● 08.11.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 11/08/2023: First Wavers and Unplugging the Ebike

Posted in News Roundup at 4:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I built up a Salsa Fargo frame into an ebike with a kit from Grin Technologies, and have been riding it for the past few years. It’s been a ton of fun. I can go further, faster, with less effort.

• And yet…I feel like it’s spoiled me. It’s not unlike a car in many ways–a heavy, ugly beast of a bike that makes up for its (and my) myriad deficiencies with sheer power. In a fit of dissatisfaction I’ll surely come to regret, I stripped the electric components from the bike and reverted it to a purely mechanical bicycle. This has taught me several things, some technical, some spiritual:

• My exams are coming up the next few weeks and I have not been the best student this semester. I think it is objectively my worst semester to date, and it makes me feel guilty. In general, I really struggle with focus and motivation the past few months. I dropped a lot of selfcare stuff, I exercise much less, I have trouble with cooking good meals for myself, I don’t manage taking my supplements and meds consistently when I never had that before. I put off restocking important stuff until last minute or drag it on for weeks after it ran out. Some stuff I’ve come to own over the past two years now feels oppressive to me and too much, but I cannot find the energy to sell or donate it. I have not made it into the forest for my usual long walks since about 5 months.

• [...]

• I see a lot of low energy, easy dopamine seeking behavior in my self – checking more websites than usual, bouncing between some feeds, rechecking a Discord server over and over again, buying a lot of fatty and sweet foods, binging on them occasionally. Getting myself through the day with treats, like sweet beverages and fatty foods. Even if they upset my stomach, make me break out in rashes and all that. I’m more susceptible to online window shopping or ordering stuff on a whim, which is very unlike me.

• Hey, do you feel out of control recently? Do you feel like life is passing you by and you are stuck? Do you feel like society is moving so fast and you can’t keep up? Are you scared about the future?

• Do you find yourself overwhelmed and confused about all the changes you are expected to take care of and track internally? Do you feel like things were easier when you were younger, and therefore more correct, and you would like to return to that? Are you surrounded by very critical and perfectionist people right now?

• Are you lashing out preemptively to prevent people lashing out at you? Are you scared of losing people to a perceived threat? Do you feel like other people are frequently permitted to do more things than you, and forgiven much more easier than you? Does it seem like if you were to do the same, there would be much more outcry and drama about it than when others do it? Do you have a history of bending over backwards for others and being a doormat, and now this new thing people or society asks of you is the last straw for you?

• Unfortunately as my partner has been continuing to struggle through with medical care lately I’ve been finding myself just incredibly angry and hurt.

• Their PCP keeps them in a bad cycle of

• prescribe antibiotics, declare that the infection *must* be clear when the course is over despite the fact that my partner is always saying “it doesn’t feel like it’s gone just that it’s better”, then the infection comes roaring back, then they have to beg for more antibiotics as they’re dealing with swelling and puss in their face, back to step 1

• It’s so fucking infuriating because all we need is just a steady course of antibiotics until the root canal is done and the infection is cleared out of the root of their tooth

• To celebrate my birthday, Evy took first daughter to her meemaw’s house and took me, roommate, and 3 friends caving in Rockcastle County.

• In the heat it always feels like crossing an invisible threshold to another world when you encounter the temperature change, the 12C air emanating from the cave you haven’t yet seen.

• It was a crawl on creek-tumbled broken limestone rocks, some soaring rooms, mud-tubes, a landscape of keyhole shaped twisty passages (all different), and finally more and more water til the explorable cave ended in a sump, the underwater river filling the whole passage.

• Like me on this fine morning.

• So at least in the companies I’ve worked, there’s a push to be accepting of things like neurodiversity and mental illness. But despite all the webinars and heartfelt personal stories, I feel these initiatives rarely scratch below the surface of “acceptance.”

• Like, we’ll talk about depression and anxiety, which is important! All well and good! But it feels like they’re turning off the acceptance tap right before it reaches Bipolar Jaimie.

• I realise bipolar disorder scares a lot of people, and a lot of people still don’t see severe mental illness as compatible with the workplace. Heck, plenty of people don’t see any mental illness as compatible with the workplace. Unless you know… you’re medicated.

• I set some money aside in funds each month, but I also have a savings account that I keep at about €5,000. I call it my buffer account. This is where I borrow money from when I need it. I can repay the loan at any rate I want, and there is no interest or late fees. In a way I am my own bank for the purpose of payday loans.

• That’s just one of the many small perks of already having money. If I wouldn’t have had an income that allowed me to set money aside like that I wouldn’t be able to take a sudden expense such as my car breaking down.

