https://nik.codes/posts/ 2026-03-30T20:16:45Z https://nik.codes/posts/the-unregular-update-of-my-site/ 2026-03-30T20:20:00Z

# First I Come Cap in Hand Another day, another tumbleweed rushing past the dank corner of this site. Much like many other times that has occurred, I had an idea, I had motivation... and that motivat

# First I Come Cap in Hand Another day, another tumbleweed rushing past the dank corner of this site. Much like many other times that has occurred, I had an idea, I had motivation... and that motivation was beaten into a pulp behind the lockers after school - well at least that's how I imagine it, being from a school in rural England, there were no lockers... or no common beatings that there was a "place" for them. Anyway, from that tangential rambling, I bring the conversation back to this site and the lack of anything occurring on it. As a relatively presenting cishet white 'guy' with a stable fairly okay paying job, life is difficult and things gets in the way! Joking aside, life did life and things got in the way and this fell by the wayside - this and other things (the training plan, the slothnet idea, other things I haven't mentioned here - you get the idea). Not to say I don't believe in these things, or that they're not important to me... They just fell by the wayside as I tried to get other aspects in line. What does that mean now? Well now I come back with aspirations of making another go of this and it being spectacular?! I mean, it won't ever be that, but I do want to continue etch out a tiny little corner of the internet to call a home for the ramblings, I do want to continue to explore a slower and lighter internet, and I do want to continue in the gemini space (although it's gotten a hell of a lot more annoying to look at resources on the www or talk to people about since Google's Gemini has now become a proper thing). # Now What? I just want to finish off with what I'm currently trying to play with, building off of the whole Slothnet idea, I'm trying to build some kind of e-paper reader for gemini with a plan to be able to write and send .gmi files to a node via LoRa. LoRa and mesh networks have been something that has interested me for a bit, but I'm not that social, so something like this where it is a connection that is only going to be used by me is something that I think is very possible. => gemini://redterminal.org/gemlog/2025-09-08-ROOPHLOCH_2025_-_1100_meters_LoRa_transmission.gmi Credit to fab @ RedTerminal for the code inspiration! I'll start putting code up somewhere somepoint soon for anyone to criticise! Anywho, till next time! Nik https://nik.codes/posts/training-log-life-log-0-notes/ 2025-06-02T00:00:00Z

## Another post out of nowhere — about something completely different — again? So yeah, it's been a while since I put anything out - and I know no-one is reading this, but I need a little corner

## Another post out of nowhere — about something completely different — again? So yeah, it's been a while since I put anything out - and I know no-one is reading this, but I need a little corner out there to vent and so vent I will. I recently completed the Great West Half Marathon, and let's just say... it went terribly, after the first half I really started to struggle, and then my legs cramped up and gave in and I hobbled over the line just shy of 3 hours. And it made me feel well and truly crap. And with that crap feeling came a lot of other feelings that hit me like a tonne of bricks. ### So what am I going to do about it? And here we are, the first of a weekly log/checking time where I will recap the week's events, how I'm doing, and all of that jazz. This isn't just a running training thing, although I will be logging that, I have another half marathon coming up at the end of October. => https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/br-5T2TCX7ESGCH-charitypartner-entry-oxford-half-2025?utm_medium=FR&utm_source=CL&utm_campaign=015 Which you can donate to if you want to here...wink... But also a life log, anything that I've been thinking about, yaddah yaddah yaddah. So ... *ahem* ## Log 000 ### Running I have a plan which is a start, I've been recommended Runna which gives a nice student discount — whacking all the relevant details in and what not I have a lovely plan to follow (which will start next week... or as it's otherwise known — week 001). => /files/2025-06-01-oxhalf_plan.pdf The Plan. I've also got my Strava and my local running club to aid too. What **doesn't** help however, is that when I went running last week — I bloody decked it 1km in. So I've been spending the last few days resting ankles. ### Food & Drink For the past week, I've been adjusting to a reduced meal plan (nothing drastic, just myFitnessPal) and tracking hydration, it went... fairly well... and so I'm planning of sticking to that. ### Other stuff Over the past few weeks, a new running club appeared in the area, so in solidarity — I'm spinning up a lil website for the group, it's a nice stretch of my legs and play around with stuff I haven't touched properly in a while. So catching up on 5 odd years of web dev has been taking a fair amount of my time to keep me distracted. Here's hoping that it gets popular enough that I can implement a payment system or something I've never done before 🤞. ## Final Words... Anyway this is a quick one, cheers y'all's. https://nik.codes/posts/the-birth-of-slothnet/ 2025-02-28T00:00:00Z

