Short one today. When tunelling into a remote server using SSH, I used to use -NfL. -N doesn't run a shell, -f goes into the background, and -L is used to forward a local port to a remote one. But nowadays I just use -L. That way, to check if the connection is still up, I can just press Enter on the shell prompt and get a quick sense of the latency to boot. And of course you can't do that if the connection is in the background.

-D is useful too. It opens a SOCKS proxy on your local machine, which in turn lets you point your browser's proxy settings at your local machine to use for censorship circumvention or as a VPN to access your remote's local network or whatever.

Some people think that "it/its" pronouns are only used to dehumanize others, but they do it all the time. And I don't just mean nonbinary it/she puppygirls (which I'm totally not stop asking >_<). It's not just babies either (although I do believe babies have no gender). I was outside an office one time, with a few other clients, waiting for the office to open up. One of us asked "who is it?" referring to the person in the office. Or I'll be with friends, and one of them will ask me who my friend is by saying "who's that?"

These are pronouns clasically thought of as referring to objects. But I really want to normalize their use to refer to people too. To go back to babies for a sec, people get really persnickety about others "misgendering" their little kids. But like, do they even have gender to begin with? I don't think that has quite established in the minds of people so young yet. And it's not like they exhibit any of the sex characteristics we associate with gender either. 🤷‍♀️So like, please refer to your babies with it/its (or they/them) pronouns.

Also please stop being uptight about your dog's gender. That's some nonsense. I don't even ask for their genders and just default to it/its. If someone specifies "her name is Roxy" I'll comply but it doesn't fucking matter.

So, besides ICANN wanting to phase out .su by 2030, it looks like Russia is getting stricter with their domains. Basically since I'm not Russian, just a vaguely communist person who thinks a Soviet Union domain is pretty cool, it would cost me twice the price to keep willow.su, and I wouldn't be able to transfer it either. Fortunately, willow.al (as in Albania) is cheap and it gels as "willow at large". Unfortunately it looks like registration is handled manually lol. Also there's no WHOIS server, which I didn't even know is allowed :O

I don't like this domain as much as my .su but I guess all good things must come to an end.

The site

In case you missed the footer, this is using Nikola. I wanted something lightweight and fast, so I was gonna go with Hugo, but I find Go's text/template rather annoying to work with. So I tried out Pelican briefly, but apparently it doesn't do incremental compilation very well, and that is important to me. Next I looked at Nikola and I quite like it! It does support incremental compilation (although it's kinda slow to start up, so that may not pay off for a while) and it uses Jinja which I quite adore <3

The comments

Getting comments on here was quite a journey. I wanted something that federated over ActivityPub, so I first tried Pinka but I couldn't get it to federate properly. So then I tried Leah's Mastodon-API fetching script along with GoToSocial and a read-only API key. Turns out there's a bug in that script which doesn't allow top level comments from other servers. At this point I was running out of options, so I ended up just going with Isso, which is an old Python project that just does local comments and nothing else. I really wanted federation though, but I figure this is even lower friction because it doesn't require an account.