author: lykso
The Internet feels a lot faster now that my local DNS server is back up and running again. 馃槢
Really impressed at how well my iPod's battery has held up. It's 19 years old, but it looks like I can still get about a day's worth of use out of it after replacing the HDD with a couple SD cards.
The news about the xz backdoor has got me feeling exhausted.
Reading issue 17 of Cat and Girl's zine and almost every one of the entries is hitting right now. This one in particular felt relevant to recent events here at Station and to my own feelings regarding them, and since I'm in a sharing kind of place right now, here it is:
https://catandgirl.com/the-truth-is-out-there/
A first for the toddler today: he went to the cutlery drawer, got out a spoon (with some help), went to his little table, and asked for yogurt, which he then ate without any additional prompting or help.
Seeing these little leaps in independence is really satisfying. 鈽猴笍
Finally got a little time today to apply the next layer of laquer and pigment to my kintsugi repair project. It's not a clean job I've done of it, but it's coming along better than I'd hoped so far.
Cleaned up the lines on my kintsugi pieces. Looking better than I'd hoped, for the most part. The cracked plate I used for practice is paying for my poor skill with the rotary tool at this point, but it's a mass-produced, basic piece; the two pieces I made with my own hands are at least looking alright, aside from urushi stains on their unglazed feet and bottoms. (Really should have used masking tape, as I'd been advised to do.)
Just read this post on cohost and thought it important enough to share here:
https://cohost.org/mtrc/post/3396947-how-to-be-smart
Today I'm trying search.marginalia.nu as my primary search engine. My first search, "woodworking redwoods," to see what sorts of woodworking projects a fallen coastal redwood might be good for (if any), turned up this rather engaging article on the Arts and Crafts movement.
https://reallifemag.com/starter-table-saw/
That little bit of dopamine from hearing the toilet shut off properly after replacing both a leaky flapper and a faulty refill valve.
Got myself an OP-1 a few months ago. Made this five track EP entirely with it.
https://mumbleandsigh.bandcamp.com/album/five-tracks-make-an-ep
@mimas mentioned wanting to see more degrowth-related content here. As it happens, I'm about a third of the way through reading "The Future is Degrowth." Has anyone else read this book? If so, what were your impressions?
Weight and diet talk ahead, so stop reading now if you don't wanna hear it.
Started making some changes to my life due to my weight gain starting to push into unhealthy territory, combined with a sudden onset of pretty bad acid reflux. No more alcohol, no more big snacks after dinner. Weight's been dropping week after week back toward my "normal," and the acid reflux is gone. Been pleased/relieved the solution was so simple, but my wife's been sensitive to this sort of talk since her pregnancy-related weight gain does not seem to have such a simple solution. So, I'm sharing here, for better or worse.
Finally got around to entering the salvageable parts of a busted hand vacuum into my inventory. Surprised to find a microcontroller in there! Not sure what role it'd play. Maybe turning the "charging" LED on and off? I'd have expected that to be a function of the charge controller, though. 馃
Made a tool that takes a list of tab-separated date-integer pairs on stdin and outputs a Github-like heatmap as a PNG on stdout.
Still needs some features, but it now produces the output I'd originally wanted.
https://codeberg.org/lykso/date-heatmap
Instead of working on my foodbot project, I'm installing Windows 98 with 86Box so I can play Creatures. Had good memories of it from my childhood, so I bought the game from GOG only to find it unusably broken. Dunno what happened to the CD I had, but I've got an ISO. Hope it works!
Reached feature parity with my Python prototype on my foodbot in Go today. Might be breaking things up into too many modules. The project structure feels a bit off to me, anyway. Here's today's bit, building on my nutrition module.
https://codeberg.org/lykso/recipes
Just released my efforts toward making something I can use from the USDA datasets.
https://codeberg.org/lykso/nutrition The project page
gemini://lyk.so/files/nutrition.db The resulting SQLite3 database
Decided to add a Markdown renderer to LML in order to write the README for a new project in it while still playing nice with Codeberg.
Wrote my own markup language for rendering to HTML and gemtext. Might still be a little rough around the edges, but it seems to work well enough so far.
http://codeberg.org/lykso/lml
Located a keycap puller for my housemate to borrow in about five seconds and was able to retrieve it in less than thirty, thanks to my inventory system. Feels good when a system works so smoothly!
Always difficult determining if you're about to over-engineer something.