## What's with all this internet? One thing that's been playing on my mind for quite a while now - and has led to my discovery of this whole **gemini protocol** - is that the internet as a whole is t

## What's with all this internet? One thing that's been playing on my mind for quite a while now - and has led to my discovery of this whole **gemini protocol** - is that the internet as a whole is too big and too fast. By this I don't mean the whole internet; there's obviously a need for the internet (and networking in general) to go as fast as possible. In my work alone, there is a need to read/write patient's details and medical and appointment information between systems and to clinicians as soon as it is demanded. But for the most of our human browsing, the internet is too bloated... Cast your minds back and back to the early days of the internet, back then we were... * Without the 24-Hour news cycle was in its infancy. * Without endless textual streaming on platforms was relegated to IRC in plaintext. * Having the majority of news was delivered at an interval. * and doom-scrolling sounded like a movement method for a certain ID Software FPS. I'm not arguing for a return to the heyday of the pre-internet, I'm not a luddite, but perhaps we could have a best of both worlds approach. We don't need 24/7 connected devices, with up to date data accessible all of the time; perhaps we could reduce that refresh rate down a bit... We could have locally hosted solutions that we can pull copies of major knowledge hubs to access offline, the zim file and projects like Kiwix already have established this kind of solution and provide copies of many sites; including wikipedia, programming language documentation, ted talks, and project gutenberg. => https://wiki.openzim.org/wiki/OpenZIM OpenZIM => https://kiwix.org/en/ Kiwix => https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&q= Kiwix Libraries Other more ephemeral sites, such as news sites and blogs, where we might only want a block of the most recent posts/entries/articles at a time can be be refreshed periodically (much like receiving the daily newspaper!). RSS/Atom feeds are already a method for tracking this, we just need something that downloads and stored these pages for access at a later point; this is something that Offpunk has started. Whilst it is a command line browser, I do enjoy the methodology behind it and it can be configured to open pages in a more GUI-y friendly browser. The content of websites are now bloated too, I find myself using http version of sites less if there's a gemini or gopher equivalent see... => gopher://theunixzoo.co.uk/1/the-guardian/wide/ The Guardian => gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/ Wikipedia => gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/chilly.cgi/ Weather Forecast => https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini?tab=readme-ov-file#web-proxies HINT! If you want to access gemini pages over http, here's a list of proxies As you can see with my site (if you're on the http version), it is as minimal as possible; in fact, it's developed for gemini, with a bit of HTML & CSS added to the http version when building and deploying. Browsers like LaGrange provide nice ample styling over these plaintext versions. => gemini://skyjake.fi/lagrange/ LaGrange (gemini://) => https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ LaGrange (http://) ## But how could we talk to each other? Communication is an interesting thing to consider, whilst voip and video-calls exist, and there's no simple "slow" way to resolve instant communication; there's still communication via social media and emails that exist. Email is a simple one, we can configure email pulls to a set schedule, and browse offline afterwards, even replies or new emails could be drafted or stored in an outbox to be pinged out at that IMAP/SMTP refresh time. Social media is an interesting one, personally I'm in two minds over social media - I hate the current state of things, with a couple of monolythic techbro institutions determining what and who people are paying attention to, with the ultimate goal not being interaction or community building, but data mining, ad serving, and political conniving. But at the same time, the ease of being able to communicate across the world in a massive forum does have its positives. I do like the look of OSS solutions (Mastadon, Plemora, and the like), but something that pricks my ears even more is Secure Scuttlebutt and it's spiritual successor PZP. => https://www.scuttlebutt.nz Scuttlebutt => https://pzp.wiki PZP Wiki It's a gossip network that can be updated via the internet (obvs), but also via passing by nodes (via a number of different communication methods); it's a kind of a mix between the town noticeboard, bluesky feeds and, nintendo ds streetpass. ## SlothNet Which brings me to SlothNet (url to be determined), an umbrella of tools to aid me (and whoever else wants to) in grabbing internet stuff slowly. I'll start with email as I think that's probably the easiest, but I want the core functionality exists as a repository, and a number of front ends and bult-ons as pluggable modules. Once the site is up, I'll make the repositories available, along with weekly/monthly logs to tell the void what's going on. Watch this space! https://nik.codes/posts/sayonara-twentytwentyfour/ 2025-01-03T00:00:00Z

