Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ACYNOVH Wordo: OCHER

• Technology and Free Software

  • Some things no one is focused on regarding genAI

    Again, no in-depth analysis this time but rather some observations. First, it really looks like all the craziness going on in the world right now is merely a distraction from something bigger. GenAI is no exception. Everyone is taking about the new grift called "Project Stargate", about DeepSeek vs. OpenAI, about whether or not AGI/ASI is reachable and what it even is, about agents/superagents/duperagents... But in fact, all that seems to be nothing more than an information shroud for the people to turn off their critical thinking and not look at the real state of things as of today. And the real state of things is, everything is coming to the repetition of 100-year-old history, only now the totalitarian governments (who, of course, will never openly admit they are totalitarian) will have a lot more technical capabilities to pursue their goals of mass surveillance and control. T

  • UI design is teh hard

    Lots of software has this bad; someone on the Orange Site was complaining that copying text off some web page was difficult; practically every character had a link or some other means of defeating the copy. You wanted a minefield of popups, right? Or here's a space boat game that helpfully scrolls the list such that the highlighted item is no longer readable, forcing one to scroll the list back up to where it was. Nice!

  • Open Ear Headphones

    Some particularly loud neighbours have reminded me of how annoying noisy neighbours can be. Fridays and Saturdays tend to involve some music after the common decency time of 10pm and so I have been using headphones more. The issue I find is that I then don't hear noises as I do thinks and so it becomes disorientating. The weirdest part was not hearing liquid pouring.

    Years ago, I had a pair of wired Shokz bone conducting headphones. They are knackered now but I wanted to return to something like that. A swift search on their site and I ended up deciding that open ear were an option. Prices made me nervous though. �100 is more than I want to spend to give something a go. I ended up finding a pair of similar devices from Soundcore, the audio arm of Anker, for the princely sum of �30. Now that is worth a punt.

  • 2025 Week 1/2/3/4: Status and Photos

    My PlanetComputers Gemini PDA is stuck on Debian Stretch due to proprietary Linux kernel patches for its processor, and as such it hasn't received updates since 2021. I wanted to try running Reticulum on it, but the most recent version of Python available from the repositories was 3.5, and the last version of Reticulum that targeted 3.5 is too out of date. Fortunately, I was still able to compile Python 3.9 on the PDA, and that allows me to run the current version of Reticulum. Soon, though, even Python 3.9 will reach end of life--will I still be able to network with the PDA after that date?

    My weight stagnated this week, drifting slightly upward by 0.4 pounds. I aim to redouble my efforts to eat well. Especially over the last few days, I've let myself slack off. More regular water consumption should help too.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • smolZINE - Issue 42

      This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

      [...]

      Hello geminispace, hope you have been well. Finally getting another issue out, yay!

    • IndieWeb Musings.....

      So I'm over on Neocities just having a grand old time, uploading old web 1.0 sites I wrote 20 years ago, and I've pulled them all together with a retro-looking Netscape front end, only I call it Skeeternet. Anywho, it keeps me out of trouble on Facebook because lately all you need to do is post about your oatmeal breakfast and 50 friends jump in your tree becausue you obviously don't care about French Toast.

      So while everyone is bolting for BlueSky, I said you know what? I'm not going. Every time something new comes up... Mastadon, CounterSocial... they all end up coming back to Facebook and all the drama starts again. So as I joke I went back to Neocities and made myself an asocial media page called Skeeterbook where I post and nobody can like or comment and it's absolutely glorious (snicker). When I shared an image of it on FB just for fun, I actually had people ask me, "How do I join?", "Is it federated?", and, "How do I subscribe?"

  • Programming

    • Devlog 3

      I managed to catch some sleep this morning, so I've been back on it again today. I needed a break from applying to jobs I know I won't get. Let's see what I did today.

      [...]

      Today has mostly been about setting up auth for the different endpoints. I have a naïve JWT implementation that works for a single user deployment, but I still need to add checks to ensure that the requesting user is authorized to see the content they're looking at. I'll probably need to think about admin routes as well at some point.

      In addition to setting up JWT I've also implemented a rudimentary token refresh mechanism for the frontend client. Users will be assigned an access token and a refresh token when they log in. The access token will expire every hour and a new one will be generated as long as the refresh token is valid. Once it's not, they get kicked out. I need to think about how I want to handle this so that the refresh token can be renewed if the session is still valid. That's for another day.

      I now have a working register/login/logout flow that will enable people to create accounts and authenticate themselves. This bit was surprisingly easy to do (which probably means I did it wrong), but at least I can now test my middleware to make sure it works as expected.

    • Devlog 2

      Building on from what I did the other day, I've improved the performance of my database queries by introducing indexes for the most-used queries. I've also updated the SQL code to use named parameters so I don't look back at the code later and forget what parameter is being passed.

      I've rewritten the "column" logic to instead build everything on top of linked lists. A column is essentially an ordered linked list anyhow, and using this approach on the backend allows me to easily display things in either columns or lists, which is a goal of the design. It remains to be seen whether my logic is right. I never was good with data structures.