Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AWGINUF Wordo: DYING

• Politics and World Events

  • Different Perspectives and Politics

    I avoid topics of politics for multiple reasons, despite my interest in the beliefs of others.

    Like belief systems, politics tend to be tightly integrated with a person’s identity.

• Science

  • The Hallucinatory Thoughts of the Dying Mind

    It's strange to think we're halfway through the decade. Time, since 2016 and especially since 2020, has felt strangely stretched: the sense that everything has been happening increasingly quickly, while at the same time, anything that happened prior to, you know, is increasingly faint. Like a lot of people, I was fortunate to spend the worst part of the pandemic holed up at home. I'm lucky: I have a partner I love (and who loves me), dogs that need regular exercise outdoors, as well as, at the time, a job that went remote fast, and stayed that way, at least for a few years.

    But life doesn't stop because everything else does, and fifteen hundred miles to the west of me, things were getting worse for my grandfather. Suffering from memory loss and cognitive slowness that turned into dementia, things worsened for him, quickly. Ten years before the pandemic, I stopped to visit with my partner while we were on a trip to Vancouver Island. I could tell he was off, and having to think about things, but that was the extent of it. Eight years later we were in Vancouver to see Hozier play at the Orpheum (incidentally, one of the great concerts of my life), and I extended my trip to be able to stop and see my grandparents before taking the ferry to visit the rest of my family. At that point, I knew things were bad: he was driving, but definitely shouldn't have been; he was trapped in loops, asking me when I was going to marry my partner (happily, he never forgot who I was, or her).

• Technology and Free Software

  • laptop projects

    The pi 4 wasn’t originally going to be a laptop project, but I got a nice display as a gift. So I mounted the pi 4 to it and soon had a very useable Hyprland setup. I couldn’t get the gesture pane swapping to work, but then I don’t really like touching the screen anyway.

  • The NEW Fantasy Life Day

    Level 5 announced a release date for May, 21. Last release date was April, but they slipped it to May. They are going to simultaneously release on Switch, PC (Steam), PS4/5, and XBox. They’re going to support cross-play and cross-save progression.

    Early access is available Sunday of that week. Not sure if that’s Sunday in Japan or where. Once it’s possible to purchase it, I’ll have a better idea. It’s really expensive on Switch and has an option for a deluxe version that’s maybe $10 more.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • offpunk is my new favorite browser

      I’ve been touring various clients, but not many support client certs. This has kept me using Amfora and Lagrange, and made me wish I knew how to get Bollux to use a client cert. Lack of cert support in other clients is why I haven’t been using Bubble except to read posts. Since Amfora is a finished product and the author is done playing with Gemini, I’m kind of looking for something new anyway. The UI for the TUI version of Lagrange is far too heavy for me. And the graphical Lagrange keeps crashing. I’ll describe that better below, after I mention certs in Offpunk.

    • Lagrange

      As Lagrange is the leading browser for the Gemini protocol, I would like to ask: what about the missed close_notify warning, as specified in the Gemini protocol documentation?

      This is not the first time I have encountered a server that could not be opened in my client (Yoda), and it is not the only one (Geopard). I don't think this is a bug; rather, it would be beneficial if Lagrange could notify server administrators about the missing close_notify signal implementation.

    • Many capsules don't send TLS close_notify

      Recently, Agunua started to throw an error when connecting to certain Gemini capsules:

      OpenSSL.SSL.Error: [('SSL routines', '', 'unexpected eof while reading')]

      It turns out that this has to with the release of OpenSSL 3. OpenSSL no longer tolerates TLS connections that don't shut down with a close_notify message, as per the TLS specification. So now things will break (as they should!) until people fix their servers.