Got My Time at Portia a few days ago. It has soaked up all my free time since then. It often happens that I spend the holidays playing more video games than usual, and this year seems to be no exception.
Does anyone else start new projects by writing out a readme detailing how you want the tool to work? I think I've come to depend on this technique to help me clarify what exactly I want to build.
Nothing like a warm drink after a walk in the cold.
Added my first additonal identity today! Now I can post from more places. :)
I like cooking without recipes. Tonight I decided to make a "fall-inspired" stir fry. Started with roasted butternut squash and improvised my way into a dish consisting of apples, chestnut mushrooms, kale, lentils, vegetable broth, butter, curry powder, cinnamon, "chicken-seasoned" seitan, and a bit of milk to keep things moist. I measured nothing.
Been stuck on my FoodBot project (now PyMeal) for a while. Have finally come unstuck after reading a couple detailed papers on the problem. Now the problem seems to be that I've been doing everything with shell scripts for so long that I've lost my intution about how to organize Python projects. 馃槵
Finally got access to my server back. Turns out OpenSSH 8.9 breaks the software that interfaces with my signing dongle. 馃う
Finally read William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. Glad to have read it, if only because I'd been meaning to for some time now. It certainly suffers from the "Seinfeld is unfunny" phenomenon common to most seminal works, unfortunately.
Feels good to resume my inventory project after a long hiatus. I've identified the bugs in sc-im as a friction point for myself, so I'm working to replace it in my workflow with a collection of shell scripts.
Working on paring back my possessions again and cataloguing that which I want to keep. Having a bit of scotch along with it for the first time in a long time. My hair's going gray and I'm becoming less ambitious, which is probably for the better. I have too many half-finished projects about.
Found this gemsite today:
gemini://d.moonfire.us/
The author's idea, picking a surname when starting a family, seems like a good one to me. I'd independently come to the same conclusion. Was nice seeing someone else had as well.
Got my tetanus booster shot yesterday. Wiped out today.
Finding myself trying to pay more attention to how much energy I'm using and when I'm using it. Trying to shift my more energy-intensive activities toward the daytime, when my solar panels are providing most of my electricity. It's proving an interesting exercise. I think I might start carrying a USB stick with media I might want and using that instead of my local NAS in the evenings...
Last night I watched "Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda." It's a documentary about a Japanese composer who, at the time, was battling throat cancer. It was a nice, calm, meandering film. I enjoyed it.
Been prioritizing buying fertilizer, so it took me a while, but I finally got enough coins to buy a synthesizer for my Astrobotany plant!
gemini://astrobotany.mozz.us/app/visit/a76b6a12acf0444e8a8155c9a5984c5f
There are not many ideologies today, it seems, that encourage consuming less in order to reclaim more of one's free time for oneself. Yet I think this is a necessary plank in our transition to a greener future. I feel this could be helped along by encouraging simple, maximally inclusive communal activities. Much of our consumption today seems directed toward compensating for a loss of non-consumption-oriented community.
I say this as one living in a relatively affluent Western country, granted.
Last night I referred to my own post on Station from about a month ago (linked below) to make another tempeh-and-rice concoction. Had to use honey because we were out of maple syrup. Still turned out alright. I think some ginger would've made it even better, though
gemini://station.martinrue.com/lykso/82c7fc62e52a45d48331bf006ae4c370
I had a Raspberry Pi 4 I wasn't using, so last night I flashed LibreELEC to an SD card and set it up to connect to my backup box over Wireguard. Now I don't have to spin up my gaming box to watch things! Haven't plugged it into a Kill-a-watt yet, but I suspect the Pi is using 1/4 to 1/10 of the electricity my gaming box does. Also, no fan noise.
Sorry about the weird posts earlier! I was testing out a script for using Station on my e-ink Kindle and it had *appeared* to fail entirely. Guess it only failed partially.
I've written a post summarizing some of my thoughts lately, framing retro gaming as a counter-"Jevons' paradox" activity. I'm curious about what some of you might have to say about or add to it.
gemini://lyk.so/gemlog/011-retro-gaming-against-jevons-paradox.gmi
After a period of low-energy, of the sort I'm learning to ride out by taking some time to relax and play games or read things (rather than trying to force myself into "productivity," which really never seems to work), I've spent today almost entirely productively. Wife has termed this "business mode." It's been nice.
