Gritty's tinylog

Thoughts too small for a normal gemlog

author: @gritty@gemini.smallweb.space

2023-06-27 15:14 UTC

Finally tried out rsync to create and push a gemlog to my capsule. I have a quick script to help me now.

2023-06-26 01:10 UTC

recently got promoted. now I step further into management. there's no going back.

2023-06-21 02:06 UTC

Bought an electric car yesterday. I know batteries can harm the environment too but my opinion is that batteries are easier to deal with than getting CO back out of the atmosphere. I also like the car, so that helps. And to hell with paying for gasoline and oil.

2023-06-21 01:28 UTC

The thing about getting upset at someone is that they also get upset with you. I have the opposite of anger issues but sometimes I feel like I can never be angry, never be upset at anything. I just have to take deep breaths and look at it with a different view, consider their side, and see if I'm unreasonable. Sometimes I don't want to do all that, I just want to be upset because I never am.

2023-06-19 15:47 UTC

Re: I just want to play fucking Call of Duty on my day off

this had me in stitches. thanks for the lol.

2023-06-18 12:34 UTC

Happy Father's Day for all the fathers out there, and for those that celebrate it.

2023-06-11 16:22 UTC

I know that titan isn't an official spec but I think it'll help me post gemlogs and better formatted tinylogs from my phone, so I'm taking the trade off. heck I guess tinylogs aren't official either but that's ingrained now too. I'm a 98% phone user of Gemini so this will definitely help me

2023-06-09 12:33 UTC

Some folks are in a tizzy over on #station regarding @morgan's suggestion on #bubble about user verifications on Gemini. I'm on the fence about jumping in but it's interesting to see such a strong feeling here in geminispace, to the point of using expletives. On the one hand I see @skyjake's point about impersonations but on the other it is more centralization and tracking across sites. I see both sides, but it definitely is going away from the original essence of Gemini. I think our Benevolent Dictator For Life, @solderpunk could jump in and clear things up before other people start making decisions around here.

2023-06-09 02:20 UTC

The phrase "can't swing a dead cat without hitting xxx" has always struck me as odd

2023-06-08 11:23 UTC

East Coast of the U.S. is getting a preview of the future if we don't switch off fossil fuels.

2023-06-07 20:28 UTC

creating per-site certificate entries for Amfora is frustratingly manual when I'm so used to automated in-app options.

2023-06-07 17:12 UTC

split my tooth in half playing racquetball last night. No blood and not a lot of pain so I didn't qualify for emergency dental work. appointment today in a little bit. I got too close to the person I was playing in order to throw them off, but ended up taking the back swing to the mouth. spat out the tooth and promptly ended the game.

2023-06-05 16:18 UTC

with the creation of Bubble, I'm wondering about two things: 1) when Station will cease to get at least one post per day and 2) when the community will press forward without @solderpunk on Gemini spec expansions. Browser writers have a lot of sway on what new and unofficial spec enhancements make it into common use, and with all the specification talk on Bubble these days, I feel like it's inevitable. prediction: an unofficial specification group is formed.

2023-06-04 03:02 UTC

I don't understand fighting in ice hockey

2023-06-03 14:14 UTC

I wish Ted Lasso had to work with a truly difficult person that wasn't won over with Midwest charm.

2023-06-02 02:03 UTC

Finished Ted Lasso. one of the best shows I've ever seen. Glad they stuck to the original 3 season plan. Bravo.

Now for a spinoff since they need to ride that gravy train.

2023-06-01 11:29 UTC

I dislike open wifi hotspots to that block vpn.

2023-06-01 00:41 UTC

Small Things Manifesto

2023-05-30 01:34 UTC

@textmonger and @circadian are my two favorite gemlogs these days. it's like a frequent /daily gemlog review digest.

2023-05-28 22:20 UTC

Interesting read of the day

Aristocrats

2023-05-26 03:21 UTC

So I finally got around to hacking together a script that allows me to post right to my tinylog via a Gemini input. This will hopefully allow me to update this tinylog much more often from my phone.

2023-05-17 16:12 UTC

Yup, I'm still alive. Life doesn't let me sit down and log into my capsule as much as I'd like. In the meantime I still engage the geminiverse via Lagrange on mobile on a daily basis.

Random thought of the day: people in the geminiverse like to compare Gemini and Gopher to the old days of the web... but I definitely remember porn and illegal software all over the place but I've yet to see that here. I've seen people use the free gemini capsule hosting as file servers when I was poking around there, and maybe some sexy ascii art, but nothing like the mid-90s or what the web has become today. Let me just say that I'm NOT looking for these things, but merely had a thought that poked into my head as I read about people comparing gemini to the old web.