Here we are at the start of another year, and christ what a year 2024 was - I feel like out of the recent years, this one was really bloody difficult! Between illnesses, injuries, mental health issues

Here we are at the start of another year, and christ what a year 2024 was - I feel like out of the recent years, this one was really bloody difficult! Between illnesses, injuries, mental health issues, and trying to juggle so many things with life, work, and everything else; I'm surprised that I'm still alive... I'm hoping deep deep down that things are going to better, not only that, I will actually put in more effort in it. But what will that involve exactly, and what is planned for 2025? It essentially breaks down into the following... * Work - My current partnerships producing and teaching python & data content is kicking off properly at the start of the financial year, hopefully this will kick off more content that I will distribute online. * Physical Health - I've had a real bad year on this one - hardly got out and now I really feel the after effects. I've accidentally signed up for 2 half marathons this year (somehow!) so training has begun. * Mental Health - Much like with my physical health, my mental health has taken a massive hit. 2 young kids, puppy, jobs, masters, and side hustling seems to be a fair bit stressful! The plan for this one is still in progress but training really affects me, so hopefully getting this off the ground will help. ## And the site? Recently I rewrote the site, with the gemini protocol in mind. I really enjoy this style, feels nice and minimal and how I want my internet to be like. I will be writing more, mainly on the 3 topics above, with a minimum target of at least once per month, at least until I feel the swing of things. Whilst this is happening, I'll be improving my development environment for this as well as developing a couple of tools that I'll put up on sourcehut at some point. Until then, have a good 2025 y'all's! Nik https://nik.codes/posts/relaunching-on-gemini/ 2024-11-18T23:08:00Z

In my quest to find new things to become obsessed with and re-stumbled across the gemini protocol => gemini://geminiprotocol.net Gemini Protocol (via Gemini) => https://geminiprotocol.net (via HTTP)

In my quest to find new things to become obsessed with and re-stumbled across the gemini protocol => gemini://geminiprotocol.net Gemini Protocol (via Gemini) => https://geminiprotocol.net (via HTTP) Gemini is a protocol much like HTTP(s) but prioritises lightweight pages of information over the current bloated state that the modern internet provides us. Not trying to sound too pretentious, I like doom-scrolling and endlessly watching videos on youtube as much as the next person - but, with some of my musings on the nature of the internet and predictions to come; I really feel need to curb back on the size of what we're producing online. I don't see the internet as something that **needs** to be on 100% of the time for everyone; obviously communications between groups/machines to keep the backbone of society running is probably a good thing to keep on running. But what's there to say to retrieving caches of data that can be stored locally to read in some down time is worse than trying to look at a local news site that's covered in full page ads and takes about 5 minutes to load despite having full 4G signal? Tangents aside, the gemini protocol really ticks off a number of positives in the back of my mind in a number of areas * Permacomputing * Decentralisation * That whisper of a Solarpunk future that I'm begging to happen. So I'm doing it, I'm shifting my website & associated blogs and what not over to gemini, and with a fair bit of code cribbing from ~ianmjones I've got it all set up to build and deploy on gemini, as well as a mirror on HTTP (with some swish lightweight CSS added to boot). => gemini://ianmjones.com ~ianmjones on gemini In the grand scheme of things, this post is purely test out that these builds and my configuration is all correct, so thank you reader for being a guinea-pig for this experiment. Till next time