Notes
This is just shortform thoughts and other annotations I wish to share, articles I found interesting, and occasional public replies to other entries in the tinylog ecosystem.
author: @zekromaster
For more longform content, browse the gemlog
2025-05-13 00:42 +0200
When I'm finally done migrating my Minecraft mods to SourceHut, I should really start to:
- announce updates on my "announce" mailing list
- actually write changelogs to post on the aforementioned mailing list
Because right now the only way to know what changed between two versions is to pull down the repo, pick two tags, and read the commits between them and that's kind of annoying.
2025-05-11 21:10 +0200
Back from vacation! I now just have to catch up with some tasks and with my inbox before I have to leave again for a work trip.
2025-05-09 18:18 +0200
Disaster! Apparently my password store was encrypted with my desktop's signing subkey for some reason. I didn't notice for the past few years, as I've had the subkey's secret material in my main device's keyring since basically forever — my desktop's /data drive was transplanted from its laptop predecessor, which was cloned from its HDD predecessor, and so on.
Obviously, this trip and the need it created to finally get a travel set up is what got me: I made a USB stick with the encryption subkey, a new signing subkey, an SSH key, and the password store on it, and for obvious reasons didn't put the PC's own signing subkey on it.
What's worse is that I don't remember my SSH key's passphrase as I counted on it being in the password store, which means I had to generate a new key on the spot for SourceHut, and am locked out of directly accessing the VPS this capsule runs on — CI/CD still works though, and it's just another 2 days before I'm back in front of my main PC to fix this.
2025-05-09 18:10 +0200
A friend's day job raised the cost of coffee in the break room from 0.30€ to 0.40€. This led to someone writing on a sign on the coffee machine:
If you raise prices, raise our salaries
Which to me was a pretty funny way to protest. I'm fully on the side of the workers here — coffee is a basic necessity.
2025-05-06 18:34 +0200
I've finally gotten a set up for on-the-road access to my servers and passwords. Yes, the set up is just having .gnupg and .ssh directories on a LUKS-encrypted USB stick, not as safe as something like a NitroKey but enough for my current threat model — I'll probably switch to something safer later on anyway, though.
2025-05-03 20:32 +0200
I've redone the style for the HTTP version of my capsule, taking advantage of the fact I wrote my own HTTP-Gemini proxy (which I should at some point publish) to have full control over the HTML.
Now it looks much better, although I'll admit it's very derivative of Lagrange's style.
Hopefully this means I don't have to touch the web version of this capsule again: part of what pulled me towards Gemini is the fact I don't need to worry about presentation and can just write.
2025-05-02 22:27 +0200
I've started migrating my Minecraft mods away from GitHub onto SourceHut. I've set up a mailing list, but honestly 99% of discussion around my mods happens in the beta Minecraft community discords so I don't expect it to see much use outside from receiving patches.
2025-04-30 02:06 +0200
re: @Sandra 2025-04-29 16:01 +0000
So much time is spent on hyperspecific lore stakes compared to the more human elements in season one which was so poetic and interesting.
Maybe this is an inherent problem in trying to follow up on this kind of narrative? When trying to build on a metaphor, at some point the metaphor collapses on itself (or becomes a pataphor [1], if you're into that).
There's only so much you can do with a single metaphor, no matter how powerful and broad it is, and sometimes that's less than the amount of story you want — or have — to tell.
2025-04-30 01:56 +0200
I've added a small section to my capsule containing my poetry. This supersedes the old GItHub repository I used to store it: thinking back, it was a terrible choice as the host and navigation interface for my written works.
Now it's all properly transcribed to gemtext — which amounts to the old plaintext format but with a # before titles really — and has an actually decent index for laypeople.
Using gemtext also made me realise that the best form for an old poem of mine — of which two almost-identical versions have co-existed for years despite the GitHub repo giving the impression only one was "canonical" — is simply two different poems linking to each other at the end, which is much akin to having them printed beside each other on paper.
Most of my poetry is in Italian, so this is the first Italian section of my capsule.
See the poems here (the link is absolute for the sake of aggregators)
2025-04-27 22:48 +0200
I'm thinking of migrating my source repositories to SourceHut [1]. I've migrated my gemini capsule's repo [2] as a test, and I must say I really like how simple the CI/CD is compared to GitHub and GitLab.
I also really dig the idea of separating "projects" from "repositories", with a project being able to contain multiple git repos, issue trackers, and mailing lists — it makes much more sense to me than what GitHub, Forgejo, GitLab, and basically every other forge does were a codebase is also assumed to be a whole project with its own issue tracker and discussion forum.
I also like the very email-centric flow, with mailing lists instead of web-based discussions and the issue tracker being able to accept emails directly.
Email-based patches are what really might hold me back: I myself am not that opposed to them, but I can see how they might discourage people from contributing to my stuff.
We'll see. Honestly it's about time I get off GitHub.
[2] My gemini capsule's git repository
2025-04-25 11:44 +0200
Happy Anniversary of the Resistance to my fellow italians! Coraggio sempre avanti!
