Gemini* and Gopher

• Politics and World Events

  • I Died as a Mineral

    I've always had a sneaky little suspicion that reincarnation is a true belief. As a very small child, perhaps four years old or younger, I had very vivid memories which seemed to be scenes from past lives. I don't wish to discuss them with anyone. Needless to say, they faded over the next seven or eight years. I don't have any particular theology propping up my beliefs, other than a strong hunch that there's something to the idea of past and future lives.

    But let's unpack this Rumi poem a bit. Regardless of whether or not you believe in the literal reincarnation of the soul into a new physical body, you'd agree with me that matter and energy are never created or destroyed; they only change form. At some point in the soon-after [1], the entity known as Chris Brannon is going to fully cease to exist in anything resembling their current form. That's a very pretentious way of saying that I'm fixin' to kick the bucket, to fly the coop, to buy the farm, to take the final curtain call, to shuffle off this mortal coil. When that happens, all that was Chris Brannon will go back to nature and the rest of the cosmos. That's just Newtonian physics that I learned in high school. Apparently there are theorems in quantum physics stating that information can never be lost. It seems to me that the soul is essentially information. Perhaps we have an eternal one after all? I don't know as much about this stuff -- specifically quantum physics and its implications or possibilities -- as I'd like to know.

  • I can’t think of an alternative to free speech

    While tankie communists understood right from the get-go that capitalist speech is dangerous (something that is painfully evident now that the world is burning on the funeral pyre of profit), the oppressive system they set up to stifle that speech immediely served corruption and lies and tyranny. When the people are being beaten by a stick, they’re not much happier if the stick is called Behemoth pulling the peasants’ plow.

    That’s the catch 22 here, how the solution might make the problem worse.

    I’ve expressed earlier how I’m not a fan of unbridled free speech; like Eric Idle I don’t believe in free speech for facists or abusers.

    I remember the so-called campus snowflakes who were seen as the biggest hreat to free speech ever just for trying to protest a fascist who was literally doxing local students from the stage, who was going beyond just expressing ideas or an ideology. How the right wing wailed and sobbed agaist these leftist so called safe-spacers while not saying peep one once the right started a real censorship wave. Because it’s free speech for me but not for thee.

• Technology and Free Software

  • A Game Interface for a non-Game

    This was originally a long post that I sent to a private Slack channel for Micropelago, but given that Slack's free-tier is now effectively ephemeral messaging I thought it would be good to clean it up and publish it. The post related to developing a GUI interface for Isle.

    A GUI is the next major step for Isle, that much is for sure; what form that GUI takes is the main question. Originally I had thought that a simple web interface which hit a local port would be the simplest solution, and probably it would be. One concern with the idea is security... right now access to the daemon's RPC endpoint is handled via filesystem permissions to the unix socket. If using a web interface the RPC endpoint would be essentially available to any user, and a different auth mechanism would be necessary. Tailscale had a critical vulnerability in this area as well [0]. Stuff like that makes me cautious.

  • The joy of physical audio

    I realise this is yet another post about how good physical media is, but what could another hurt?

    A couple of years ago I decided to start rebuilding my CD collection along with creating a small tape collection. This didn't come from a sense of nostalgia, but to help support acts. I listen to a tonne of small bands where any purchase helps keep them afloat as well as being a vote for them to continue producing music. We all know Spotify pays pittance and I've never felt that listening to an album stream really feels like having the album itself. I do still buy digitally through Bandcamp, which is my preferred way to buy from artists since they get a pretty good slice of the pie.

    Tapes, admittedly, were a bit of nostalgia but I enjoy the sound and it's often the easiest thing for a band to produce. There's something really nice about the sound of clapping your cassette onto the player and thunking the play button down.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • My Minimal Gemini Client

      I like to tinker with things by making my own scripts and programs in interpreted programs like Python. (Learning a compiled language like C or Go is something Iintend to do "eventually.") This often means that I reinvent the wheel in order to understand how the wheel works. Fortunately, with Gemini, the wheel isn't hard to reinvent.

      Others have written about how ncat can be used to browse Gemini without any further tooling. The following is my own wrapper around ncat, which outputs Gemini documents to stdout in a similar style to `cat`. It takes in one mandatory argument, which is a Gemini URL, but it can also take the path to an SSL certificate and key to make authenticated requests. The full request and response header are printed to stderr. The wrapper can handle long-living TCP connections and can thus stream data over Gemini. It's also POSIX compliant and should work in almost any shell.