I didn't yet mention why this is called *twinlog*. Of course 'gemini' is Latin for twins so that's the base for a pun, but I'm also the father of 5-year old twins. I'll probably be mentioning them time to time here but I'm keeping them out of my blog. I don't feel like using kids as blog material is ethical, so I'm slightly oversensitive about it. That's one reason I love a less public place like this.
So a friend needed to get rid of a microwave oven that was much better than ours and I bought it. When you have 5 year olds, a backyard and a microwave you're throwing away, what do you do?
We took the microwave and I explained a bit about fire hazards, water and electricity etc. And explained the plan in case the oven is suddenly on fire. Then we tested different combinations of aluminum foil and both got some good arcs and saw what kinds of combinations are safe. That was the awesome part.
Then we had a bunch of failed experiments (which is educational in itself!). I tried creating plasma with different configurations of orange because I had no grapes, but that didn't work. Then we tried an egg and got a disappointing crack after a minute or so. I guess the magnetron had seen better days. Finally I tried plasma with a candle but no cigar.
Later I went cycling, this time to see this gemini space and my website. (They're hosted on Hetzner in Tuusula, Finland. The facilities looked secure enough for my static content and I didn't try to go over the barbed wire fence.)
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I've been working on some low-hanging fruit in Zola (a static site generator). I'm trying to both learn Rust and to familiarize myself with the codebase enough to try generating this gemini space with it. I'm realizing that generating HTML from Markdown with good usability actually takes quite a lot of assumptions. We'll see if generating non-HTML content is a good idea at all.