Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: UILMSTB Wordo: TIMER

• Politics and World Events

  • Old Files

    In 2011, the Arab Spring blossomed in the Middle East, the left-populist Occupy Wall Street movement took over Zucotti Square in New York City, the right-populist Tea Party movement sought to change US politics from the inside, and the 4chan-based hacking group Anonymous published a PDF document called "Anonymous Survival Guide for Citizens in a Revolution."^ Yesterday afternoon I found the PDF on my NAS, tucked away in a very old downloads directory.

    The guide, more a rough outline than a full manual, was at its core a a survival guide. However, instead of being written with simple disaster preparedness in mind, it included tips on surviving political turmoil: riots, government surveillance, and repression. Egypt and Libya had erupted into violence by then--they were cited in the document itself--and activist groups around the world shared and archived the guide to help civilians in danger. Updates to the guide were promised, but from what I can tell, they never came. Only the 1.0 version has been archived.

• Technology and Free Software

  • GNU/Linux has changed. And that’s good

    I got my first laptop in, I think, 2006. It was a fujitsu amilo. I remember this because I chose “amilo” for its hostname when I installed Debian on it. I’m not a particularly creative person, necessarily. Didn’t buy a new one until mid-2010’s. A Toshiba Satellite. You can play guess the hostname, you won’t be disappointed.

    This toshiba is still in use nowadays. We’re watching a series from a usb hard drive on it right now. And at the same time, I’m connected to it via ssh and writing this post on it. In the same screen[a] session, I have open an amfora browser where I’m reading Ploum’s[b] old english gemlog entries (my french is a bit rusty, reading french is doable, but I’d end up with a slight headache :D), offpunk to see if I get the hang of it, an ssh session to tilde.team[c] and another one to texto-plano.xyz[d].

  • I hate voicemail 📞

    If I called you, it's because I needed to speak to you. I could have sent you a message in any number of ways, but I chose not to do so BECAUSE I NEEDED TO SPEAK TO YOU. So no, I do not want to leave a message.

  • Night of Lights

    In theory I'm coming to you from across my house via light beam communications.

    [ But I wasn't, I ran into more software configuration gotchas when moving from sending/receiving with one laptop running very old Linux, to transmitting from my 'new' laptop running current Devuan Linux. First was that I forgot that specifying characters as hexidecimal codes with "echo -e" is a Bashism, so didn't work with /bin/sh which is symlinked to /bin/bash on the other laptop. More difficult was working out why the sending would stop after a while. It turns out the kernel serial driver now has a default time-out of 30sec for the serial port buffer to clear before it's forced closed. Since I was using really slow baud rates, it always timed out before the end of the file was transmitted. This isn't the domain of stty, so I needed to install setserial with which the time-out can be bumped up to 20min with: sudo setserial /dev/usb/ttyUSB0 closing_wait 120000

    So now on the 6th of Feb, another warm night full of dive-bombing mozzies, I'm having another go at sending this post through my house and out into cyberspace through nothing more than some flashes of light.