I find my engagement with video content and text content is different. Video content "goes down" easier, but tends to not engage my thinking as deeply. Reading text *feels* more difficult, but I also feel like it forces me to consider every detail more thoroughly. I could easily spend all day consuming visual content, and I have in the past, but I find myself working to cut out that kind of content lately. I must be getting old. 馃槣
When I was a kid, Myst looked amazing. I never got a chance to play it, but I really wanted to. Now I'm on a resource-constrained laptop with ScummVM... seemed like a good time to finally give it a go. I'm stupidly excited about it. 馃槀
People with experience using screen readers: what is it like when people use Unicode superscript numbers鹿 to create footnotes in their gemtext documents? Is it a better experience if they use parenthetical statements instead? What about using these footnotes to simulate inline links?
鹿 Like this.
Any recommendations for Gemini-based git hosting?
Continuing the "experiments with tempeh" phase I'm going through: just fried up a whole bunch of tempeh strips, and then my wife and I sat there and ate 'em with ketchup. This was not the plan when I *started* frying the tempeh, but I'm not sad about how it turned out. :D
Looks like Astrobotany just reached 1000 gardeners!
gemini://astrobotany.mozz.us/
Small annoyance in Lagrange: Shift-Ctrl-v clears the text box that pops up for "input" server responses. This is the same key combination that you use to paste in most terminal emulators. I keeping finding myself writing posts in Lagrange and trying to paste in a URL or emoji at the end, only to see all my text disappear. 馃槢
Hanging out in mozz's chat room for a bit. 馃憤馃憤
gemini://chat.mozz.us/
Spellbinding is driving Gemini adoption in my social circle. My wife and I have been playing it, and now her sister and one of her friends have installed Lagrange in order to join us in playing it. 馃榿
gemini://spellbinding.tilde.cafe/
Finally joined Astrobotany: gemini://astrobotany.mozz.us/public/a76b6a12acf0444e8a8155c9a5984c5f
Has twtxt completely supplanted tinylogs on Gemini? Feels like my tinylog feed is really quiet these days.
Using the electricity mix in my region, the servers I run put out around 5 tonnes of CO虏 a year. My laptop puts out just shy of 100lbs, or 45kg (assuming 12 hours of use per day). Seeing what tricks I can employ to begin keeping my servers powered off more. Already I've started keeping my media box turned off at night and much of the day by downloading music and video I want to consume in the near future to the devices I'll be consuming them on, but my VM server runs some things that should be kept on 24 hours a day. Next step is, I suppose, seeing if I can put some of those VMs onto SBCs instead. (I have a few from previous projects just gathering dust at the moment.)
Just improvised a lunch for me and my housemates. Writing it here to share and remember:
- 1/2 a head of garlic
- 1 onion
- A generous amount of sesame oil
- 340g (12oz) tempeh
- 60mL (1/4 cup) soy sauce
- 60mL (1/4 cup) pure maple syrup
- 3 packets of red pepper flakes
- 15mL (3 tsp.) garam masala
- Some shiitake mushroom
Fry onion, garlic, tempeh together in oil, add mushroom and fry until browned, add rest of ingredients, cook until sauce is absorbed/reduced. Serve w/ rice or eat as-is.
I've written a post about why I've chosen to be pseudonymous.
gemini://lyk.so/gemlog/009-why-a-pseudonym.gmi
Perfect score on Spellbinding. 馃檶
Listening to KONPEITO #8. Anyone know of any other Gemini-native music/mixtapes?
gemini://konpeito.media/
Combing through my data, trying to create a reasonable accounting of and structure for it all. Seems almost like a never-ending project.
Just upgraded Lagrange from 1.9.5 to 1.10.1. Really enjoying that it now shows me the identity that will be used to request a URL in the "URL" bar that pops up at the bottom of the window when hovering over a link.
One of the benefits of the Reform having a clear bottom: I don't think I've ever cbeen this fastidious about keeping the inside of a computer clean before.
I keep wanting to use fzf as a general interface, but there are all these seemingly-slight issues that keep that from being viable. Was building a Spartan browser in shell script using fzf as an interface just now, but the lack of line wrapping and the lack of support for entering arbitrary text makes it a non-starter. :/
Enjoying this interactive gemsite:
gemini://gemini.thegonz.net/
I really like Gemini, but inline links have been very hard to let go of for me.
Dropped a butter knife on my laptop screen. Managed to make a small cut in the polarization film, so now I've got a white line in the middle of my screen. I wonder if it's possible to order the film only, or if I'm going to have to order a whole new screen? 馃
Just upgraded to Lagrange 1.9.2 from 1.7.0. Enjoying the new fontpack feature!
