Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • More free advertising for a sock company

    So, the warranty form initially didn't work on their website, giving an error from hulkapps.com, presumably their form provider. A-ha, the first indication of claim-discouraging dark patterns to come, right? I sent a message via email letting them know it hadn't worked. They responded with an apology and said they were happy to take my claim via email. Hmm, not so dark.

    It took eleven days to approve. Eleven long days sat huddled in a corner, icy winds blowing through the holes in my socks. The approval email came back with an apology for taking so long. As compensation, they wouldn't be asking me to send a photo of the socks "cut up to retire them". Sweet, now I can sell their carcasses to twin dwarf cyclopes for use in bank robberies.

  • a worldly education

    there is a lot of night life at the pub. plenty of people sneak in past sunset and spend entire nights here, socializing and sipping away at their preferred poisons. I miss out on that, mostly, as my pub moments are in the mornings. luckily ~bartender and the bar-minions not only mix drinks but make a mean macchiato, too. it's just strong, black coffee for me today. jolts me awake and gets me ready for a day of thinking.

    lilDude was complaining about geography class. he doesn't like it. "there's so much to remember!" you know, coordinates, countries, capitals, and whatnot. which nation borders which others, and what stretch of water gets called what—and according to who. meanwhile, here I am batting .990 at Where In The World because there aren't enough tiny island nations left to properly confuse me.

• Science

  • Automobile Differential Tire Movement

    This post uses AsciiMath with the arbitrary delimiter U+23B5 BOTTOM SQUARE BRACKET surrounding all AsciiMath blocks.

    My brother and I were discussing how the differential system works in automobiles, and how during turns, the outer tire moves faster than the inner tire. He challenged me to come up with some kind of slide rule trick to easily figure out this difference of speed. So I explored this matter for a little while.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Samsung Washer Woes

    Hey, so I have one of those crappy Samsung Washers (and the dryer too) with the annoying ringtones, mushy buttons, mold-prone door moulding, noisy spin cycle, the easy-to-lose liquid tray, corrosion promoting relay valves and finally, snowflake of a pump.

  • Automated watch of vulnerabilities affecting my infrastructure

    Keeping an eye on published vulnerabilities is part of my work, but there are now too many CVE published every day to read them all, and the delay between the publication of a vulnerability and its first exploitation also became very short. In my opinion, this work cannot reasonably be done by hand anymore.

    My infrastructure is already updated automatically for nearly all its components, so most of the time a fix arrives without me doing anything. But sometimes, I need to react faster than the update, for example to set up a workaround while waiting for a patched version. For this, I need to know quickly when a vulnerability affecting me is published.

    In this blog post, I share the small setup I made to receive alerts about vulnerabilities that affect my infra, with issues tracking and maybe a fix created as a PR automatically when possible. There is nothing exceptional here, but it may give ideas to some readers.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • AI/SALAMI

      lately I shared some musings about the reaction of geminauts to the encroachment of AI bots in geminispace.

      as the post describes, I've had to use more generative AI/SALAMI just in order to meet increased demands for productivity at work. my main takeaway so far has been that, as it has been for the past few years, it seems to be good at generating bullshit, and that's great as long as that's what's needed. it also seems to be OK with relatively simple tasks.