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Long Time No Burrow
November 21st, 2020
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It's been a while since I've written here. I've wandered
quite a bit since first discovering the tildeverse through
tilde.institute. I've spent a lot of time on Gemini thinking up
interesting things to do with it. I still browse around
Gopherspace, but most of what I write ends up on my rawtext
capsule. rawtext.club is the server I lurk around the most. I think
the explicitly "slow" philosophy and preference for asynchronous
communication has been a good fit for me--partly because that is
more in line with my lifestyle, but also because lately I haven't
really had much time to sit at a computer. As a consequence, my
various computer related endeavours---to which this phlog was
originally dedicated---have been seriously delayed.

The last time I posted here, I had just started messing around with
my Raspberry Pi. I've done a lot more with it since, but everything
is still quite basic. Initially, I thought I would begin a tilde on
it! But I think I need it to be experimental for time being, so
maybe if I can get my hands on another one I can set up a tilde and
gain some more experience with system administration. For now, the
Pi serves a few domains over http and gemini, runs an XMPP server,
and serves a writefreely instance. I am trying out a few different
solutions for hosting a place for my wife and other friends to
blog. I always liked the minimalism of writefreely, so we're giving
it a shot. In the near future (when I get a chance to breathe) I
want to experiment with running a mail server, which I know may not
be successful being that I'd be running it on a residential Korean
IP. But I want to try so I can understand email a little more.

At the end of summer I had been fooling around with Rust, but for
no reason in particular. I think I had been wooed by the buzz
around it. Since then others have suggested trying out Go and
Python, and incidentally I've started messing around more in
Python. It is easier to keep in my head, and it's easier to just
jump in and do simple things with it. It seems like a nice way to
transition from shell scripting to writing simple software. But I
haven't had a chance to do much with it actually! I had a little
free time a couple months ago and got kind of ambitious, but lately
I've been preoccupied being a dad and whatnot. I initiated a
project, gemini://booksin.space:1955/, which intends to be a public
domain library on Gemini, but I haven't had a chance to contribute
much to it. It has stalled out, and I feel sorry about that.
Although, I didn't intend for it to be "my" project...I just
purchased the domain is all. However, it is a great project for me
to take on. It has a clearly defined purpose and structure, which
makes writing code for it relatively easy for someone like me. But
alas I am not a programmer! So in spite of its relative simplicity,
I can't just sit down and kick something out in a couple hours (and
usually I don't have even that much time to work on anything
consistently!).

Anyway, lately I felt like I had neglected tilde.institute and this
gopherhole I started. I actually reference the wiki and user repos
here quite often, but I haven't done much with the space, and I
feel sorry for that. So I'm going to revive it and try to write
about the little experiments I do. Like everything else, it's
slow-going, but I like the quiet here. Burrow is a nice tool, and
when I come here to write it feels easy to get out what I want to
say.

Maybe I should use burrow to compose chapters for my
dissertation...