Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — AIMQUSR Wordo: LAMER

  • xkcd — 3116

  • the unfamiliar half

    I search for familiar faces
    among strange names
    try to find just one 
    that looks like the parts of me
    I can't place
    I wonder where they buried you
    does someone still bring flowers
    or are you forgotten
    has your gravestone 
    already been replaced
    without me visiting once
    I told myself I didn't care
    but I often think about 
    how swiftly my mother said
    I wouldn't have known you 
    either way
    did you know I was coming
    would it have mattered
    would I have been the change
    that made the difference
    

• Politics and World Events

  • Making News Headlines out of Statistical Noise

    The press story around the newest CPI figures is excitable and significantly over-interprets the data.

    "UK inflation figures showed a surprise upward change between May and June, CPI rising 3.6 per cent" says The Standard in yesterday's lede on the inflation story. But this massively misinterprets the reality.

    First, CPI is presented usually as a rolling annual figure, so it compares prices with the same time last year. But I suppose that a headline screaming 'Prices surge by 0.2% in a month' wouldn't cause such frothing.

    Second, the CPI doesn't measure prices per se, but only samples prices across a selection of locations and items, introducing sampling bias, measurement errors and statistical uncertainties. This is the reason that the published figures are always rounded to the nearest decimal place, but even so the figures are often revised in subsequent months as more data comes in.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Response to Sloum's 'O Pioneers Post

    Thanks to Sloum for the mention [0] of Willa Cather's "'O Pioneers!" [1]. I had not heard of this book before, but it looks interesting to me as someone who likes historical fiction. I found it is part of a trilogy of books called "The Prairie Trilogy", all of which were written in the early 20th century, and are in the public domain in nicely formatted versions from standardebooks.org (just do an author search). So, downloaded and on my to-read list!

    [0]: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~sloum/phlog/2025-07-10.txt

    [1]: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/O%20Pioneers!

  • Internet/Gemini

    • "Goodreads for Gemini"

      Here's a free idea for an enterprising developer with way too much time on their hands: Make Bookwyrm for Gemini. Bookwyrm is a federated (i.e. connected to the Fediverse) alternative to Goodreads that lets you build reading lists and write reviews for books.

    • Bringing the Butlerian Jihad to Gemini

    • Gemini, we need to talk about community

      Gemini, I've been reading about this decline of Gemini and the Small Web, as of lately and we need to talk about community. There are people building the infrastructure, there are people building on that infrastructure: posting articles, sharing stories, poems, little slices of life and so on. When I do that on Gemini, Gopher or the small web, I do it with two expectations.

    • First post: introducing Scandinavian Retro

      There we go, I've set up the companion capsule to my new Peertube channel Scandinavian Retro. I plan to create video content covering 80s and 90s home computers, with the occasional appearance of other electronic equipment from the same era, legacy internet protocols and the small web and a bit of pinball maintenance. Maybe a typewriter or two.

      This is a small-web first and fedi first endeavour. Hence the choice for Peertube and a Gemini capsule as the primary source of companion information.

    • The small web is not dead

      This is me chiming in as well. I have only recently joined Gemini space, but am here to stay. Just today I added my second capsule, and I intend to move more and more towards 'Gemini first' content, with optionally (but not always) a mirror the world wide web.

      I might not (yet) be an active developer helping to build out the Gemini ecosystem, nor may I be building services hosted on Gemini.

      But, I am, in my own modest way, publishing content. And more than that, every day I read the new posts on the many gemlogs and learn a thing or two or become inspired by what others are writing. Something I haven't experienced elsewhere on the internet in a long time.

    • Re: I will stay on the small web

      After I saw a few of those posts on BBS I too started thinking about the idea that the smolweb was "dying." I know I got interested in gemini two years ago, got everything setup for my own server. I run both my personal "life" capsule as well as one for my amateur radio use which I then proxy to http for the rest of the world to see. For being a web developer I never really liked doing web development. So making content for the smolweb felt much more like home.

      But the more I think about it, what really is the major difference between smolweb services like gemini and the rest of the WWW? Its the availability of new content. Some of the most hit up sites on the larger web are places like Reddit that just aggregate other sites and facilitate discussion. Blog posts are a dime a dozen and most people don't really subscribe to any individual author. There has been more of a push for blogging type services, people moving from Medium to SubStack, but even there, as a consumer it feels more like filling up a queue where 90% of it ends up being noise and you skip content for the few diamonds in the rough. People posting trying to get you to subscribe when I think to myself "you want monthly payments when I find once a year worthy content?"

    • OCC - Logging into ICQ and a Links Update

      I have been thinking about chat clients that I could use on the OCC box, and as luck would have it, today I read Matto's post on ICQ and nina.chat [0]. Although I did not remember my old ICQ number, I picked a random one and signed up under #8174290. The old version of pidgin that comes with Debian Lenny connected with no issue, all I had to do was select ICQ from the new account type list. Hop on and say hi!

      One tip - after you create your nina.chat account, go into your account settings and add a legacy client password. This legacy password worked for me to login to their ICQ server at login.oscar.nina.chat, port 5190, and of course I do not have to worry about this password being compromised, since it is different from my nina.chat account password.