2023-04-14 12:30 UTC

I finally found all the words and took the top spot on #spellbinding yesterday. There's a lot of good players on there and I really like the competition. I certainly wouldn't play as much as I do if there weren't a leaderboard. I used to play #wordle every single day but this has taken its place for the most part.

I really need to find a way to post to this tinylog from my phone without having to use termux. I just need to find the time to convert my capsule into a dynamic one and write a CGI script that adds to the top of this file. Seems simple enough if I had the time. Too much else to do.

Oh look at that, Fitbit is now part of google and requires a google account. Oh goody.

2023-03-27 23:15 UTC

I see a lot of folks posting about emacs. I tried it and I'm just not a fan. Maybe I didn't give it a good shot but I'm still learning Vim and don't need another.

2023-03-25 18:25 UTC

I posted about this over on my station tinylog, but I found a capsule implementing the #gempub specification[1] by converting public domain ebooks to gempub [2].

[1] Gempub specification

[2] Shaggypeak's Library

2023-03-25 18:12 UTC

I occasionally think about playing current-day music to people in the past and gauging their reactions. I'd pick something that wasn't highly offensive or entrenched in current-time vernacular. For some reason "I get a good feeling" by Flo Rida reminded me of this when I was channel surfing on the radio today.

2023-03-24 23:45 UTC

Not a whole lot to report on in the past month or so, just work and the kids. It's starting to warm up so we can bring them to the parks around here, but of course getting out the door is always a process and by the time we do I sometimes wonder if it's worth getting out, but staying inside all weekend is not an option if it can be avoided.

I did, however, come across the gpub specification yesterday and it piqued my interest a bit. I found a capsule on ~bacardi55's Discogem that had a bunch of gpubs listed from the public domain, and I was a bit surprised that Lagrange just supported it natively (which I really shouldn't have been surprised at). I think I may want to list a few here myself.

2023-02-17 16:27 UTC

Finally updated my /now/ page. If you're curious check here:

About /now/ pages

2023-02-16 23:57 UTC

switched back to my Pixel 4. I had switched services and they offered a "free" pixel 6 so I jumped on it thinking I could just put a custom ROM on it. wrong. I stupidly forgot about carrier locking. how could I? so, I used my 6 for a while but didn't use google play only fdroid but it didn't feel right. the phone is bigger, riddled with tracking, and is heavier. so I got home today and swapped the SIM. my only problem is that the charging port doesn't work so well and I don't have google maps but other than that, I feel better.

2023-02-16 01:20 UTC

reading stuff on gemini can sometimes be depressing. While I agree with a lot of views here, reading post after post about the evils of the internet, big corporations, and humans in general, I long for lighter posts in nicer topics. I can't say it's all like that but I see a lot of it...my capsule included. time to start posting some sunshine.

2023-01-28 03:00 UTC

still haven't tried dvorak. I did, however, code a bit today. I'm a hobby programmer, and don't have much time for it, nor have been interested, but I was today and it felt good. working on a console version of farkle in python. nothing crazy, just entertaining. getting the hang of vim...starting to be a bit natural.

2023-01-17 01:07 UTC

I'm thinking about trying the dvorak keyboard layout. I think this will be difficult to not abandon it in favor of qwerty, which I'm pretty fast at.

2023-01-10 11:23 UTC

There have been a few games now on #spellbinding where folks have gotten all the words. I find thst impressive.

2023-01-10 01:18 UTC

I really need to work on that /now/ page. Also, I really like Amfora - it's a really clean TUI Gemini browser

2023-01-10 01:00 UTC

Sometime last week I asked @skyjake and @bacardi55 on #mastodon if either of them would consider a mobile version of a tinylog aggregator. My reasoning is that while I enjoy the TUI version that @bacardi55 made, most of my time is spent on mobile, and if there were a stitched-together timeline of tinylogs in a clean looking app, it would be much easier to read. I think tinylogs would be more accessible this way as well. To my surprise, both of them responsed fairly quickly. Skyjake said he liked the idea but that it might be feature-creep, but would think about it. Alternatively, Bacardi55 pointed out that #gtl can output into gemtext, so if I just setup a cron job to output my subscriptions every say, 6 hours, I could just use #Lagrange on Android to view them. Liking this idea, I set it up in no time. However, when I subscribed to Bacardi55's tinylog list, I found a lot of them were dead. So what I did was go through the logs one by one and then add the ones that worked and the ones that I liked. Next, I went over to a gemini search engine and started looking for some interesting tinylogs. The result is now what's on my aggregated tinylog page, linked off my main page.

This was almost enough for a reglular gemlog post...

