Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: IMNOYTR Wordo: DESEX

• Technology and Free Software

  • Crypto rant

    After reading some texts and watching some videos (and making some transactions), I can suggest the following use cases for cryptocurrencies:

    1) Scams, gambling and currency speculation

    I think this is pretty clear. You are either one who wants easy money and actually loses money, or you are a big fish who know what they are doing and take money from the first one.

    2) Illegal activities

    Child porn, extortion, u name it. Condemn.

  • MNT Pocket Reform progress

    There have been some changes both on the hardware and the software side. The hardware part was quite important yet simple: the current CPU module has a WiFi chip without any cooling. As the CPU is relatively hod (at least for the ARM) the WiFi part is hot, too - and it seems to work bad when hot. So the quick fix is to add a small thermal pad (about 2 mm thick) so the chip will be connected to the heatsink. The long-term solution would be to use a cooler CPU.

    Software part includes many fixes and updates so the cloning script (which moves OS from the EMMC to the NVME) now forks flawlessly. This is important also because if te EMMC is not used then the whole CPU module is cooler.

  • Devil mode in Emacs on the console

    Emacs on the console comes with some challenges because several key bindings can't be used, like `C-h k'.

    Recently, "But she is a girl" posted a interesting article on their blog [1]. It is about using `devil mode' on Emacs [2], written by Susam.

    This mode allows you to use the comma key in Emacs commands to replace the control key. The mode is clever enough to let you type a comma when needed, so nothing is lost.

  • More Meshtastic Nodes

    This is a random smattering of details about the nodes I have now set up and what I’ve learned in working with them. It’s a mess, but I wanted to capture it before going to bed.

    As I mentioned in a previous note I have some Heltec v1 boards. In another note I had mentioned building Meshtastic from source. You can probably see where this is going. But this was all after I bought some Heltec V3 boards. I bought one v3 for myself and two more for friends. At this point, we have all loaded up Meshtastic on our V3 boards and have stable relays by way of MQTT from the Heltec v3 clients to our t-decks. We don’t live close enough to each other to use just the mesh, so we use the internet.

  • Migrating

    I'm currently migrating my personal project server from an older Ubuntu server to a Debian server.

    It's been good as a reminder to me of what I actually set up, and how I did it. Plus an opportunity to clean a few things up.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Fixing more Apache errors

      To me, this is obviously a crawler, despite claiming to be every possible web browser in existance—is it Windows? MacOS? Linux? Yes. But what's interesting is that all the errors seem related to serving up images.

      The way my blog [4] works, all requests to posts are fed through mod_blog, and if said request is for an image, it just copies the file out [5]. It works, but if the server gets slammed just a bit too hard, it breaks down. If only there was some way to get Apache to serve the images directly instead of having to go through mod_blog.

      Wait! There is!

      I've been using Apache for well over twenty-five years now, so it was a relatively easy issue to solve. First off, point Apache to the directory where all the data for mod_blog is stored.

    • Summer Doldrums [Ed: Microsoft Bing is drowning in its LLM slop, rendering it useless]

      I went looking for some internet help setting up my new longbow, and 80% of the page one hits on DuckDuckGo were AI-generated web pages, uncanny nonsense pictures included. Google has been a burning pile of SEO garbage for years, but now DDG seems to be failing as well. The larger web is no longer a place to go for accurate information on anything. Supposedly there are new AI tools coming that can help fix the mess made by the first set of AI tools, but surely the circular insanity of this is obvious to all parties involved.

  • Programming

    • Chapter Eight: Tables and Polymorphism

      Janet tables are very similar to JavaScript objects, and they fill the same roles in the language: you can use a table as a primitive associative data structure, or you can use tables to emulate “instances” of a “class.” As a matter of fact, Janet tables are *so* similar to JavaScript objects that I’m not going to try to explain them from first principles — instead, I’m just going to describe how they differ.

      Remember that tables come in both mutable (“table”) and immutable (“struct”) varieties, but I’m going to use the term “table” loosely to mean “one of Janet’s associative data structures.” They’re exactly the same, apart from the mutability bit.