Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Consume, Consume, Consume, Create

    At the end of the day, when the kid is asleep, I sit down in front of the TV and hours go by.

    The algorithm tells me to consume, so I consume. The strength needed to fight it isn't there.

    It never ends. Consume, consume, consume, consume.

    Then it's time for bed. Repeat, evening after evening.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Meta-Interaction

    The context here is the close similarity between the human-moderated world of a Role Playing Game and the virtual world of a MUD (or MU* or MMORPG or the term now in fashion). The author draws a line between (the otherwise very close) human worlds and virtual worlds in that virtual worlds have automation and rules that do not exist or may be sloppily applied out in meat popsicle space. A Dungen Maestro may for example fudge the dice rolls when they know the story should go a certain way; the similar modification of the RNG in a computer rules system would likely be considered an exploit and would likely get you banned.

  • 💻 Low tech and open (non-)books

    [Meta] Since I have a few different kinds of topics I would like to write about, I've decided to prefix some titles with an icon to represent the domain of discourse of a post. It should usually be evident from the title, but I imagine the icon sets the tone quite appropriately, at least for myself in writing the post. I have been planning on writing on social issues and on gardening, but I haven't come around to it because computer programming has taken so much of my mind space, and it usually does when writing on the computer. Oh well.

  • August

    Not much computing in August. I decided to have ACTUAL holidays. In last (many) years it was rather different. Few one-day trips but mostly being at work (or working from home) all the time. Not as actively as normally but working.

  • URL filtering HTTP(S) proxy on Qubes OS

  • Some more notes on the “wireless service unit”

    After much experimentation, I found out that the “wireless service unit” the Monopolistic Phone Company sent us [1] to replace the DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) does in fact support multicasting [2], although it's a bit more pedantic about it than any other router I've encountered so far. The address I used to use, 239.255.0.1, falls into the “administratively scoped” category of multicast addresses, and I picked it because I wanted a multicast address that was scoped. The “wireless service unit” isn't something I fully control, so it rejected that range of multicast addresses. In fact it appeared that it didn't like any multicast address that could, in theory, be routed.

    Of course it exhibited different behavior with different blocks. Most of the blocks it would work for just under five minutes, then fail. I found this out by writing some very simple programs—one to send some data once per second to a multicast address, and one to receive the data. I would run the sender on two computers, and the listeners also on the two computers. Both the listeners would receive data from both senders, and then as they approached five minutes, they would only receive multicast packets from the sender running on the same computer.

  • Software Releases/Announcements

    • Hunchbin version 1.0.6 released

      Hunchbin is a self hosted snippet service, and file dropper, aimed at textmode browsers. It also features temporarily bookmarks. It doesn't use JavaScript.

      Add snippets, files, or bookmarks to Hunchbin, to be saved temporarily.

      Hunchbin assigns an individual expire date to every item, calculated using a default expire period.

      When the expire date is reached, the item will be deleted.

      The expire date of any item can be changed, either by postponing it with a number of days, or by adding a number of days to the current date.