Rebooting

Author: Ben <benk@tilde.team>

Sun 18 May 12:20:15 +05 2025

It has been a long time since I visited Gemini space. My plan is still to continue working on the gemcast, but until I am able to produce a new episode, I figured I might as well write something to my gemlog in the mean time.

It's hard to believe that my last gemlong entry was in 2023. I've changed systems more than once since then, and I'm not even sure if my original Gemini setup still works. Right now I'm going through everything, checking the scripts, and making sure that I can effectively resume publishing to Gemini without having to do everything manually like I did in the old days.

So far it looks like everything is still working and in place, which I guess is a testament to some of the design decisions I made when I created this system. My Gemini capsule is still going *brrr*; I owe a special thanks to both Martin Bays (author of diohsc) and Omar Polo (author of gmid) for enabling my capsule to run indefinitely. gmid is a full-fledged FreeBSD package thanks to its author, and so the server is now kept up to date automatically. So far it doesn't seem like diohsc is packaged for the system, but I guess I should figure out how to do that myself.

Compiling diohsc with Cabal is easy enough, but it's a lot for my poor little server to handle. Fortunately, it seems I specially tweaked Cabal's configuration so that the compilation and update process runs smoothly without burdening the system. I simply forgot that I had done this.

Of course, compiling diohsc was the very first thing I had to do to get back into Gemini. I just can't use Gemini without it, and all my scripts depend on it. Impressively, I have a cron job on my server that asks diohsc to water my plant every day in Astrobotany. I forgot that this was happening for some time, and today I logged in to discover that my current plant is still watered and healthy. It is 867 days old, and I have amassed a wealth of nearly 103k coins. I wonder if I can sell them? ;)

Since yesterday I have been contemplating on upgrading the hardware of my server. The current machine, a fanless mini with an Intel Atom processor, has served me well for the past 7 years starting in 2018 (according to my dad). It succeeded an original ASUS EeePC that I was very fond of. With the things I'm running on it now, two gigs of RAM is just enough, but if I'm not careful it can run out of RAM and bring services down.

I could simply go back to the minimalistic days of hosting only Gemini and XMPP. How lovely that would be! However, I got too wrapped up in nonsense like Syncthing, and now GoToSocial uses a significant amount of resources as well, although I do love GoToSocial very much and want to maintain it. My move onto the Fediverse was probably one major reason that I became less active on Gemini, but these days I've been neglecting even that.

I do encourage all readers to connect on ActivityPub, where my ID is:

Also feel free to send any questions or comments to my e-mail (above) and/or Delta Chat:

As always, the Geminauts XMPP chat is still active: