Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • promise

    whatever happens, this is not our downfall. life is not a staircase to climb, or a marathon to finish. it is an ocean. it has islands, and it has waves. you might land on an island, stay there for a while. sometimes, you need to let that island go. you leave at sunset. the waves are calm. then you sail for a while. you go days, weeks without another island. you want to fall, and give in to the waters. promise me that you will not. and then, you will meet the waves. they will try to tear you apart, take your sail, spoil your supply. sometimes, you will prevail. sometimes, you will not. and you will go without a direction for many days and nights. promise me that you will look at the stars and find hope in their light. promise me that you will feel the south wind on your bruised face and tend to your wounds. sometimes, the waves will be so high and the rain will be so heavy that you *will* fall. and there you will be without a ship, or a compass, or any hope. promise me that you will take the helping hand of the hard-working fishermen and the benevolent pirates.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: HNOSYWU Wordo: TRAIT

  • Brief departure from Tolkien to read Don Quixote

    One of the few books where I’ve laughed aloud in public. It’s a great springtime read.

  • Tired

    All day tired, I can't sleep well at night, trying to exercise is more difficult when you didn't sleep well, I already booked some days off at work for a few week but I don't know if those would be enough.

• Photos

  • Blumenfotos

    I'm so happy to have these cherry blossoms in the school yard accross the road.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Live Off the Land

    The phrase "live off the land" struck me.

    Yes, live off the land. Give up on installation and customization. Assume your environment has all the tools and support you need. Your task is to figure out how to make best use of what you've already got.

    At NASA, they call it "in-situ resource utilization". In the arts, they call it "bricolage". Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. Make it up. Make do.

  • Let it be as simple as it can be... but no simpler

    The topic of "hand" or pen and paper ciphers turns out to be much vaster than I initially thought. Even in the modern era, new designs are constantly popping out. Some of them are made just for fun and don't imply a lot of security (being used, like, at school or for geocaching purposes), while others are seriously preparing for even more dystopian scenarios than we already are living in. The main problem of the second group of such ciphers is a great deal of inconvenience: either with key material distribution if we're talking about one-time pads, or, if we're talking about something else, with encryption/decryption process itself which usually is too slow and/or error-prone. Today, I'd like to focus on a single case of taking a for-fun cipher from the first category and applying some slight modifications to it in order to successfully (in my opinion) move it into the second category without increasing the complexity too much. Let's go!

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Seven Days Without Y*utube

      By accident I came across a video of a boy talking about `extreme minimalism'. Part of his experience was what he called a 30 day long youtube detox.

      At a first glance this does not seem too difficult. I have not visited the actual website youtube.com since something like 2020, but have since designed my own video-consuming work-flow that makes use of various misfit programs such as dmenu, yt-dlp, and various front-ends that work in links2. Subscriptions are handled in RSS by newsboat.

      The boy said there is a lot of bloat on youtube, but that there also are many valuable things. I don't know if I agree with the latter, but I want to see if I'm video-content addicted.

    • Psst... Geminaut, want some comments?

      I finally made a python script to enable commenting in a capsule on any page. The goal was simplicity. In theory, all you need is Python3, a CGI server, and write access to the directory. Perhaps you can adapt this script to your CGI server.

    • Thoughts about TOFU and gemini URLs

      Sorry for not posting for many months. I was busy with finding a new job and reinstalling rasbian, since some packages on my bullseye got too old.

      I thought about alternative to how to provide some semblence of trust that certificate was in fact created by authour of capsule without centralized points of authority: embedding fingerprints into gemini URLs in place of userinfo component. This way validity of certificate would be determined not by luck or by capital, but by community consensus. It seems to me that it is much harder to modify not only every single certificate, but also to keep track of how they were modified.

    • Thoughts about TOFU and gemini URLs

      But there is a flaw in this idea: tls certificates are mandated to expirie at some point. Sure, one could set them to expire at some absurt point in the future since there is no Certificate Authority to dictate its policy, but it seems dirty to me. Perhaps there is such a thing as perpetual x509 certificates or gemini could move to ssh (yeah, sure) or we could all agree to just ignore expiration in clients, but I am not sure which is better and if any of these choices are better that status-quo.

    • [17] if i'd discovered bear blog sooner, i'd probably have loved it

      i've seen mentions of a "bear blog" two or so times in the past few days, which prompted me to go have a looksie. i like blogging. and bears are very cute! put those two together, and you get quite the silly image in your head!! part of the reason why it got my interest was mostly because of the funny name. bear blog... haha :)