2025-04-25 11:34 +0200
re: @bacardi55 2025-04-23 09:18 +0200
I'm currently working on something that will allow me to post to my tinylog from my phone
I'm also looking to make something like that, but this is manifesting in the form of an email-based bot. The idea is I can email stuff to my Tinylog's address that gets autocommitted to the git repo and then pushed to server by the same CI/CD pipeline as the rest of the site contents.
2025-04-24 20:48 +0200
I seem to have missed an update to the Tinylog specification [1]. It doesn't allow the usage of timezone abbreviations anymore, but now blank lines are allowed in tinylog entries. In the name of keeping backwards compatibility with parsers which might have assumed no blank lines in entries, I'll be holding off on using them for a couple months, but I will separate the link at the end of the page with two spaces just to be sure it doesn't become part of the first entry.
2025-04-20 01:42 +0200
I've noticed that horror videogames scare me much more than horror movies or books or comics. It probably has to do with interactivity: in videogames, I'm in control of what the character does, which means I can't "disconnect" from it the way I can do with a movie character, for instance instead of shouting "RUN!" at a screen I'm actually running away and failing to escape.
2025-04-19 00:21 +0200
It's so strange that at some point we all decided that "login" and "register" shouldn't be two separate features, and now a lot of places have some "magic" auto-register-on-login thing going on.
It's annoying, especially when you're like me and use different emails for different services, and are left with no way of checking if you already have an account without accidentally creating 5 in the process.
It also turns logging in into a two-step process because either the application has to check if the account exists before it can show a password prompt or it outright sends you a link or code in your email — either way, that's gonna be two steps where there used to be a single form.
2025-04-18 18:41 +0200
This year I decided to try my hand at making a traditional Pastiera Napoletana [1]. I've made the filling and the dough, now they're both resting in the fridge. If this first "test" comes out well, I've got enough ingredients to make another one to either give away or eat with friends at a dinner or lunch. We'll see.
2025-04-12 23:46 +0200
On my way out the house earlier, I've looked at my bicycle — which I park inside, near the building's lift — and noticed someone left a supermarket flyer on the back of it, as you usually do with cars or mailboxes. I found it quite amusing, it was even properly attached to the rear rack.
2025-04-10 19:33 +0200
I've been thinking a lot about the advantages of long-form, asynchronous communication mediums like e-mail and forums. They feel somehow more "natural" to me compared to instant messaging, and they allow elaborating, "branching" (in the case of e-mail), more comfortable search and indexing, and a more tight integration with other aspects of one's digital life.
I think we've lost something when most internet communication became fast, snippy, short form and proprietary. I remember it being perfectly normal and acceptable to take days if not weeks to respond to a thread, where nowadays a social media post is basically dead after a day or two and people expect instant responses on IM platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram.
Maybe it's because now we're "always connected": smartphones are considered a necessity and mobile internet is cheap, compared to the days where your default state was "offline" and you went online from a computer on your desk, making the internet almost "a place" you visited rather than the background radiation of life.
In a sense, building the infrastructure that enables this kind of communication was a curse, because it made it the standard societal expectation.
2025-04-10 01:00 +0200
I still haven't had occasion to try Shadow of the Weird Wizard [1]. I have decided to join a Not The End [2] campaign a friend is hosting at my local board game society though, which means I am still trying out a new system. I decided to make my character a chronicler and historian of the kind that prefers witnessing history first hand on the battlefield, much like many chroniclers of antiquity or modern war reporters.
I've been told the campaign will have a relatively serious tone and revolve around themes of remembrance and learning from the past, and I feel like this character will give me a good lens to explore historical memory, cultural inheritance, and the ethics of war chronicling/reporting.
[1] Shadow of the Weird Wizard
2025-03-30 16:00 +0200
I've fixed a friend's pronounciation with the help of some rogue phonology knowledge. She had this tendency to lateralise her "soft c" sound, realising it as a [t͡ɬ] [1]. Now, the so-called "soft c" in Italian is pretty much supposed to be [t͡ʃ] [2], so I ran a little experiment on her and tried to have her pronounce the sounds separately («say /ʃendere/; ok now say /at ʃendere/; ok now say it very fast; congrats, you've just said /att͡ʃendere/»).
It did work, and now she correctly pronounces that letter. I feel weirdly proud about this even though I know it's not that big a deal, but it is one more win for niche theoretical knowledge.
[1] Voiceless alveolar lateral affricate
[2] Voiceless postalveolar affricate
2025-03-09 12:07 +0100
I've realised that there's a tablet embedded in the wall of the local laundromat that's just permanently configured to show the same image, a flyer with a QR code linking to the laundromat's Google Maps page where you can leave a review. It's pretty much an expensive and battery-powered alternative to a sheet of paper. I wonder how it came to be that they installed a tablet into a wall rather than print the single image it's meant to show.
2025-03-01 19:30 +0100
I'll be testing Shadow of the Weird Wizard [1] soon. I'm interested in seeing how it fares compared to more OSR systems in an open table setting: character creation doesn't seem too slow, at least at level 1, and the game is practically built with early D&D-esque "frontier fantasy" in mind, although the lack of codified "domain play" might be an issue if one wishes to keep a long term fantasy campaign going — although that arguably isn't one of the goals of the game.
[1] Shadow of the Weird Wizard