making friends as an adult' and it resonated with me on a deeply personal level. I am very grateful for your thoughtful insights. I can especially relate to you when I consider how much easier it is for me to make and maintain meaningful relationships with women than it is with men.

      It has always been this way for me.

    • Re: Replying to smol.pub user posts

      How will we cope with the inevitable disagreements when they come? We surely can't be positive about one another *all* the time. That would be a pretence, not real community.

      I'm trying to make two commitments here.

      The first is to try to remember that I don't always have to tell people when I think they're wrong. I'm sure I will, sometimes. But I've spent too much time online allowing myself to be farmed for my outrage: sometimes a deep breath and moving on is all that's needed.

    • Probably a stupid idea for most, but definitely easy enough for enlightened users

      After reading Michael's recent entry regarding an "AI" (read: LLM) MCP server for gemini/gopher space, I was immediately irritated. While I was taking a piss, imagining some billionaire's face was there instead of the urine cake, I thought why not just encrypt posts? An author key pair could be created and the public key could be shared somewhere surrounded by poisoned data; easy enough for a human to find and proceed.

• Programming

  • Reviewing GitHub PRs without the browser

    In the last post about patches I wrote how I move code into air-gapped VMs with a simple `.patch` file. Turns out that was a gateway drug.