Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Surrealism is where you find it

    For reasons, we had a package that needed to be sent via UPS (United Parcel Service) [1]. All I had to do was drop it off at the local UPS (United Parcel Service) store around the corner from Chez Boca.

    I arrive. Adorning the windows of the establishment in the strip mall were Federal Express [2] banners; nothing at all about the store said “UPS” to me. I double checked Google Maps and it said this was a UPS location. I entered the store.

    It was small. The counter was cluttered with tons of paper, an obvious scale and a computer terminal. Buried in the clutter was a desk bell. I tapped the top, it rang out with its distinctive bell sound.

  • storytime: the neediest, plead-iest ex i ever dumped

    Some people, when dumped, take the hint. They delete your number from their phone, cry into a pint of ice cream, and go on with their lives.

    Some, however, do not. They keep sending you unsolicited mail: "Come on, babe, we had a good thing going, you know you want me back." You can block their number and change your address, but somehow, they still manage to find you.

    I got just such a piece of mail from an ex today. I've had whiny exes before, but this one is by far the worst.

    Today's was a postcard: "Let's make it official! Come back and you can have a free iPhone 16! And 40 percent off major streaming services (with ads!) All on the nation's largest* 5G network!"

    Yep: My neediest, plead-iest, won't-take-the-hint-iest ex ever is Verizon.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: EHLOSWU Wordo: MASTS

  • start of pious august 🦋

    if these institutions knew that it takes me literally all day and requires all my life blood to write two job applications, they would give me a job i swear...

  • mad girl supper

• Science

  • Farewell, plastics

    Hopefully it’s gonna be easier since we’ve used plastic for less than a hundred years. Fossil fuels have been used for more than two hundred years (not counting peat which is also bad and has been used for four thousand years).

    Why are all these enviornmental problems popping up all at once, you might ask? It’s because we started using a capitalist market system where environmental effects are unaccounted for in transactions. Anyone who loves capitalism should push for regulation. Or we’ll have to replace the entire thing with some odonian Bookchin thing.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Resilvering a disk after faults with ZFS

    I have a machine with a 3 disk ZFS raidz pool and recently a disk in the pool had faults.

  • Keep calm and carry on

    I haven't been writing nearly as much as I would like due to my own, well, not exactly fear, I'm not sure what the best word for this is, but because of LLM (Large Language Model)s being shoved down the collective throats of everybody. It's as if the rest of the world has decided to double down on crazy pills and if you aren't also taking crazy pills, you yourself are crazy and should be shunned from society.

    Or something to that effect.

    It just seemed so pointless to keep writing about my ANS Forth implementation [1] when Forth itself is a rather niche language that has less “training material” than Python, Go or Rust, running for a criminally underrated 8-bit CPU (Central Processing Unit) that probably has less “training data” than Forth, for what? A world that has decided that expertice is an outdated concept that should be handed off to a glorified random number generator? That “time to market” has to be minimized to such a degree that programmers should use every short cut they can, which includes LLM use, is now The Right Thing™ to do? [Never mind that being “first to market” hasn't stopped companies like Microsoft, which to my recollection, has never been first to market with anything other than a commercial version of BASIC (Beginners' All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) back in 1975, or Apple, which wasn't the first to market a home computer (with or without a GUI), or Google, which wasn't even in the first two dozen of web search engines, or [DELETED-Facebook-DELETED] Meta, which wasn't the first social website, from becoming some of the largest companies in the world. “Time to market” my XXX!]

  • Fake Modules

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The return of the blog

      Hi, it has been a while hasn't it?

      For the uninitiated: I used to run a regular html/css blog on my personal home server. This `server' was in fact just a raspberry pi stuffed in a shoebox which lived underneath my parents' ISP-provided modem/router. I always knew that this system would fail some day, and living more than one thousand kilometers away, I would have no way of fixing things. This happened way back in May of 2023. I fixed the issue on a visit this summer, only for the SD-card to break itself again not a month later. All this time, I have add the itch to write, but there were two problems: First, my server was fried, and second, my static site generator was on that sever.

      Yes you heard that right, I was a total [REDACTED] and kept the only version of my software on a device prone to breaking. I suffered and I learned. My old static site generator was an incredibly efficient Makefile, consisting of less than 50 lines of code. Despite its brevity, it handled: indexing, rss, styling, special pages, and more. Re-writing this system has been the main holdup for me in terms of writing.

    • 2025-08-01

      I'm thinking of building a Neocities site to try something new. I've got some ideas – it will mostly be a blog, a few pages to log books, films etc. It will be a fun challenge anyway.