Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Returning from the JMT

    So, a few months back, I posted some brief thoughts I had about planning a hike on the John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada. Broadly, it was mid-May, the permit I got was for mid-July, and I had very little of the actual logistical planning for everything underway.

    [...]

    Looping back around to my last post, I did have a lot of logistical matters to take care of. The biggest one was food: it's voluminous and heavy, even when dehydrated, so it's not practical to carry much more than a week's worth. And, on the John Muir Trail, you have to fit all your food and other scented items in a bear canister, which makes it even harder to carry a large amount of food. And, of course, carrying food is subject to the same tyrrany as a rocketship: the more food you carry, the slower you hike. The slower you hike, the more time you spend on the trail. The more time you spend on the trail, the more food you need to carry. And repeat.

    Regardless, I had to figure out a) what I was going to eat for 26 days and b) how I was going to resupply while on the trail. If you've ever had the pleasure of cooking a freeze-dried backpacking meal you'll know two things: they're really expensive (like $10-$15/meal these days) and they're generally aggressively mediocre. Usually, the first few bites are decent, but the more bites you take, the harder and harder those bites are to force down. As a rule, when I've been out backpacking in the past while carrying these freeze-dried meals, I never look forward to mealtime. Plus, the fact that I'd need around 50 for lunch and dinner immediately ruled that out on cost alone. So, I had to make my own dehydrated meals.

  • Tadpole Update 2026-09-13

    Unfortunately, much like my shrimp in the same tank, the tadpoles seem to be slowly disappearing one-by-one. Their guts are full, they're becoming flatter, and on a few I see the beginnings of limb buds coming out. So they're clearly healthy, but they're disappearing without a trace. Which gives me a major worry. I now suspect that my tank has some sort of odonate nymph hiding somewhere. It's the only reason I can come up with for why shrimp and tadpoles would permenantly disappear without a trace in only a couple gallons of water that's never had any fish in it.

  • 500 Miles, roughly [spoilers ahead]

    I had almost lost hope for a good movie that I could watch without a tangible sense of being deceived. Last time we went to a cinema and chose the "Buzz Lightyear". And it was a disaster. A few years later, we had "Sound of silence." It was a relief. But as you know, one bird does not make it spring. This time we decided to give "500 miles" a try. And, guess what - it got us good.

    The story follows the young (but maturing) boy, Finn, and his younger brother, Charlie. From the very first seconds of the screen time, the story shows us the perils of Charlie. How small he was, how many times he went through a hospital, and how funny he was. We get to know the brothers' parents and grandparents. And for now, nothing spoils what will go wrong. A few scenes later, the boys are running away to Ireland, where their Grandpa lives. In the words of Finn, only he will know what to do. About what? So far we know only that the parents struggle. We can only imagine that they don't get along softly.

  • A Return to Cash

    Two weeks ago I bought myself a new wallet to celebrate my return to a cash-only lifestyle. Yesterday I canceled and shredded a credit card, subsequently deleting 3 related apps off my phone.

    Motivation

    I live in Japan, a place mostly considered a cash country. Since COVID however there has been a rapid adoption of digital payment alternatives. Not just credit cards and Apple Pay, but also Japan-born, bank-connected, preloaded apps that function like debit cards and are as simple as scanning a QR code or having yours scanned by a teller. The largest is called Paypay, and most people that I know have it. I did some research and came up with a figure of 30-40% of people still being considered "cash centric", and although some people are staunchly one or the other, many use both, and most digital-first people still carry some token amount of cash for emergencies. Despite the advance of these digital services, being Asia, you never know when you'll be hit with "Sorry, cash only."

  • Six Sides of an Argument

    To cat and dog owners alike, the benefits of their choice are obvious. In the best case they live in peace and don't think of the other side too much. In the worst the other side is judged for their choice, which is not only wrong but evil. To those on the extrema, any nudge away from their ultimate position is to admit some virtue of the other side, however slight, and this is considered a moral failure. While it may be difficult to consider another pet owner "evil", it's not hard to see how this applies were we to shift our example to politics or religion.

    There is strength in solidarity, especially when the other side is in fact evil. The weakness of being on a pole however is that you cut yourself off from information and ways of interpreting life that may be critical to your survival.

  • Zzzzzzzzzzzz

    Need to be careful. The upcoming weekend is gonna be taxing. Getting up early, socialising, building books, socialising more with fellow bookbinders.

    I should be preparing, alas, the dog dancing trip on Saturday seems to have kicked off some PEM[1]. Followed by a Sunday of being out and about, trying to find a nice café that's not overrun. (The weather was nice and a few decisions had to be made. You never know how much energy any decision making takes until your batteries are broken.)

