Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Outdoor Updates

    This morning I caught my first glimpse of the stars since last spring. I was outside on the front lawn about 5:30am, getting ready for work. The air all around me — horizontally speaking — was foggy, but the sky above appeared to be clear. This moment was astronomical twilight, and the sky was a dim light blue, but I could still see a number of familiar groups including Perseus, Auriga, Taurus, Gemini, and the Pleiades. Jupiter was shining brightly off to the east, though I admit at first I supposed it was Venus.

• Poetry

  • a prayer to the next one

    oh my dire reckoning
    reflection i can feel more than see
    can you reach me?
    i can not be here for me
    i am now always receding
    static light whitenoise 
    it encases my being
    to be
    anything
    anything at all
    

  • fall colours

    night falls over the town in a blink
    I inhale the cellar-like scent in the air
    shiver in layers too light
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • Bash

    Testing the smol.pub bash script. It works! But only when I asked Duck.AI to read the instructions on the smol.pub site and then give me step by step instructions. This exercise has taught me that I need to begin my Linux education with file paths and permissions, and possibly whether my Linux distribution handles root in a particular way.

  • EBAY

    I've been complaining for some time that a lot of the products that I used to sell on Ebay (few of which anyone wants to buy from my own website) aren't selling anymore. Mainly electronic components, so I'm not really sure if this is people not using Ebay or maybe nobody except me still wants to build electronics with components that won't talk to smartphones, via pre-assembled modules (I had a go at making modules too, but I just don't really get it).

    Ebay themselves have also become increasingly annoying over the years in a whole host of ways, which I don't have time to detail. But now with that rare 1980s mechanical keyboard I was talking about in the last post, they've reached a new level of active obstruction.

  • Mecha Systems Delays the Comet Handheld Again, Opens New Pre-Orders with a January 2027 Target

    Portable computing startup Mecha Systems has opened pre-orders for those who missed the crowdfunding campaign for its Comet Linux-powered modular handheld — while confirming what backers already knew: the planned September delivery timescale is out of the window, with bugfixes and hardware revisions pushing the earliest delivery date out to January next year.

    "We have had busy last 4–5 weeks; we got off track but the good news, we have signed off on the design, it took us longer than we anticipated," Mecha Systems founder Shoaib Merchant admitted to backers in a recent update to the highly popular Comet crowdfunding campaign. "I am sure it is pretty obvious now, that we cannot ship by the [already delayed] late October timeline, and shipping late in December is tricky. Based on current timelines, the Comet's deliveries will start from January 2027."

  • Religious and moral education for artificial intelligence?

    This past weekend, one of the top news headlines was about a former Anthropic researcher sounding the alarm (1) on the rapid development of AI, claiming that AI could drive humanity extinct by the end of this decade.

    Albert Mohler today discussed this issue in his podcast, The Briefing (2). Mohler notes that this type of ontological question has arisen in the past, for example, when nuclear weapons were invented, and even in the infancy of modern computing. A Christian worldview Mohler espouses makes it clear that AI is a creation of humans; it does not possess consciousness, and it "is not a species. It is not a being. It is impersonating a being. It may be very convincing in impersonating a being, but it is not a being."

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: To All Gemini-to-HTTP Proxy Providers

      tl;dr Thanks for the reminder, Michael. I added the support to my proxy application.

      When I first found the smolweb (specifically Gemini as I had been on Gopher back in the 90's) I decided that I wanted to go minimalist for my sites. It was always about content, conveying the details of solutions and talking about topics. I never have been big into the flashier side of the web, which is funny coming from someone who has been making a living off that side of technology for over a decade now. I created this capsule and decided that if I was going to have a presence on the HTTP side of things it was going to be a proxy of my content rather than a separate site.

      I went first with Kineto as it was the first solution I could find that didn't require a version of a language my old Debian VPS didn't support. It worked for a while but eventually I found out that I was one of those responsible for opening up the greater smolweb to the crawlers over on HTTP. I eventually killed off that part of the proxy, only allowing my host to be accessed and that seemed to clean things up. The traffic for those other host pages, however, didn't go away. Even though I wouldn't forward the traffic the bots have not given up on spamming me for requests that now 403.