gemini://gem.hack.org/mc/log/2023-08-01.gmi

I have a ton of things on my personal todo lists, but haven't exactly done much yet. I feel this meme captures some of it:

(Description: Off ramp meme but the car has flipped around on the roof and is on fire. The signs says "Doing what I need to do" & "Doing what I want to do", then under the burning car, not going in any of the signs' directions: "Me, somehow doing neither".)

It's not that bad all the time. I like to read and have plenty in my to-read list. And yes, I've spent the first two weeks of the vacation reading. It's been mostly fiction, but also a few books about history, including, yes, the middle-aged white man cliché, yet another book about WWII: Peter Englund's "Onda nätters drömmar", a remarkable book about just November, 1942, from a lot of different people's personal viewpoint.

Just finished Mark Lawrence's "The book that wouldn't burn", the really good first book of a new trilogy of his curious mix of SF&F. Another recent read is Ian McDonald's remarkable "Hopeland". It's about a large chosen family, the Hopelands, and the people affected by them. A mix of tech thriller, science fiction, magical realism, solarpunk and a rather relaxed view on genders, relationships, and sex. Highly recommended!

Before that I read Jörgen Jörälvs history and bibliography of the Swedish publisher Delta Science Fiction. Yes, I guess that makes me a huge book nerd. I know, OK? That's fine.

The cottage kitchen still hasn't got any plumbing, so we're still in the city flat, unlike most summers when we usually move out to the cottage. Haven't been out and about much at all, but we did some small road trips, including to Höganäs where we found a nice surprise:

(Description: Me, a white man with a white goatee, dressed all in black (t-shirt, jeans, hat) standing on a street painted in the colours of the old rainbow pride flag. The street sign says "Pridesgatan". Some houses in the south Swedish style is visible in the background.)

We also went to the cottage to scythe the grass in our lawn-turned-meadow and to look at how the kitchen is coming along. It seems almost finished, except for some plumbing and electrical work, but then the head contractor suddenly had a baby, so now we're in waiting mode again.

Still struggling with sleep after coming off of Mirtazapine. Sometimes I just can't get to sleep or it at least takes a lot of time. Sometimes I lie awake for at least four hours.

I recently stayed up for almost 24 hours. I just gave up about getting to sleep and sat in the living room reading instead. P was quite surprised when she got up in the morning. That evening I could finally sleep again because I was so tired. Sleeping every other night? Not good in the long run, I think.

I recently bought some Melatonin and tried to see the whole thing as a case of jet lag. Finally slept good that night. Let's see if I can turn this ship around. If I can't cure it like jet lag perhaps I can continue with the Melatonin for quite a while?

I've had my personal desk and workstation in the kitchen for a while. Even if we recently got window blinds there it still isn't ideal, for many reasons.

I just moved it to the living room instead. It looks like this:

(Description: White desk on a wooden floor next to some wooden shelves. Under the desk there is a tower workstation in a black case. On top there are: a red/black touchtone phone, a black trackball, a black 60% keyboard, a 24" monitor on a gasarm, a small computer case with a router/firewall, a small wifi access point with three antennas, a pair of black headphones, and a black coffee cup. On the screen there's a single huge window with green text and some indistinct photos showing.)

Still needs a lamp or something. It's too dark in the evenings. Other than that I think I like it here. Depends on what happens in the living room, I suppose, if we suddenly get a teen invasion or something when #3 brings friends that want to use the living room, but that has yet to happen.

I also re-routed our home network a little to get rid of the cable salad I had made next to the fucking DOCSIS modem. Instead, I have connected a single Ethernet cable from it all the way behind our bookcases to this desk and keep the rest of our network equipment neatly on my desk. The cute and noiseless little PC Engines apu2 which works as our combined router and firewall is my favourite computer in the household and sits just under my monitor now.

This also means the workstation now gets real Ethernet instead of the Powerline thing it had before. Yeah, I know, I should just give up on the Powerline things already and just wire real Ethernet to every room in the flat.

I was quite surprised when I tested the network after having done the changes above: 439.61 Mbit/s down, 11,82 Mbit/s up! WTF!? Our subscription is 200/10 Mbit/s!!?! Suddenly we have more than double downstream performance!? I just wish we had had a doubling of upstream, instead, but I guess I shouldn't complain.

I'm slowly continuing the configuration of our new media computer, a late 2014 Mac Mini now running Debian with vanilla Gnome. I gave it static IP addresses and set up NFS mounts from the home file server to get at our music and other media.

Note that if you use IPv6 you might want to have "proto=tcp6" or "udp6" in your mounting options. Totally makes sense, but I really didn't get that at first.

I've set up Samba to share files with the Windows boxen in my house. I've never done that before, perhaps sort of refusing to recognize that I even have Windows boxen in my house. I would be perfectly happy if we had just kept using SFTP (perhaps with some sshfs-like mount thing) but I agree this will probably be easier for the Windows users.

The most important configuration I did was allowing just my own v4 and v6 network prefix, denying everything else (again, both v4 and v6), and enforcing transport encryption. I really wonder why the latter isn't the default. It looks like this:

Also investigating setting up an internal Wiki on thix box, but haven't really decided on the software yet. I will probably do some experiments with different wikis first. Any suggestions?

You feed your statuses on stdin with an external program. I wrote a quick thing in Go to feed it with at least a timestamp but I'll extend it to other things I need.

Pretty sweet that it shows how many windows there are in total in the current tag when you're in Monocle mode, just like dwm did. I've missed that.

In the screenshot you mostly see two foot terminal emulators. The one with the red border is running a local tmux with an Emacs client where I'm editing this gemlog entry. One terminal is running mosh to a remote machine where I'm editing a web page in Emacs in another tmux.

A newer version of river also meant I could change from swaylock to the much simpler waylock

The most important change is that the screen doesn't unlock if the locking program crashes. This needs support for ext-session-lock-v1 in the compositor to work.

It also means I have to cope with river commit fc6d1cca15f39755e00b2c89501ef3975f63e562 which made my GTK apps borderless until GTK clean up their act with CSD/SSD stuff. Not that I run many GTK apps but it's a bit confusing where focus is on my two Firefox windows. Isaac Freund taught me I could remedy this with riverctl rule-add ssd, so, for instance:

2023-08-01

Mirtazapine and sleep

Workstation and desk

Internet speed

Media computer

File server: Setting up Samba

river Wayland updates