Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — AHINVSR Wordo: UNTIL

• Technology and Free Software

  • Discover new music (without algorithms)

    If you're fed up with being kept in a bubble by algorithms, try something new, or actually something old. Discover new music by yourself.

    Ask your friends and family for recommendations. What have they been listening to? Probably Spotify, but what's their favourite band recently? Go to local music venues. Small bars, concerts around you. You can also get recommendations from professionals. There are still music magazines and blogs out there.

  • Making new system ROMs for a Macintosh Classic II

    During the restoration of my Performa 200, I ended up getting another Classic II for parts, to be able to isolate the issue I was having.

    It turned out that the system ROMs were dead in my machine. I could replace the ROMs from the machine I got for parts, but then I started feeling bad about leaving that poor Classic II by itself and wanted to repair it too. I had to find a way to get new system ROMs. Unfortunately it's almost impossible to find vintage Macintosh ROMs for sale, so the only option was to make my own ROMs by programming EPROMs.

  • Macintosh Classic II (Performa 200) Restoration

    I got a Macintosh Performa 200 for reasonably cheap, but in a pretty poor condition.

    It was sold as working, but I expected that some recapping work might be needed. Unfortunately when it got to me, it wasn't working any more. Then the seller admitted that it took a few minutes for it to boot after powering it on. From this it was clear that it was already on the verge of dying. It was dirty inside and outside, so it was very much due to give it some love. He offered to either buy it back or pay back half the price, which was a fair deal. I decided to keep and renovate it.

  • CD32WB - Making a Workbench CD for CD32

    I made a simple Workbench CD for the Amiga CD32, which can be used on an unexpanded machine. It needs no keyboard, can be used with only the joypad via an on screen keyboard. There are many game collection CDs available (some can even be used for listening .mods or watch .anims), but I missed the AmigaOS look'n'feel, so I made a system for myself.

  • Amiga CD32 - Console review

    The world's first 32Bit console. Well, technically Fujitsu released FM Towns Marty in Japan a few months earlier, but it had a 16Bit bus, so we could still give that credit to the CD32. The console looks surprisingly cheap, but also with some nice touches. It has a mixture of thoughtfullness and cheap costs savings. It was born in the last period of Commodore, thrown together in a desparate attempt as the company was trying to make money from the gaming market. Objectively speaking, the console itself is not a beauty, though to my biased eyes it looks pleasing.

  • The case for cassette tapes

    I like to listen to music in an old fashioned, analog way. I grew up among vinyl records and cassette tapes. Vinyl was already fading out, while cassettes were the now. I listened to my parents' tapes a million times and made my own mix tapes. I waited for the billboard charts and request-a-song programs on the radio and recoded my favourites. I also bought a fair share of original tapes from Virgin Megastore. I had my own tape recorder and a walkman I used to take to school and listen to music on the way or during school breaks.

    Years later when CDs became popular, I had a collection of CDs too and I burned many of my own CDs, but cassettes always had a special place in my heart.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Federated Fragmentation

      What's a quote post, and why would feature parity be a good thing? Micro.blog indicates they omit "like, boosts, and trending tags" to try to cut down on outage and popularity contests.

      Having to "visit a site" sounds like friction, is there not an RSS feed or equivalent to consume? Or some aggregator application that does the same with whatever complications social media sites seem to have invented?

  • Software Releases/Announcements

    • Oddμ v0.19 release

      I made a new Oddμ release. I added feed pagination. This happened after I started thinking about feeds as archives. Given that we're still facing the bots, I'm not sure this a great idea, but I guess I *want* this to be a good idea and I hate a timeline where discoverability and interoperability are hidden away because of the tech-bros and their authoritarian governments. The ​#Butlerian Jihad is ongoing, I know. But I don't want to write software while thinking about it all the time. I want to do both: Write the software I would like to use on the best timeline and still be ready to defend against abuse on the worst timeline.

  • Programming

    • A nex server written in C

      `nexserv` is a server for the nex protocol written in C and compiled with `sheepy` (more about sheepy in the links below).

      `nexserv` is a sheepy package and can be installed with `spm`:

      spm -g install nexserv

      The server configuration is on top of the source code.

      I'm running `nexserv` in my machine and it serves my gemini capsule. Using `nc` as a nex client, it can be accessed like this:

      echo index.gmi | nc gmi.noulin.net 1900 | less

      nex protocol is a simple protocol used in Nightfall city, the request is a path and the response is a file.