Now using fzf to interactively search my inventory files. Updated my "bins" system page and wrote a quick gemlog entry about it. Pretty simple stuff, but maybe you'll find it interesting.
gemini://lyk.so/gemlog/008-searching-the-bins.gmi
Just realized that I hadn't shared my own scripts for generating a gemlog index and an atom feed yet. I'll write something up about them on my Gemini "systems" page later, but for now here they are:
gemini://lyk.so/gemlog/index.gmi.sh
gemini://lyk.so/feed.atom.sh
Made a cheddar cheese sauce and added a bunch of lemon juice to it just now. Tasty AF.
My capsule's finally back in action. Moved from Vultur to openbsd.amsterdam and am running vger.
The old SSL cert did not come along for the ride. The new cert's fingerprint is:
b599fdfccd8605785ad6f8ae5147dc9d32b78a4bf9f1a42e6dc9f78bd0e7c62b
My Gemini capsule, running gmid on an OpenBSD VM hosted by Vultur, somehow got borked, and restoring from a previous snapshot doesn't change a thing, which makes me suspect the problem is Vultur's. The VM won't even boot. I get dumped into some sort of debug console instead. Meanwhile they've dropped support for OpenBSD so I can't spin up a fresh OpenBSD VM unless I bring my own ISO and hope nothing goes wrong again.
I've known about this for over a week now, but haven't settled on a VM provider for my capsule's next home yet. Any suggestions?
I enjoyed this post titled "Gemini and Desire:"
gemini://alex.flounder.online/gemlog/2021-10-31-gemini-desire.gmi
My thoughts regarding Gemini and sustainable/old tech are similar, though I have not fully formulated/verbalized them yet. Learning to control one's desires, realizing that much of them are illusory and bound to be more a source of harm than help, seems like an important skill to develop.
I think the world would be a slightly better place if more people were quicker to think "this software has gotten too bloated" and slower to think "this computer has gotten too old."
Finally sat down and threw together a script for easily looking up and inserting emoji anywhere I like in a way that conforms to my preferences.
gemini://lyk.so/systems/emoji-input/
馃檶
Just figured out why msmtp wasn't working under Debian. Its AppArmor profile is too restrictive for how I'm using it. Leaving a note here for my future self and anyone else with the same problem. Credit to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62838673/awk-permission-denied-when-run-through-msmtp
The solution:
sudo ln -s /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.msmtp /etc/apparmor.d/disable/
sudo apparmor_parser -R /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.msmtp
Created a page describing my e-mail system. I use mblaze, msmtp, and mbsync.
gemini://lyk.so/systems/e-mail/
I bookmarked this post some time ago and found myself reading it again today. 'To survive a collapse, never mind build the utopia, systems need to be running now. That means scaled sourcing of materials, creation, and deployment.' This resonates with me. I also think there is value in documenting what can be reclaimed from where, along with what those components may be used for. Making useful what would otherwise be waste is, in my opinion, one of the most solarpunk endeavors possible.
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/shufei/phlog/20200712-Comp-Solarpunk.gmi
Does anyone else ever have mixed feelings about 3D printing? Sometimes I wonder if the whole thing isn't just a ploy to sell more plastic.
What do you geminauts think of saltpack? I've been meaning to try it for some time, but it doesn't seem to have any traction anywhere.
https://saltpack.org/
Just finished the 2021-04-05 episode of Trendy Talk and then immediately found this post, which I thought dovetailed nicely with some of Chris Were's arguments: gemini://ew.srht.site/en/2021/20210716-re-why-distributed-systems-dont-work.gmi
Structural change does need to happen to address a lot of the problems facing us, but in the meantime there's still value in doing whatever little bit one can immediately do as well.
This whole "intuitive, impulsive" cooking thing is working really well so far. Procrastinated on a task today by making a fresh pasta dinner for the house with three different pestos and some oven roasted brussel sprouts while listening to an episode of Trendy Talk. Not bad as far as procrastination goes. Certainly beats endlessly scrolling social media!
When I was younger, I thought that being an early adopter for every shiny new tech toy would empower me and give me an edge. I tried to make up for a lack of experience with being among the first to every new trend. Now those shiny new toys just look like shackles to me, and the "progress" of consumer-oriented tech just looks like a hamster wheel. It's a strange feeling, being in tech while also hating so much about it.
