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description=Nelson Minar s weblog since 2001: technology, travel, food, gay life, etc;

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ssured it s a one time thing much love to rael dornfest and his blosxom blog engine i ve been running that for 25 years i may be the last person left who was running it or at least the 2004 perl cgi flourish is a static generator i custom built in python with claude code opus i d spent several weeks hand writing a prototype a couple of years ago and couldn t ever get it launch ready the ai rewrote and finished it in two days with a much better testing plan than i ever would have done the new blog looks more or less the same as the old blog a few broken things fixed and some cosmetics improved there s a slick javascript page search now try it once the new system proves itself i plan to modernize the visual design who knows i may even start blogging more i cannot say enough about how great ai coding tools have been for me in just a few weeks i ve totally updated the server software infrastructure launched a major new personal content site built a new blog engine and done a bunch of little projects i know there s a lot of tension about ai coding but i ve found it very productive for my personal hobby projects and fun too i feel like my expertise still matters i m just not bogged down anymore in the scut work tech 2026 10 03 00 13 z new server for somebits com somebits com has a new server it s been up for a few days and seems to be working great big things hosted here weblog linkblog postcards the new server is hosted at ovhcloud and runs on nixos for 20 years i ve been hand managing servers like this this time around i got an ai to build it for me it was a very good experience and i m quite satisfied with the result nix feels like a good match for ais the entire operating system is described declaratively so there s no managing of running ssh commands and tracking their side effects tech 2026 09 17 21 55 z travel postcards major new product in the nelsonsphere my travel postcards our recent cruise to italy france and spain is a good example to start with i plan to keep updating this going forward i collected social media posts for 41 different trips i ve taken in the last fifteen years i think of each post as a postcard a little thought in the moment hopefully an image when collected each thread becomes a diary of a trip and the collection as a whole is a summary of much of the travel ken and i have done it s a lot some 1900 photographs i started tweeting travelogues back in 2009 or so but only got intentional about these as a sort of diary a few years ago so the newer ones are better written i ve got technical notes on how i built this using ai coding it s pretty straightforward with the recent mastodon threads it s basically just a thread unroller but for older posts i had to do some heroics with heuristics to identify travel tweets and lots of image recovery involving using the wayback machine and flickr and google photos archives to find my originals i might have managed the basic unroller on my own but i never would have done all the archive retrieval without an ai s help culture travel 2026 09 09 00 22 z learning to break the rules when i was a young boy i played cards with my friend and his sicilian father dad would cheat he d palm cards fudge the score take extra turns when i got to age 9 i realized he was cheating and i was so mad cheating was wrong i realized much later that he was teaching us a lesson that while it might be wrong sometimes people will cheat you he taught us to recognize being cheated when i was 15 i applied for a job at the local grocery store part of the hiring process was a test for produce codes i had not memorized them i went to the beach instead i was screwed but someone else had brought a cheat sheet and offered it to me i was shocked cheating was unethical i declined and i did not get the job the finale of heartstopper has a nice moment of queer solidarity charlie can t get permission from the school to start an lgbt club his art teacher offers to help and says historically us queers have never asked for permission to exist it s an important lesson in surviving as an oppressed minority when i was 16 i started having sex with other guys that was illegal in texas then not so much my age although maybe that too but the fact that two young men loving each other was a crime that was a law i joyfully broke as often as i could the us is currently falling into fascism because of a political movement empowered by its willingness to cheat and corrupt i m not advocating for that kind of wholesale ignoring of ethics but it s important to recognize when you are being cheated and to know when you yourself can break the rules a bit whether to get an advantage that harms no one or for civil disobedience or just to get laid in a place that has made you an outlaw life 2026 07 18 15 26 z linkblog on linkding a small update to my linkblog that you probably won t notice