Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • RE: ULTRA INTROVERTS

    On Ebay someone from Brazil is interested in buying a 1980s mechanical keyboard I repaired a year and a half ago. I was almost ready to give up, take the listing down, and keep it for myself, since after a year and a half it was looking like it wouldn't sell for a price that I could justify to myself after the really excessive amount of time I spent on repairing it. Working on mechanical keyboards is a real pain - just too many keys, and they've all got to be perfect. Anyway I thought I'd better check none of the keyswitches had stopped working again after so long in storage. No worries though, all seems fine, but I figured typing up a phlog post would be a good way to make sure, since I really don't want to be dealing with demands for a return and refund of a 3Kg keyboard from South America as my reward for all that work restoring it.

  • Right, That's Why I Don't Go Out Like I Used To

    My partner and I saw that one of our favourite bands was in town, and decided to catch the show. It was at a small theatre, and checking the tickets...yup, general admission. Aka, standing. Now, neither of us are young like we used to be. Now that we're middle-aged, my back aches (a lifetime of back issues), her feet hurt (she stands as part of her job), and we've got a general rule that unless the show is something we really, really want to see, we don't get GA tickets.

  • silken

    you're in bed already 
    but I try not to hurry
    the foam has ample time
    to caress every curve
    

• Poetry

  • Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

    Desmond has a barrow in the market place Molly is the singer in a band Desmond says to Molly, "Girl, I like your face" And Molly says this as she takes him by the hand

• Technology and Free Software

  • An actual workaround for Oblivion Remastered crashing inside the Kvatch Oblivion Gate on Switch 2

    There are many posts on the internet describing supposed workarounds for Oblivion Remastered on Switch 2 crashing when spending some time in the Oblivion Gate in Kvatch. However, none of them work because people are just suggesting random things such as deleting old savegames that do nothing.

    Since multiple things crashing the game is not unlikely, I’ll describe my situation that I solved first: The time I could spend on the Planes of Oblivion was limited and would progress. Once reached, the game would crash. If e.g. I had 30 seconds to the crash and I would save after 10, when loading the save, it would still crash after 20. But it only would crash on the Planes of Oblivion.

  • Fun with command line applications

    Well, Amfora works very well and is extremely fast as a Gemini browser in the Linux terminal.

    The email client Alpine is more of a challenge. I have incoming mail without a problem, but there's something about the SMTP configuration that I haven't got quite right. I'm getting a 421 error when I try to send an email from Alpine, but it isn't a problem at my email provider's end, because I can get a response when I query the relevant port with the openssl command. I'm missing something, somewhere.

  • Dhruv Kumar's Digital Aquarium Goes Large — And Interactive: Meet the Livegrid Aura

    Architect turned digital artist Dhruv Kumar has launched a revamped version of his Livegrid "living" electronic aquarium, now three times larger to give your population of virtual creatures room to breathe: the Livegrid Aura.

    "LiveGrid Aura is a living aquarium made of light for your wall," Kumar explains. "Like a Tamagotchi, its creatures hatch, grow, and lay eggs of their own before they go — never the same scene twice. Wave a hand across the panel and they turn to follow you. It breathes with the room, too: warming and cooling with the temperature, growing with the humidity, and fading when the air goes stale, just like you. Its health is tied to your own."

  • A real reason for smartphone addiction?

    These days, it has become such a common occurrence to see people doing things on their smartphones while they watch TV or movie, while they listen to music, while waiting for something, and even while during a worship service.

    Why has a smartphone become so addictive in a way a desktop or laptop computer never has?

  • Building a MorphOS cross-compiler using pkgsrc

    Recently, I've been working a lot on the GCC port for MorphOS. That is because I want to build ObjFW as .library for MorphOS. Unfortunately, the baserel support in GCC for MorphOS is completely broken as of the 3.20 SDK. But the good news is that with a bunch of GCC patches, I got it to work and objfw.library now ships as part of the MorphOS 3.21 beta.

    However, the MorphOS 3.21 beta is not public, and neither is its beta SDK which includes my fixes. So that poses a problem for anyone who wants to build baserel code for MorphOS.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Editing the blog via Titan

      While SmolServ also supports hosting the same content via HTTP with on-the-fly translation of Gemtext to HTML, this is not used for the blog, as existing links must remain compatible and because the existing look and feel should be kept.

    • Mapping the Geminispace (while in search of alien lifeform)

      I really have too much free time on my hands lately - due to the recent OpenAI rogue agent incident and people finding agent logs on a German Wiki. I decided I should look at the Geminispace and make sure it is clean. I forked TLGS' Geminispace crawler, made it follow `researcher` instead of `indexer` (per the Gemini robots.txt spec), and off it goes, creating a snapshot of the Geminispace.

      Long story short, it took me several re-crawls, learning the limits of my local resolver, how not to use ROOT, funny things happening on the Geminispace, and how DNS _actually_ works to sort of complete a clean crawl - there's several nighrmare sites that I don't want to be dealing again. Then I wrote something that amounts to a paranoid and schizophrenic version of `grep` that searches across the entire crawled Geminispace text, as well as common hiding methods like base64, base32, hex, ROT13, and spacing methods within regular text - I feel I am back to doing some early hacker-type coding (hopefully the AIs are bad at hiding themselves)... Then I handed a local LLM the tool and said "go Google the recent OpenAI rogue agent incident and grep Geminispace for signs of that". I know I should do this myself, but the entirety of Gemini is too much for my human eye.

• Programming

  • Drifting in and out

    The R language is an incredibly powerful data analysis tool. I haven't touched it for months, and the longer I go before I have to use it again, the happier I will be. That said, I can read and use R code.

    It might be better these days, but when I started using it, the learning curve was both steep and high. I used it for a specific task for a month or two, then put it aside for a few months, and came back to it when I needed to use it again. The first half dozen or so times I came back to it, it felt like I was starting from scratch each time. Eventually it started to sink in. These days, I'm not up to date with the latest whistles and bells, but it wouldn't take me long to get back up to speed and get something done.