• Grandfather-based allotment on an ETS is a perverse incentive that rewards emissions. The EU made a huge mistake there, possible a world-ending one. They should’ve used another allotment scheme. 😭

• An Amish-like life (minus the patriarchy) seems like a more sustainable future.

• I wouldn’t expect people to voluntarily go Amish—our society is a candy shop designed to induce buy buy buy—but that’s why people are looking sternly at each other for “unnecessary” purchases.

• I’ve been learning French, for the best reason there is to learn a language: I now live in a French-speaking region.

• It’s not the first time I’ve encountered the language, having taken French for three years in school. But, the lessons were hardly inspiring, and I came away with a grim view of French as unnecessarily confusing and complicated.

• Since then I’ve changed a lot: I’ve lived fifteen years outside my home country, learned German to conversational level, and even learned a fair amount of Mandarin Chinese more or less for fun. So the second time around French looked very different.

Health

• I was an early long-covider, contracting Delta just before vaccinations were available (and a few months shy of my birthday and monoclonals stockpiled for boomers). I was very sick for a month, then somewhat not right (especially in the head and tastebuds, but largely from pathological media-induced fear) for about a year.

• I wonder if I was so sick because the news had primed me with “this is going to kill you if you are over 40″ kind of messages.

• I really try hard to not be a doomer. But as a first waver, it’s really cool how I might just drop dead from “unknown” causes soon. I found a life, love, more love, and it’ll all be ripped away from me because our society doesn’t care about people.

• [...]

• It’s even worse that there’s a high chance my death won’t be considered covid-19/longcovid related.

Games

• I’ve got to write down how I do the realtime component of our time tracking because I think it’s not super obvious.

Technology and Free Software

• Found a real gem in the basement the other day – the Sony CD Mavica! It’s huge! The photos have 2.1 megapixels! It has 6x digital zoom!

• I has used Vim for coding in python or php since 2008 for 10 years. Then I switched to phpStorm with Vim motions. I did that because of better ecosystem for Symfony projects. All these easy jumpings between definitians and references, easy jump to twig files or routings, at that time we started to add docblocks and phpStorm do that easily. Same things with setters and getters. And the main thing was correct autocompilations and showing errors on the fly. But… it is quite heavy tool and it has a lot of things what I will never use. I’m the fan of minimalism and I am frustrated by all this needless stuff around.

• Before switch I was using phpactor[1] as my main helper to code in php. But it was quite young project and time to time I just got into situation that I code only in pure Vim because service is broken. The creator of phpactor Dantleech is awesome but man’s time is limitted project went in its temp.

• What bothers me most is that IMAP and webmail have lead to billions of people and organizations accumulating years and years’ worth of private messages on mail servers (strangers’ computers). This increased their risk of data compromise to the point of near-certainty. Webmail in particular made people dependent on their online accounts for accessing their e-mail archives. And providers make zero effort to persuade people to move their data offline, even though this could be done with a couple of clicks in the webmail interface.

• Small, simple, single-page web tool for handling users, rooms, and registration tokens on your Matrix Synapse server.

• I have been hosting a Matrix Synapse server for many years now. Although it has a vast admin API, it lacks a simple admin tool for frequent tasks such as password resets, user management, room cleanup, and registration token creation. Thus, I wrote this tool, trying to keep everything as small and simple as possible. Synapse Admin fits into a single HTML page with <500 lines of uncompressed and readable code. You need a fairly modern browser because it uses Fetch API and string interpolation, but it does not have any external dependencies. The only communication that happens is between the page in your browser and the homeserver that you specify. There is an optional feature to save your credentials, which uses local storage, keeping it within your browser.

• Since I have been spending much time on the couch, I had the opportunity to spend time with my Steam Deck. I picked up the Steam Deck awhile back and it was supposed to be my gaming replacement for my aging Alienware Alpha R1 (steambox), which it has, but I think I spend m0ar time using it for general purpose desktop linux tasks and tinkering. It is a really nice device and I’m glad I pulled the trigger on this purchase.

• Today I decided to bring out the Sony HMZ-T2 Personal 3D Viewer. It is a Head Mounted Display (HMD) that came out around 2012, before the Oculus Rift and all the recent VR models. There’s no head tracking or any of the fancy features like today’s VR stuff. It’s basically just a display that connects via HDMI. Oh, it’s also good for 3D Blu-Ray.

Internet/Gemini

• I continue to amuse myself by finding ways to play games over gemini, abuse of the protocol though this arguably is. Abstract strategy games and interactive fiction were too easy targets, so for a challenge I decided to try a real-time action game. Thanks to gemtext streaming, this is narrowly possible. Here’s what I came up with, a backwards ski race down a perlin-noisy slope, inspired by the unix classic ‘ski’ and uninventively entitled ‘Gemski’.

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