Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd: 100% All Achievements #3148

  • 🔤SpellBinding: EUOPSTK Wordo: COPRA

• Technology and Free Software

  • Hyperbole and AsciidocHyperbole and Asciidoc

    I've started using Hyperbole. I switch off my computers in the evenings. So every morning, Emacs starts fresh. The first thing I want to see is the directory names of various projects I'm working on. This reminds me of the things I'm doing and `M-RET` on these directory names takes me there to do them.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Maybe Social Media Isn't All Bad

      Logging into Facebook for the first time in a month, I see that I've been tagged: an old acquaintance and fellow musician. He's talking about a concert. About _that_ concert. I was finishing grade twelve. He was I think two years behind me in school. But we were playing in the same youth orchestra, in Montreal, the first anglophone orchestra to perform at the AOJQ (Association des orchestres de jeunes du Quebec) festival since its inception.

      [...]

      Until last night, when I found out there was a recording, which I'd never even thought might even be a possibility. I downloaded everything. I uploaded it to my cloud storage. I re-indexed my Sonos music library, and put it on to listen to with my partner.

    • My ROOPHLOCH 2025 Journey

      On Sunday, I made a post for solderpunk's annual ROOPHLOCH, or Remote Outdoor Off-Grid Phlogging Challenge.^ The post itself was short, but the process to make it happen was anything but, and I wanted to share both my setup and the problems I had getting it to work.

      I participated in ROOPHLOCH 2024 as well, but all I did was write a log from my backyard and post it to my capsule over my home WiFi connection. Leading up to September, I had many different ideas for how to participate in this year's ROOPHLOCH. Some of the ideas were fairly simple, and some were extremely ambitious: I thought of sending an NNCP packet over Bluetooth, automatically photographing and uploading a document I'd written on my typewriter, and even creating a custom punch-card storage medium for the post and uploading it over regular WiFi. I would have needed to prepare a lot of these ideas over the summer for them to be practical, but other commitments and hobbies ate up my time, and none of them were ready by the start of September.

    • Where are the portals across Realm Gemini?

      While I caught on to the gemini protocol community fairly early, I wasn't particularly adventurous. I looked at the main hops, and, honestly, that was quite enough to satisfy.

      That being said, I never really integrated into the community. Even though I continue to haunt the same spots that my early discovery unearthed.

      What really stuck with me, and still does, is the same sense of wonder and excitement I had when I first discovered the web. Almost like a world of text filled with epiphany under every stone.

      And most of that came down to the fact that when I discovered the web, the primary mode of socialisation were portals. Portals of blogs, portals of digital art, portals of flash animation, portals of flash games, and later even portals of amateur videography. Everything was some kind of forum hinged on one or more media formats (but, largely, each community was focused around one).