Air fryer chicken katsu with pickled plum onigiri tonight. Very simple and easy to make. First time using the air fryer. Really happy with how crunchy the breading turned out. Housemates also liked the tonkatsu sauce I made.
Just successfully repaired a broken scissor switch on my Thinkpad using a male pin header, a hobby knife, and some epoxy. One of the pegs on the scissor switch had broken off, and the metal from a male pin header was exactly the right size and shape to replace the whole section. In the past I would have replaced the whole keyboard. Feels like I've just leveled up! :D
I have a bad habit of killing my own momentum when what I perceive to be the "correct" path conflicts with what I *want* to do. I perceive learning the "mother sauces" to be "correct," as I've already begun that task and knowing those seems to be considered "foundational," but what I *want* to do now is play with lentils and curries. So now I find myself doing neither. :p
Just threw together a cheddar cheese sauce to put on some dried pasta I'd made. Would not have known how to do this a month ago. success-baby.jpeg
New UI experiment:
gemini://gamma.lyk.so/ Long-form text entry via movable chunks.
gemini://gamma.lyk.so/view/SHA256:df405d296c935b544987fc5fbbabc30f6bc855c8953b70974df3249f8126ad63 Something I wrote using it.
I don't suppose there's a way to render a line starting with ``` in preformatted mode, is there?
I've begun with the UI experiments. First point of inquiry: how best to present forms with simple, single-line inputs? Two approaches immediately came to mind:
gemini://alpha.lyk.so/
gemini://beta.lyk.so/
I'm interested in hearing opinions about the two approaches.
Next up will be experiments in long-form composition from within Gemini.
Shoved my larger plastic bins into a space I made for them in my closet. Updated my "bins" system page accordingly. Not everything is catalogued and binned yet, but I'm feeling the sort of strong resistance to the task that indicates burnout. Soon I will become entirely incapable of making myself catalogue and bin anything (you can't even pay me to do something I've burned out on; I quite literally *cannot* make myself do it), so I'm going to try to tie up the loose ends so I can call it "done" before I totally lock up.
gmid keeps locking up for some reason. Once a day it seems to stop responding until I restart it. vger was quite reliable. Anyone know any tricks for getting client certificates via CGI in vger?
Does anyone know how to view 'rlog://' links like the one on this page? I've never seen this protocol before. gemini://xj-ix.luxe/wiki/nomad/
I quite like Gemini, but it's very difficult to communicate to anyone in my life why I like it. It's like here's a certain level of fed-up you've got to reach, and you've also got to be fairly technical, for this sort of thing to appeal. But wow, I really like Gemini. I'd be quite happy if I never had to use the web again, frankly.
Switched from vger to gmid today in order to start playing with client authentication. Here's a little toy I just wrote: gemini://lyk.so/cgi/bin/whoami
Source code is here: gemini://lyk.so/cgi/src/whoami.c
@bacardi55 I can't seem to select text in gtl. Makes it a bit difficult to follow links in tinylogs.
I bought a couple old, second-hand, e-ink Kindles years ago. Specifically ones with firmware predating the agreement with Audible that resulted in Amazon removing the text-to-speech function. I got a lot of use out of that function back when I had to drive a lot for work. Now I'm finding them useful again for low-distraction reading. I've begun closing tabs by turning them into ebooks. Somehow reading on this sort of purpose-specific device *feels* faster. There are fewer background processes in my brain considering what else I should be doing than there are when I'm at a computer. And I can make the device read to me from where I left off when I need to do more physical work.
Just modified my tinylog-post script to mirror my posts to station.martinerue.com. Does not mirror tinylog replies, to avoid cluttering up Station. This will save me from having to decide which things to post to my tinylog and which things to post to Station. Let me know if this becomes obnoxious, please!
gemini://lyk.so/systems/gemini/scripts/tinylog-post.sh
Experimenting with posting from the CLI using gemget.
Bins system working well so far. Was just reminded that I'd left something out when I returned to my computer and saw the relevant grep output still visible in my terminal. Maybe I'd derive some benefit from keeping a list somewhere of possibly-left-out items, populated by a special "inventory-grep" command. 馃
I've set up a tinylog at lyk.so/tiny.gmi
I wrote a script using ed to add to it. The syntax might look familiar to vim users:
ed $log <<EOF /## i ## $(date -u +'%F %H:%M UTC') $@ . w q EOF
The whole script, with a short description, is up here:
gemini://lyk.so/systems/gemini
Is it just me, or is GUS offline? Related: what other social networks/Twitter-likes are on Gemini?