Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The Moon Pool

    I don't remember why I downloaded The Moon Pool when I first discovered Standard Ebooks and set about grabbing a bunch of books to read later (as one does). I finally got around to reading it.

  • commitment

    I want to make a commitment to myself.

    It's only for a short time. Six month, starting at the beginning of this month. I want to take a commitment toward my health, wealth and living arrangement.

• Poetry

  • fingers burned

    I try to pick your brain
    just a little
    to find reassurance 
    just a little
    about things better left alone
    but I go poking
    and hurt myself
    fingers burned
    

• Science

  • The Bible & Science

    I still hear it said that you can’t believe in God and accept the teachings of science. They are 2 incompatible “worlds” - you must live in one or the other. It will be no surprise that I don’t accept this for a moment (I do, after all, have a degree in Physics). Let me explain briefly why.

    Usually, people begin by pointing out that we “know” now that life has evolved over millions of years. Science has proved it. The Bible says that the universe was made in 6 days. One of them must be wrong, and since there is all sorts of evidence for the evolutionary point of view, it must be the Bible. If the Bible is wrong about this, who is to say it isn’t wrong about everything else?

  • Knowing the Conversation: Research Databases and Search Engines Worth Your Time

    Before you write into a scholarly conversation, you have to know what the conversation currently says. I will argue that search is a skill with distinct instruments rather than one big box you type into, and I will show it by sorting the tools into three jobs: broad discovery, citation mapping, and the subscription databases you are already paying for through tuition.

  • The Pastor With the Survey: Insider Research, Data Sovereignty, and Authorization as Protocol

    Most practitioner-scholars never study strangers. They study their own congregation, their own school, the organization they founded or lead, and sometimes communities for whom "research" carries a documented history of extraction. Two ethical traditions speak to that situation and the methods literature keeps them apart. I will argue that they belong in the same room, and I will show it by running one ordinary study through both audits.

  • The "I" of Theseus

    I enjoyed this post and of course agree with their “conclusion” that the Ship of Theseus thought experiment is about the names we give “things”, which are really patterns with discernible continuity through time.

• Technology and Free Software

  • My New Operating System of choice: NixOS

    NixOS is a Linux distribution based on the Nix package manager and a declarative system configuration.

    Instead of manually configuring the system, you describe the desired state of the operating system in Nix configuration files. NixOS then creates the system from this configuration, making it reproducible, version-controlled, and easily rollable back.

  • HEIC decoding for Oddμ is problematic

    About half a year ago I wrote about software patents (2026-03-18 I haven't thought about software patents in a long time). I was unhappy. And I think I was right. Just now I was looking through my dependencies again and noticed that something has changed.

  • Getting off Codeberg

    Codeberg voted to restrict LLM-heavy projects on the forge. I was a supporting member. I had been somehow proud of that — supporting Codeberg, being on their platform, and what they stood for. Part of it was the mission. Part of it, if I am honest, was also that I like(d) being a bit different than the masses, not just parking everything on GitHub with everyone else. Is that still valuable? I think so, yes.

    I gave Codeberg around a month after the terms change, to see whether the community would backfire enough to change it back again. Nothing happened. So I decided to move off now.

  • Christina's Five Questions October 2026

    1. How best for a North American to plan deGoogling? Beyond easy fixes like installing F-Droid, using proxies for video watching, how much planning should a beginner do to migrate from a Gmail account, install a custom ROM, choose new alternative FOSS apps?

    I think anna answered this question better than I ever could. In general, I'd expect a lot of work, rough edges, annoying work-arounds. My advice would be similar to eating a Keto diet: don't try to replicate your current experiences with faux solves. Instead, embrace the lifestyle for what it is.

  • Habits Before Apps: Strategies for Research and Writing That Finish a Project

    Tools only help if you have habits to run them through. I will argue that the habits matter more than the software by walking through five of them: how to handle sources as you read, how to size the work, how to keep your drafts safe, and how to protect the hours in which any of it happens.

  • Prabu's Knowledge Garden

    Welcome to the knowledge garden. The organization of content in this site follows standard [Org Roam] guidelines. Pages in Notes section are meant for long term reference and covers both technical and non-technical. Journal pages are meant for quick notes/links.

    [myzettel] page provides detailed technical information on how this site is built.

  • Expansion

    There is, and space-expansion, and goodness-expansion. The things you *don't like*, you throw it to space (you do a space-expansion on it). The things you *care* about, you throw it to good (you do a goodness-expansion on it).

    There is also the things you like to keep, the things you like to stay, which is different than an expansion.

    So, there has to be a good separation between *goodness* and *keeping it*. Goodness is the things to propagand about, to spread forward. Like for me, is the GNU operating system and Free Software.

  • Guix Book

    Someone posted a link to a Guix book project on Github on the System Crafter’s Guix discourse. The explanations are very well done and I’ve been learning more about features I didn’t know. There are some weird AI generated images that it makes use of, but the text itself is great.

    The project for the book can be found here: Guix Book and there’s no need to build the text as someone committed the generated artifacts along with the source in (at least) pdf and epub formtas.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • First Post

      If I have set up everything correctly, this post will be visible in my Gemini capsule, but not my web site. It was created using Micropub (via IndieKit) but instead of using a traditional indieweb type like ‘article’ or ‘note’, it is a ‘gempost’.

      I found it necessary to make Gemini-only posts possible because I want to send replies to others via my gemlog, without adding them to my web feeds. It needed to be a new type because gemlog convention requires even short notes have a title.

    • The Memory Police

      The Memory Police is a novel by Yoko Ogawa from 1994. The plot is very original and hard to categorize.

      According to Wikipedia it is a science fiction dystopian novel, but I am not sure this is a right categorization.

      I doubt about the `science fiction' part.

      The story is about life on an island, where things are erased from the memory of the population, and also physically disappear or get destroyed.

    • Gopher Apps on Android

      As I've been ahem digging into Gopherspace this past month, I of course wanted to see how I could get there from my phone. I already had Lagrange for the Gemini protocol, and Lagrange handles Gopher in a Gemini client better than Netscape ever did in a web browser. But there had to be some dedicated Gopher clients for Android, right?

    • DiggieDog

      Another basic gopher client, similar to DeBurrow, but with different quirks. Bookmarks and history are supported, you can set your home page, it's visually clean-looking with icons for folders, text docs, web links, etc. (but no dark mode), and supports downloading files. DiggieDog accepts gopher links from other apps, and sends non-gopher links out to the system, so you can jump between your web browser, gopher and Gemini clients seamlessly.

    • Gophercle

      An extremely minimalist Gopher client for Android. I kind of like the text-based toolbar, though I had to experiment to figure out what each button does. ^S does search, settings, adding a page to bookmarks, etc. |^| shows your bookmarks @ lets you enter a new URL ^R reloads <- goes back a page in your history. (As with DeBurrow, the system back button closes the app.)

    • Pocket Gopher (Android)

      Pocket Gopher (not to be confused with the JavaME app of the same name) is even simpler than DeBurrow or DiggieDog, but it's more usable than either because it follows UI conventions more closely. You can type in a full URL or fix a typo. You can download files. It has bookmarks, history and dark mode. (Actually it only has dark mode.) The main thing missing is that it won't pick up Gopher links from other apps.