i m now using self hosted linkding as the backend instead of pinboard i switched to pinboard back in 2011 and have appreciated having a hosted service all these years but development on the product stagnated long ago and the last few years service quality has been erratic right now the service is down because the domain registration expired it s galling that i had to log in to nazi twitter to even see what s going on with the service i ve been running my linkblog since 2003 and have rearchitected it a few times the last big change was about four years ago when i built a custom static site generator to format the link database as a web page i got that code right i haven t really had to touch it in four years it may be the last piece of substantial software i ever write without ai tools i had jules make the minor linkding code changes yesterday linkblog 2026 06 16 13 50 z the year of linux on my desktop for the first time in about 25 years i m running a linux desktop it s great i used to use linux all the time but even back in the early 00s all i was running for work was ssh terminals and a web browser and windows did that just fine and for gaming you had to have windows i had a few years of using a mac then switched back to windows once wsl got good enough to have a local unix but i liked to try linux out every couple of years last month i installed bazzite on an external drive to test it out i liked it so much i m now converting entirely i even bought a new computer and monitor for it a key factor in switching is that bazzite is a particularly well engineered consumer product it installs simply with a bunch of codecs and drivers so that my fancy hdr monitor simply worked bazzite is a gaming oriented os and it only exists because valve put a lot of effort into making linux gaming work with the proton compatibility layer these days linux plays most games better than windows itself does and thanks to the success of the steamdeck a lot of devs are testing on linux kde plasma is another key part of my good experience it took 27 years but linux finally has a pretty usable desktop environment out of the box multiple monitors work display scaling works hdr even works there s still some rough edges but all in all it s pretty good a lot of things work better than they do on windows i ve been having a lot of fun tinkering with stuff quieting fan noise getting wake on lan working streaming plexamp to my sonos some of these things are probably doable in windows too but it s sure a pleasure figuring it out in linux having ais to ask questions of is a big help too i wouldn t have found this so easy two years ago bazzite was a great first date but i ve since switched to nobara linux they re very similar both fedora variants bazzite is an immutable os which is great for an appliance like a tv pc but not so good for tinkering nobara is a more traditional install what you want setup i could also just use fedora directly but the extra customizations and drivers add enough value add i am glad to have it tech good 2026 05 30 23 51 z net motss founding statement in 1983 steve dyer created the usenet group soc motss possibly the first ever online lgbt community it was an important part of my life in the early 1990s there s a couple of good retrospective histories of motss avery dame griff and david auberach i wanted to re post steve dyer s original october 1983 post from when motss was first created at 1am subject net motss is born from sdyer bbncca arpa steve dyer path watmath utzoo linus decvax genrad wjh12 bbncca sdyer date fri 7 oct 83 01 05 04 edt net motss is a forum for the discussion of gay related issues of interest to all members of usenet its name is an acronym for members of the same sex coined by contributors to net singles as an analogue to motos member of the opposite sex it is therefore unfortunately a euphemism of sorts an alternative to the preferred net gay nevertheless the proponents of the group have gladly passed on this minor issue so that the group should be swiftly formed it is designed to foster discussion on a wide variety of topics such as health problems parenting relationships clearances job security and many others gay members of usenet will find this a supportive environment for the discussion of issues which have immediate impact on their everyday lives those who aren t gay have an opportunity to be informed by the discussion and are encouraged to read the news items and contribute their own questions and opinions net motss is emphatically not a newsgroup for the discussion of whether homosexuality is good or bad natural or unnatural not is it a place where conduct unsuitable for the net will be allowed or condoned rather like every usenet news group it is an opportunity for people all across the world to express their opinions exchange ideas and come to appreciate the diversity within the usenet membership steve dyer decvax wivax dyer decvax genrad wjh12 bbncca sdyer ima bbncca sdyer i like a few things about this the statement this was a safe space for lgbt