Blazing Star updates and more
-----------------------------

I recently noticed with delight that zaibatsu.circumlunar.space
phlogs are once again correctly being tracked by the
Bongusta! aggregator.  Thanks, logout!   In other Gopherspace
news, congratulations to the Free Thinker on five years of riding
the Gopher[1]!

I've been making another strong push lately toward finishing goals
from "Operation Blazing Star"[2], now that we are (somehow!) in the
final quarter of the year.

Last weekend I finally deleted my old tilde.zone Mastodon account.
I'd not tooted there in literally years.  Somehow I continued
to regularly accrue new followers, even though the account was
extremely visibly abandoned.  Well, whatever, it's gone, at last.
As you would hope/expect for a decentralised FOSS project that
tries to do the right thing, it was very easy to download an export
of all my data in sensible format.  I don't hate the Fediverse or
anything like that, I am not trying to encourage anybody else to
delete their account.  I have simply decided that it's not for me.
Some small minority of you are aware that I have a small and very
quiet alt presence and might think me a hypocrite, which is fair.
That account might go in time, too.  I haven't tooted there in,
well, I'm not sure how long, but it's gotta be at least six months.
I feel closer to that community so it's harder to sever all ties.

I also recently shut down another VPS after migrating its services to
another one.  It all started out, long, long ago, as one VPS in the
first place.  I split things in two one day to take advantage of a
recurring monthly discount offer, because back then I still thought
running servers was exciting and virtuous, and hey, separating out
web and mail makes things more secure and robust, right?  Well,
yes, it does, but this was absolutely a case of LAPRing a real
sysadmin in the very low-stakes personal project context involved.
So the two are back together again and I'll save even more money
than with the recurring discount by just having the one.  Not that
I'm shutting down VPSs to save money, they are absurdly cheap, it's
more a philosophical thing of spending less of *all* resources -
money, but also time, energy, stress, brainspace - on computing.
I've shut down two this year.  I have one left which isn't doing
much work, but I kind of need it, for now, as a home for smol.earth,
mostly because I want smol.earth to be on Gopher and reliable virtual
hosting isn't a thing on that protocol.  Maybe I can be happy with
having it on Gopher on IPv6 only if I can get another machine to
serve two different Gopherholes on different addresses, we'll see.

Spurred on by the impending threat of mandatory 2FA, I am working
toward deleting my GitHub account (well, my "solderpunk" one, anyway,
sadly the one I use for work has to stay around).  This has been a
bit of a mission.  The only repo hosted there is for VF-1.  VF-1 is
also associated with my PyPi account, which it turned out still had
my older @sdf.org email address as it's only email address, and I had
never bothered to verify the address, if indeed that was even a thing
one could do back in the day.  I still knew my password, of course,
and could still log in, but apparently that doesn't count for much
these days, and without a verified email address and, you guessed
it, functioning 2FA, you can't do jack with your PyPi projects.
That old email address doesn't work anymore, for reasons known
only to the inscrutable and unaccountable powers that be at SDF,
so I was quite worried I was going to be in a bit of a pickle here.
In the end I was able to regain access, and I'm grateful to the
PyPi team for helping me through that process.	So now the repo has
been moved to Sourcehut, and I made a new release today, mostly to
get the new package metadata indicating the new repo into the PyPi
system so it's safe to remove the old repo.  This involved replacing
the old setup.py file with a new pyproject.toml one.  The amount
of yak-shaving involved in distributing a single .py file is an
affront to the human soul and if I think about it too hard I know
I'll cry, but I got there in the end, after hitting a small road
bump because PyPi do not consider a gopher:// URL a "valid" URL for
a package to set as its "Homepage", even though it's valid enough to
be supported by the standard library's urllib.parse module.  Ugh!
Anyway, expect another post about VF-1 changes in the near future.
There'll be, at long last, a 1.0.0 release before the end of this
year, I swear it!

I have one other personal web project that I want to substantially
deprecate, probably not take stuff down necessarily because
I'm loathe to break at some links, but a fresh new front page
which doesn't link to most of the old stuff and just has the bare
essentials for the purpose seems like a good idea.  I also still need
to finally update this laptop to the latest Debian stable release.
I'll probably put that off until December, because if something
goes wrong I'll probably just hurl the thing out the window and be
done with it, which would be a distinct impediment to finishing the
other things on my TODO list.  Those are all the really big computery
things I wanna get done, I think.  Aside from more progress on Gemini
finalisation, of course.  That has been going pretty well this year.
I put it on hold for a bit to achieve some of the above, but I'm
preparing to swing focus back now.

I've got the Nitto albatross bars and Dia-Compe brake levers I
mentioned in an earlier post installed on my bike now.	They are
really nice.  Not, for me, as utterly transformative an experience
as they seem to be for others, although to be fair when I switched I
switched to a shorter and longer stem as well to partially reduce the
change in position because I was afraid of things feeling too cramped
if I didn't.  Maybe I shouldn't have been.  There's still a change,
and it's nice, and I think I could tolerate for.  But between this
experience and the experience of riding on drop bars and skinny
tyres on my other bike, I have become sceptical by default of all
grandiose changes of small bike setup changes having transformative
consequences for the riding experience.  Sure, they matter, but at
the end of the day, bikes are bikes, and ignoring ridiculous extreme
edge cases, different bikes feel more alike than they do different,
so, y'know, stop overthinking and just ride.  I can't believe that I
still haven't finished my July tour write up after literal months!
I don't feel good about that, but, well, I've been prioritising
all of the above.

I have very unexpectedly become very interested in packet radio,
which is about as diametrically opposed to everything I thought
I was getting into amateur radio for as possible, I think,
but these things happen?  Waiting on parts to throw together a
cheap and cheerful MC3362-based APRS receiver.	I enjoy building
things almost entirely out of parts distinctly from last century,
scrounging eBay for local bargains.  The MC145151 PLL chip with
14-bit parallel databus allows building a stable local oscillator
which is crystal-locked to a single frequency without the need for a
microprocessor, which is dandy (prescaler required for VHF, though).

[1] gopher://aussies.space:70/0/~freet/phlog/2024-10-20Five_Years_Riding_the_Gopher.txt
[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/embracing-the-universe-like-a-blazing-star.txt