Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • A poetry recital

    This is how I introduced a recent performance at one of those full night events that opened at 10 pm, supposed to go on till six in the morning, except that by 7 am the last act hadn't even entered the stage and I felt compelled to leave. I was fortunate to be scheduled a few hours earlier.

• Science

  • The Value of Raking

    Simply raking the ground (or, thatch, more accurately) helps wildflowers to grow.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • foogle

      It's another Big G rant I am extremely angry/frustrated at 3 entities, though the one that could have stopped it before it happened is Big G.

      This time, it's about their horseshit "pay for placement" strategy. I have not used Big G Search for years. Years. My mom is not so savvy. I told her she needed to renew her LP registration because it expires at the end of this month. So instead of going to the fucking state DMV site, she just types some horseshit into Big G, unbeknownst to me. That was this afternoon, about 6 hours ago.

      Then she gets a receipt from ee tee ay gee ess dot com. She says, "Oh, I guess I paid way too much. Oh, well. It's fine." No, I told her. It's not fine. Now I have to spend thankfully my excess free time now searching for this horseshit site to see if it's a scam. Nothing but negative reviews. So it is a scam in spirit if not in actual practice. I told her she needs to contact her bank to stop the payment. She only realized this recently and it was outside business hours so she didn't call them. I told her she needs to call them because they may have a 24-hour support line. As she suspected, they were closed.

      [...]

      While my mom and certainly the fucking scammish site are definitely to blame, I blame a shit-ton of this on Big G. They have every opportunity to turn down scams or vet these businesses, but they don't. No, just throw whatever nominal fee G charges and you're given priority treatment without regards to facts or anything.

    • Resources for Retro Systems with Old or Absent SSL/TLS Support

      This is pretty self-explanatory, I've been looking for old or no-encryption resources I can comfortably use with my Debian Lenny desktop, either web or gopher. If you have any to add to this list, let me know at bofh _at_ unixlore.net!

  • Software Releases/Announcements

    • VF-1 1.0.0 is here!

      Upgrade using pip, or pipx, or whatever other nonsense has been foisted upon you! Or just clone the repo from https://git.sr.ht/~solderpunk/VF-1 and just stick the one standalone .py file somewhere in your $PATH. Fire it up and head to https://git.sr.ht/~solderpunk/VF-1 and gaze upon the majesty of the pre-formatted man pages available over Gopher itself!

    • VF-1 1.0.0 is here!

      I'll make another post in the coming days with more actual information about changes I made. I just wanted to get this post made ASAP to prove that I did, in fact, do what I swore I would and got 1.0.0 out this year.