Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — CGYINVH Wordo: MASHY

  • a little end of may diary

    it's rare that we actually get an appointment for viewing a flat, so it's wild to have gotten two in one week. alas, both are a no-go. but! when we went to see the first one, partner and i discovered a few new green areas to explore. as well as treating ourselves to some fried good ("5 generations of fryers!") delicious but slightly deadly. and toda the second flat had a dog-friend in it! they were sniffing my hand very intently. so that's another little bonus.

• Politics and World Events

  • Capitalism vs Space Communism

    While I think the space billionaires have gotten their timelines way out of order and I say that we must fix climate & sustainability before even looking to the stars, I do want future generations to get there eventually.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Some Brief Examples of the Unthinking Adoption of Technology (and a Solution?)

    In Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism he discusses the necessity of being intentional when adopting new technologies; He makes the critique that as a society and as individuals we adopt new technologies merely because we can, often without making a risk/reward assessment. The consequence of this is that we often find ourselves stuck with the consequences of a particular technology after it's already been widely adopted. In this article I want to discuss some examples and provide an alternative to uncritical technological adoption.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • NetCrawl

      Met a patron the other day who kept talking about NetCrawl [1], and how he was able to hack Nightfall City's street lights or phone lines with it. He seemed a little dense to be honest. He asked his cocktail to be made with a special coffee that comes from Brazil. A fascinating person!

    • Overcoming a Missing Molly Brown Feature

      Rather quickly after I setup a Gemini capsule I settled on Solderpunk's The Unsinkable Molly Brown as server software. I created a Docker container as I'm not a fan of running untrusted code on my publicly accessible server infrastructure. The container mounts /var/gemini, and the TLS certificate and key file read-only which restricts its ability to be harmful in the event it is ever compromised. Until recently the /var/gemini directory contained just a checked out copy of a private(ish) git repository containing all the files served and all was well.

      At some point libgit2 got upgraded and the ancient CGI script that I have serving the git repository broke because it refuses to open a repository that isn't owned by the process owner. My git hooks run as the git user but the container runs as a different UID which means that the checked-out copy of the repository isn't owned by the CGI script's EUID, causing it to fail.

    • Living in Lagrange

      The main takeaway for me was that you could comfortably use Lagrange for both the big web (kinda) and the smoll web. The lack of JS and HTML input support make for a read only web, perfect for when I need to focus or am using ferry wifi but YMMV.