people not a forum for debate about our existence that it was a world wide community the inclusion of health as a topic this at the start of the aids crisis and the fact that the name was a below the radar euphemism the phase members of the same sex has a history going back to kinsey and the 1970 us census culture 2026 01 17 16 38 z dry january i m planning to do dry january again this year no drinks for the month last year was the first year i did it and i found it really helpful the main thing i learned last year is i could drink less it s the longest i d gone without alcohol in a long time and i wasn t sure at first i could it helps that the goal was simple and short term i felt better pretty much immediately more energy and the calorie reduction was welcome although i did end up eating more instead sometimes i felt like i was missing out on some fun but mostly i found i could socialize including a weekly happy hour at a bar it also gave me new perspective on how much alcohol changes social interactions one thing that helped in the evenings was having fancy non alcoholic aperitifs on hand for the ritual i quite like ghia a bitter soda nyt has a lemon tonic i like making non alcoholic beer has also gotten very good it tastes just like regular beer i find myself looking forward to doing it again this year life 2025 12 08 01 18 z tex mex gravy cheese enchiladas are some of my favorite old school tex mex food corn tortillas orange cheese smothered in a beefy thick gravy the gravy is not like a typical mexican enchilada sauce no tomatoes or tomatillos instead it s more of a southern gravy like you d put on biscuits or serve with turkey but spiced with chile cumin oregano and garlic powder the key thing is it s made with a roux and a lot of roux it really is a thick gravy you never see this sauce in california or new mexico and i suspect not in mexico itself except maybe at the border but it s everywhere in texas it s a defining element of tex mex cuisine there s an early recipe for the tex mex gravy in the 1908 gebhardt chili powder company cookbook this cookbook was written for americans for whom mexican food was exotic it was written mostly to sell their chili powder a spice blend of mild chiles probably ancho cumin oregano and garlic powder i made a pdf of the book from these scans salsa de chili chili gravy this may be made of any brown or meat gravy by adding to each one half pint of gravy one teaspoonful of gebhardt eagle chili powder stirring thoroughly and cooking for ten minutes this makes a very rich sauce for fried eggs cooked rice baked beans etc note it doesn t mention enchiladas there s no enchilada recipe in the copy of the book i have but this is our tex mex gravy although it s awfully light on the spice robb walsh s tex mex cooking has a modern version of the same gravy see the nyt version it s a 4 1 mixture of chicken broth to roux with tex mex spices added walsh s recipe says the lifeblood of old fashioned tex mex chili gravy is a cross between anglo brown gravy and mexican chile sauce it was invented in anglo owned mexican restaurants like the original culture food 2025 10 24 23 31 z phnom penh street food tour one of the best things on our trip to cambodia in march was a street food tour in phnom penh led by urban forage they provided a great guide and a tuktuk and driver it was an amazing chance to try all sorts of casual snacks and meals the kind of stuff that always looks so interesting but too intimidating to try on my own places were vetted for food safety for delicate western stomachs and our guide did a great job teaching us about the food it was so fun and delicious there s some photos here and here cambodian food is roughly similar to thai and vietnamese food but is its own thing first up was the famous grandma noodle shop a home cooking restaurant with the kind of fish noodle soups i loved in cambodia this place was a restaurant with a choice of items but also very casual we had both a chicken noodle soup and the fish noodle soup both curry flavored but clearly cambodian not thai the rice noodles are super fresh made that morning kind of gelatinous and stuck together the soup had such deep delicious flavor and lots of fresh ingredients to liven it up limes basil a bunch of unfamiliar herbs like fishwort the second place was a sidewalk stand near wat botum park rice crepe with turmeric stuffed with chicken and sprouts dipped in fish sauce lime juice also a rice flour ball with chives in it fried dipped in coconut cream it reminded me a lot of dosas and idlis very yummy and seemed like solid daily food our third stop was for a baguette with crispy pork belly inside some herbs also a fresh carrot pickle similar to banh mi we enjoyed it all nice and fresh but at this point we started to realize we were in for a long haul of lots of food the fourth place was in the russian market and served barbeque various kinds of pork cuts we had spare ribs very crispy fried and quite fat was too full to enjoy it all but it tasted great fifth was 54ល្ងាចស្រស់ ...