Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: EGHIOTU Wordo: JAUNT

  • Hello chadobear world

    I've had this capsule running for almost a week, now. It's hard for me to make time to sit and create things at my keyboard -- a three-year-old and eleven-month-old make strong demands on my attention -- but I find myself captivated by geminispace.

    It's the vibes, the feel, the a e s t h e t i c.

    To browse geminispace, I feel like I have to "log on." Maybe I'll uninstall the client apps I have on my phone. Maybe it's better if I only come here via a keyboard and monitor. A "terminal".

  • 🔤SpellBinding — BDOILNF Wordo: STORE

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ATFHMSC Wordo: CLOSE

• Technology and Free Software

  • On Advertising

    Yet no matter how hard I protest (mostly cursing under my breath or running an adblocker or disabling advertising cookies), the companies which fund advertising activities have the statistical edge on me (and you too). I may be able to escape the attentional clutches of ads for one site, for one show or one moment. But they never tire of shoving things into my face. They only have to show me something in a moment of weakness or hunger or boredom. They can bombard me. Sure, I can raise my shield, but eventually my arm will wear out and they will strike me.

    I believe the shift to advertisement-centred monetization is a symptom of the overabundance-culture of the West. I will touch on the superabundance in a different gemlog post, but in short the vast majority of the West knows effectively no need compared to those 100 years ago in the same place. We have no conceptualization nor experience of famine. Sure, crops may fail in Kansas, but a farmer in Nebraska or Iowa still produces enough for the nation to get by on comfortably.

  • Git as Decentralized Archival

    The state of the modern Internet, and our inability to escape centralized control of it, is concerning to me. Thus, I like using FOSS decentralized tools that cover a broad range of technological use cases, from Syncthing to Reticulum to Session to NNCP to Yggdrasil and more.

    Most of these tools publish their source code via GitHub. Many members of the FOSS community don't trust GitHub, as it is a proprietary platform owned by Microsoft, and it is known to provide data to train Microsoft's Copilot AI coding tool. More disturbingly, even before its acquisition by Microsoft in 2018, GitHub has had a spotty history in standing up for developer freedom, including removing the repos for Popcorn Time, Aurous, Widevine decyptors, youtube-dl (albeit not permanently), and others.

    Fortunately, all of these tools and repos have one thing in common: they are managed by git. git was created primarily to version-control software in a decentralized way, but it has turned out to be fantastically robust for a variety of uses, and it can be applied to any project where prior iterations of data need to be stored.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • AWS Hosting

      As some of you know I've struggled with tildes hosting my games, and finally gave up and signed up for AWS a week ago. Why AWS? I don't really know, but given their size and breadth (encompassing a good chunk of the Internet) I figured it is likely to at least be reliable.

      My attempts to get a cheap host at some barely-known place or one of the German facilities failed miserably. Also, unsurprisingly, trying to sign up for Oracle was a disaster with four $1.00 holds on my credit card while telling me my credit card was no good and customer service never responding.

      In the meantime, my t3.micro instance has been a blessing. I cannot think of a single complaint -- I spun it up knowing nothing about AWS to full steam in maybe 10 minutes. It is friggin fast (after dealing with tildes) and my utilization is almost always 0.0! Since I am not running all the crap you see when doing a ps on a tilde, this machine has infinite resources for me.