💾 Archived View for samsai.eu › gemlog › 2023-07-13-heartbeat-signal-2.gemini captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:10:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-07-22)
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- 2023-07-13
Hey, hello, this thing still on?
It's a damn good thing I made a Makefile for this and all my scripts are still working.
So, it's been a little while, almost a year apparently. I kept the server online for sometime after I effectively stopped updating my capsule until I did a switcharoo from Hetzner back to DigitalOcean.
About that, Hetzner had a really weird issue where the server's network would effectively freeze for a split-second every 30 minutes or so. I filed an issue with their technical support but they couldn't fix it. Even verified the issue with some of my friends' Hetzner VPS's but even then they didn't really want to investigate. Extremely annoying when you are trying to do livestreams on the damn things! I would highly recommend not buying into their Owncast offerings if you can avoid it.
Anyway, now I am back on DigitalOcean and paying a pretty penny for a VPS that hopefully is a bit more stable. At first I didn't even bother putting the capsule back up, but a week at a summer cottage with sub 1 Mbps network connection did make me think back to Gemini and I did some browsing after a long break. Someone even got in touch with me on Mastodon about the capsule, so I figured what the hell, let's put the damn thing back up and see if I can do something with it.
Now, admittedly, when two posts in a row are about how you are still alive on a platform usually that means you are about to vanish into the ether, so we'll see if I bounce off again somehow.
I guess the big problem has always been that I am somewhat of a lazy writer and even though I sometimes have ideas about what to write, they don't necessarily materialize into actual things due to time constraints and whatnot. It's a damn good thing I am on summer leave for a bit, so I have a bit of time for just writing things down.
The other thing of course is the fact that I try to balance things between the blog and the capsule. I guess I could try to figure out some kind of a workflow to cross-post this stuff, but that feels kinda lazy. Also, the mediums are ever so slightly different, so maybe it wouldn't work all that well. I guess the main difference is that the blog side of things is more planned out and this stuff is more stream of consciousness? Oh well, I'll spend some brain power on that later.
How about a little life update?
So, in the past year or so a few things have happened. Mostly work related, but I guess I am boring enough to talk about work. I got transferred from the previous team into a new team because a prototype we had been working on in R&D turned out to be successful enough that they built a business unit around it. So, now I am a sort of SDK designer, product owner, documentation overseer and probably a dozen or so other things in some capacity. But mainly an SDK designer, trying to figure out good ways to package up API functionality into code-level constructs for external consumption. It's pretty cool and I can try to engineer for beauty of code at least to some extent. Hopefully by the time we're supposed to ship, what I'm making matches the expectations of other devs!
Beyond that, moved out of my parent's home into an apartment. Just a rental, not yet feeling rich enough to actually properly own my place. It's a nice place though, right next to a train station so I can speed off to work just 3 stops away. Also got a nice balcony, so I can watch all of the green trees around and enjoy some reading time. Even have a little balcony garden of a couple of planters, although my violets and lavenders pretty much died during my cottage trip, shame.
It's a bit hot in the afternoon and evening with the sun setting on that side of the building but overall it's not too bad. Honestly I prefer a western facing and scorching sun in the evening rather than in the morning. Plus, I have blinds, so it doesn't get too bad. The days are starting to get shorter anyway.
Speaking of reading, been doing a decent amount of that lately. Picked up the first six books in the Dune series and I have gone through over half of them now. Currently working on finishing Heretics of Dune. I've quite liked the books, it's really interesting to reflect on the effect they've had on all the other scifi media that I've consumed. And even then the universe of Dune manages to be so different from other scifi. Dune plays around with many interesting ideas around governments, religion, the nature of power and freedom. And probably best of all, the books are generally difficult to predict, the plots are quite complex and the information is given as a drip-feed, so it manages to be surprising quite often.
But yeah, there's a little life update for you. I've still got the rest of this week free until I need to return to the office. I'll try to figure out what role this capsule will fit in my life, but hopefully this won't just become a series of little heartbeat signal posts spaced a year apart.
It seems like there is still quite a lot going on in the Geminispace. I've only managed to do a fairly cursory browse, but it was nice to still see some familiar names on CAPCOM and Spacewalk. Apparently also some new developments landed a little while after I took my hiatus and the Titan protocol extension is apparently a thing? I don't think Elpher supports it and sending files and long-form text over Gemini doesn't seem particularly necessary to me, but I can see the value in enabling somewhat lower barrier of entry to having some Gemini presence via a bulletin board. Skyjake apparently a thing called Bubble for that.
So yeah, plenty more to explore and hopefully more to post too. Until next time!