Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • big brain dump 2

    * de-condition myself from treating buying as a source of entertainment or a mood boost

• Science

  • Milky Way history off by 5 billion years

    Analysis of Gaia data leads researchers to adjust the collision history of the Milky Way by 5 Ga. The takeaway here is that secular astronomers have a very clear picture of the formation and history of the universe, but sometimes they can be off by a few billion years, give or take.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Emacs: Torifying Elfeed (publ. 2024-06-20)

    Currently I use elfeed as my feedreader for Web feeds. (I use a different system for gemini feeds.) There are some other approaches in Emacs I might explorer later, like Gnus feed backends, but for now elfeed is convenient. The only thing that bothered me about using elfeed is that the fetches are not routed through Tor (torified). Fortunately, this is easy to setup in elfeed, because elfeed uses cURL on the backend, which is SOCKS5 capable. This assumes you have the Tor daemon installed — an exercise left to the reader — and that you know what magic words to put into which variable.

  • The Dumbphone Experience

    When I went to dumbphone (Oct 2017, so more than six years ago now that I’m updating this), the model I got had an FM radio so I was like “OK that’s fine, I’ll switch from pods&music to listening to FM”. And that was frankly awesome! Until the headphone jack broke after a few months. And then I was like “OK that’s fine, I’ll just have to practice not having pods&music when I’m out and about.” And that was hell for the first few days but I ended up liking it.

  • Bad Encryption

    ABBA isn't very good when both AB and BA can decrypt the message, and the intent is that one of those pairs cannot decrypt what they just encrypted, which is probably mentioned in the libsodium documentation but is easy enough to miss

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Five years of Gemini!

      Today is the fifth anniversary of the public announcement of Project Gemini! In some sense, it's a bit of a strange one. On the one hand, from a personal perspective, and in terms of official project activity, it's been the busiest year in a while. There have been seventeen posts to this newsfeed since my "Four years of Gemini" post, whereas there were only five between it and "Three years of Gemini!". On the other hand, the number of people paying attention to official project activity feels smaller than ever. It's certainly not zero, I am certainly getting feedback and ideas and help on the stuff that's happening, and I'm certainly grateful for it. But I think it's clear that a great many of the people who were on the scene in the final days of the mailing list have not been patiently sitting around for the past few years for me to get my ducks in a row so they can return with just as much energy and vigour. That's not a complaint! To be honest, I mostly just feel a little silly for having made such a big deal about slowly building up momentum for working on the project again, trying to establish goals and schedules and systems, imagining a large, very heavily invested audience to be lurking. It all feels perhaps a bit overblown, relative to what might actually be needed, wanted, expected by the current community. Again, this is not a complaint. I think it's right and good and proper that for every person subscribed to this newsfeed, there are ten or more others who use a Gemini client on a regular basis but don't know or care that this newsfeed exists, because they're more interested in Geminispace than in the protocol itself; avid readers or writers, moreso than printing press or book binding geeks.

      [...]

      Lupa knows of 505,000 (half a million!) working Gemini URLs at present, up from about 425,000 this time last year, an increase of almost 20%. They are spread across roughly 2,750 capsules, up from about 2,500 last year, a 10% increase. Those capsules live at 1,800 domains, up from 1,700 last year (about a 6% increase), and those domains resolve to about 1,200 IP addresses, which is actually just the same as last year.