My main page

GTL Gemini mode instructions

Note that this command writes to the terminal, so you'll have to redirect to a file, like this:

gtl --mode gemini --limit 50 > /path/to/capsule/tinylog-aggregate.gmi

this will use your default settings in ~/.config/gtl/config.toml and subs

2023-01-02 19:08 UTC

Unpopular opinion: I don't like Taylor Swift's music all that much.

2023-01-01 17:45 UTC

Parenting is: seeing your small child between the curtains while you shower.

2022-12-31 02:38 UTC

The internet makes you believe everything is burning and all life choices contribute to such. anything you do is futile.

even if true, i'm tired of living in a place that is screaming at me that everything is fucked.

2022-12-27 20:35 UTC

I finally deleted my Twitter account. After many weeks of playing email tag with the helpdesk, I was able to get in. For some reason my MFA SMS messages weren't coming through and I couldn't get in. I then used an auto-tweet deleter (free one), changed my profile pic to a gray background, unfollowed everyone, prevented follows, deleted everything in my profile, and deactivated my account. Good riddance.

2022-12-19 00:18 UTC

Had a rough weekend, but I'm starting to feel quite a bit better. I have a never-ending chest cold that won't go away, but after finally taking some decongestant medication I started feeling better.

One thing that was contributing, I think, to my mood is that I was becoming addicted to Mastodon. With the influx of Twitter users, I was really starting to engross myself into all the people, connections, and inside jokes that were starting to fly around. None of this reading or scrolling is any type of meaningful, long-term learning and I was in the endless refresh-for-more dopamine cycle. It wasn't until I read ~Shufei's most recent gemlog [1] that discussed the shortcomings of such platforms, as it relates to human interaction and real life. Shufei, of course, is MUCH more eloquent than I - I felt like was reading a psych/philosophy paper - but it was what I needed to shake of the cycle. I promptly deleted the app off my phone and resolved to just stick with what works - Gemini. I'll probably go back, but for now, I needed to take a break.

[1] Shufei - Miscellaneous - Tech - Of AI's and Men

2022-12-16 00:03 UTC

Got all the parts of my capsule and and running again after migrating to Digital Ocean droplet. Final touch was getting the atom feed generator running again; I use the one made by ~solderpunk: gemfeed. I put it into a bash script and just manually run it everytime I make a new entry. Not the most streamlined, but it works for me for how infrequently I post.

2022-09-07 14:15 UTC

The childcare place that I've been taking my kids has finally opened up to let us inside. Since COVID we've had to pick up and drop off at the door, but now we can actually see the inside. And since my children only started at this place during COVID, we, the parents, have only been inside once before.

I used to complain that it was annoying to stand at the door in the different temperatures throughout the year, but now that I have to walk in, unpack and unload both kids in their separate rooms, I now realize it wasn't that bad! "here's my little ones, have fun!" was basically what I had to do. It is, however, nice to see their rooms, their teachers, what they're doing, and see the other children... so it's a give an take I suppose.

2022-09-02 14:00 UTC

Went for a nice run in a park that's not too far from my house. I dropped the kids off at daycare and headed on over, so there was literally no one in the park. I like going there because it reminds me a bit of being back home, where it's not quite as built-up as it is around here, and you feel like you're actually in nature. OpenTracks, the FOSS activity tracker app I got off of F-Droid, says it took me 37 minutes to run about 4.8km. Definitely not my best, but it was trail running, and I AM a bit out of shape.

2022-08-31 01:09 UTC

I dropped off Gemini and Gopher for a while, but I have picked it back up in the last week or so. I debated on moving this site off my raspberry pi and just using my tilde.club account, but I almost feel guilty for having invested this much time into my own Gemini setup. I also kind of wanted to update my phlog, but I barely have the time to update my Gemini capsule here, and I'm not sure what I'd write there and not here...

Most of the time I've just been going to capsule hosting or gopher hosting sites and randomly clicking through people's sites. There's a lot of neglected content out there, but still some gems despite the age. One advantage I think Gemini has over gopher, is the ability to subscribe to capsules... it's possible in Gopher, but a bit trickier and not as intuitive.

Lagrange on my phone has been instrumental in keeping me on the smallweb, because without it, I'd rarely be surfing here. Makes me wonder how @skyjake is doing... I haven't surfed over to his sites in a while.

2022-08-09 02:25 UTC

Still hot as heck around here. If people don't believe global warming exists now, they never will. Not unless there's a catastrophic event like food shortages or flooding, but even then. I say this while I still drive around every day in a gasoline powered car because I can't afford a new car payment for an electric one...

2022-07-14 12:13 UTC

It's summertime in my part of the world, and while I do enjoy the sun and ability to do things later in the day, the longer days are exhausting because I tend to fill them up so as not to waste any time. On the other hand, I dislike winter because I can't do anything outside... so basically I like Spring and Autumn.