  • Zzzzzzz 2.0

    Still in PEM. And the eventful weekend is looming. Will have to go and get cheese on Thursday. And pack.

    Debating if to cancel agility tomorrow. With how I am still feeling —napping on the couch all day— doing some sports tomorrow might be a rather unwise idea…

• Technology and Free Software

  • On Executing and On Deciding

    Ploum turns a legitimate question into a blanket refusal. Where he draws a line between human and machine, the real line runs between execution and one's own decision. A piece of work has to rest on decisions the person actually made, decisions that nobody and nothing should take away, least of all unchecked. The following paragraphs pick up individual arguments from the original text and extend them, without trying to tear them down.

  • I lost a game of chess to a small script...

    I'm definitely not a very good chess player but the fact that such a small amount of codified play defeated me in short order is a little bit embarrassing or maybe simply a testament to how well chess strategies have been codified and distilled over time.

  • Life in Plain Text (3): My set up

    At the centre of my system is Raspberry Pi 4. It sits quietly in a corner and makes no fuss. It holds a git repo of the files I use. (More on them later)

    My 'workhorse' is a Starlabs Starbook laptop, running Ubuntu. It's about 5 years old, and apart from a wobble at the weekend has caused me no bother.

    My backup laptop (not that I really need one) is a Dell D630 running Debian. It's built like a tank and the keyboard is lovely. I really should change the battery, but it's a heavy beast so I rarely use it on the move.

    My phone (Google Pixel 9) is a weak link in the system - I haven't really found the mechanism for comfortably viewing and editing my files on there. Perhaps it's me. Maybe it's because I've fallen out of love with Google.

  • I Found My First Android Phone

    I honestly expected the battery to be completely dead after all these years... but I was wrong. I plugged it in and, to my surprise, the battery still charges and holds a charge.

    That's probably the most impressive part of the whole discovery. After sitting forgotten for 10 years, the battery isn't completely destroyed.

  • I Found My First Android Phone

    While looking through my old room at my parents' house recently, I found something I hadn't seen in 10 years: my first Android phone the HTC Desire HD which was last used in July 2016.

  • Leaving Sony

    My PlayStation account of 14 years is officially gone.

    Modern companies have invented all sorts of tricks to hook their customers and ensure they become recurring sources of revenue. One of those tricks by tech companies in particular is to offer fantastic services at the outset, then slowly replace them with predatory alternatives that provide the illusion of quality but are designed to make it harder to leave. What makes this practice sinister is that companies deliberately roll out such changes one at a time and in very small increments. Usually, those changes in isolation aren't enough for consumers to justify leaving the entire platform, but taken in aggregate, they make the service significantly more hostile to consumer rights. Before we know it, the frog has been boiled, and a combination of FOMO and the sunk-cost fallacy keep us bound to platforms we claim to despise.

    Video game companies seem to be leading this charge. Twenty years ago, some games had online server to which players could connect and play against each other, but once the customer purchased a physical disc at the cash register, the flow or revenue almost always stopped. Companies were thus incentivized to make good games and make them frequently, as that was the only way get money from the gaming consumer base. Since then, companies have introduced DLC, paid online services, battle passes, timed exclusives, and in-game currencies, all in the name of making games a recurring revenue system. Some companies are introducing requirements to validate the game's key online before each play, meaning games that themselves don't rely on any online services will still require an Internet connection to play.

  • LoRa BBS: Keep it simple, stupid!

    My vision for the local BBS over non-internet, non- cellphone, non-HAM wireless was the following:

    (I've never diagrammed a network before, let me know if this makes sense, or what is missing or unclear)

  • Internet/Gemini

    • To All Gemini-to-HTTP Proxy Providers

      If you must run a proxy which exposes the Geminispace to the Web, please be respectful and support `robots.txt`.

      [...]

      This disallows all URLs starting with `/proxy/` and has two outcomes: first, nice crawlers like Googlebot will honor this and not index this and all subsequent URLs. Second, bad crawlers will find this URL in `robots.txt` and crawl it on purpose.

      Better is you don’t have a link to a proxied Geminispace URL and just link to the proxy, which doesn’t load a Gemini URL by default. Then, users can type in a URL and submit a form, which is not done by bots in general. You can have a dropdown menu pre-populated with some Gemini URLs, if you like, which auto-submits on selection.

    • Tak

      Welcome to Gemini Tak. Here you can play against my rather slow, rather unskilled Tak bot on the 5x5 grid size. The game board, state, and log are displayed each turn.

• Programming

  • TkInter scrollable frames that don't suck (WIP)

    After days of trying to work with frames embedded into textboxes or canvases I bit the bullet and made my own wrapper class with callbacks for scrolling. Following code is unfinished and might be cursed but at least it works as intended.