2022-06-04 11:52 UTC

One of my favorite types of pizza - maybe my all-time favorite - is taco pizza. The thing about it though, is that it's rather hard to find. I have this one retaurant near where I used to live, one town over, that doesn't offer it on the menu, but does a pretty good job of making it without me having to explain too much what I want. There are a few ways to make it, but my favorite is regular crust, taco meat, salsa, cheese, lettuce, and dollups of sour cream on top - all in that order. Some places will also crumble torilla shell in there for that extra crunch, but I could go either way.

In other news, I got a new PR on my Peloton bike this morning for my 30 minute ride, beating my best by 6 kJ. I don't know when I'll be beating that anytime soon since I was SPENT by the end of the ride. I don't exercise a lot, but if this is the start of a new regimine, maybe it'll be sooner than later.

2022-05-09 02:47 UTC

Just finished the show #severance. It's one the the most interestingly odd shows that I've ever watched and I couldn't stop. Binged the whole season. It's definitely akin to Black Mirror. Recommend.

2022-04-22 01:30 UTC

I hate doing laundry, I really do. And kids just seem to make so many piles of it! #screwLaundry

2022-04-19 02:45 UTC

Finally finished Ender's Game, what a great book. The audio story telling was great and I would delay doing things a few minutes to keep listening. Plot also got me thinking and feeling, which is rare these days. Looking forward to the next installment. Still also reading The Furyck Saga.

2022-04-09 02:38 UTC

Finally got an ethernet cable run to my raspberry pi that's sitting on the top floor of my home, and also running my Gemini Capsule. Not surprisingly my site loads faster. Also had a snafu whith my site not loading, but that seems to have resolved. New gemlog post on my foray into wiring up my house with ethernet and behind-the-wall cabling.

2022-03-31 00:21 UTC

I had a tree removed from my property today, and I was surprisingly and almost inexplicably emotional about it - like loss and remorse. It's just a tree, but I liked it and it was HUGE; however, it was slowly dying and dropping branches which posed a safety concern. It took a 5 person crew almost all day to take it down and the enitre time I kept saying "sorry tree..." I will be planting a new one though, so there's that.

2022-03-27 10:40 UTC

I was poking around gemlog.blue yeaterday and noticed a lot of odd looking usernames. upon further inspection it appears bots have infiltrated the signup process. A lot of the sites are single pages with file download links scattered across the web, and also SEO agencies. Makes me sad to see.

2022-03-23 12:49 UTC

I met the former owner of my home just today, and he was different than I'd expected. I don't know what I'd expected, but he seemed like a laid-back friendly older man, maybe in his 70s. I've only had this place for just over a year, and in that time I've kind of cursed him for the bad wiring job in all the rooms, but now that I met him I felt a little bad. I still have wiring to fix in this place, but it changes things when you meet someone in person, especially when they seem friendly enough.

2022-03-23 02:11 UTC

I've been poking around gopherspace a bit in LaGrange on my Android, and also Lynx and the official gopher software from the linux repositories, and I can't put my finger on it, but Gopher has a different feel to it. For one, it seems to have more content than Gemini...meaning, in Gemini there's a lot of folks talking about how Gemini works, but not a lot of personal projects or thoughts, etc. I think this has to do with the age of Gemini, so I'm guessing there will be more regular content here. Also, and it may just be me, but Gopher seems to center around a few main servers, i.e., Floodgap and SDF, etc., but I have more digging to do.

2022-03-20 01:35 UTC

Re: @deerbard 2022-03-19 23:24 CET

I've been wondering about that here on Gemini - will you even see this response if you're not following me? Probably not, unless you look yourself up on Kenndy Search's mentions page.

2022-03-18 23:49 UTC

Started watching Ted Lasso because Apple decided to make it free for a short while to lure folks in. I knew exactly nothing about the show except that it won a LOT of awards. I'm four episodes in and I can say that it's got me hooked; however, I refuse to sign up for another streaming service so I'm just going to binge as much as I can before they pull the plug. I guess I should figure out when that is...

2022-03-17 01:30 UTC

- I like that there are so many things to discover about Gemini. After having figured out how SCGI basically works on the Molly Brown server, I returned my attention to actually making content and surfing around on here. I've seen the debates about how Gemini is kind of centralizing with these aggregators, but honestly, they are only a small part of my time here on Gemini. I'll find a link on a capsule and just go down a rabbit hole of links...which is part of the great thing of Gemini. It's the original stumbleupon.

- The only negative thing about Gemini is that if I don't post to something like Antenna, it's almost like a personal journal here, with my only readers being link crawlers. Not that I have much to say, but isn't that part of writing a gemlog on the internet? So other people might read it?

2022-03-04 03:28 UTC

Shit just got real with that nuclear power plant in Ukraine.

Have we learned nothing?