Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Inverted Catenaries #3176

  • 🔤SpellBinding — EGINOSV Wordo: DIPSO

• Technology and Free Software

  • I joined SDF last night

    Well I joined SDF last night and I think it'll serve the anti-loneliness purpose. Not sure it's even loneliness; I just want to be around people talking and doing stuff. The radio station on there (anonradio) is charming and has, like, open mics and quirky long-running shows and stuff.

    I had been thinking I'd keep a parallel phlog on there that is less tied to my real world identity, but...so far all I can think to put in there feels like whining, so maybe not.

    Feel like I've got a good thing going on in the smallweb! I've got around ten regular readers of this thing, I think. I've got a handful of people on Gemini I'm subscribed to, a handful of people on Gopher I'm keeping an eyeball on, and little projects percolating here and there.

    I've been trying to run away from my digital life for a while now, but this recent smallweb interest has got me turning back. I still have no interest in social media or gaming or...anything that requires more than a terminal client, but there's a lot of interesting reframing going on in this space -- reframing software (yet again) as something tinkery, hackerish, pleasurable, magicalprosocial, and even occassionally countercultural.

  • Olimex's New Espressif ESP32-C5 UEXT Module Adds Dual-Band Wi-Fi 6, BLE, and Thread Support

    Bulgarian open-hardware specialist Olimex has announced a new add-on for any of its boards that feature a UEXT expansion connector: a dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Thread/Matter-compatible IEEE 802.15.4 module, powered by Espressif's ESP32-C5.

    "MOD-ESP32-C5 is compact 40×20mm (around 1.57×0.79") development board which can be plugged to any development board with UEXT connector," Olimex founder Tsvetan Usunov explains of the new module, "and [which] adds dual band 2.4/5GHz Wi-Fi 6 connectivity via Espressif ESP-HOSTED SDK."

    While Usunov may be focusing on the dual-band Wi-Fi connectivity, that's not the only trick up the new module's sleeve. At its heart is the Espressif ESP32-C5, a microcontroller module that provides three radios in total: the dual-band Wi-Fi 6 radio, a Bluetooth 5 Low Energy (BLE) radio, and an IEEE 802.15.4 compatible with Thread and the new Matter standard, all under the control of a 32-bit RISC-V core running at up to 240MHz and used in this case as a dedicated network processor with 8MB of SPI flash and 4MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) on-board.

  • Homeless dragon 🐉

    It seems that Sector Disk Gopher has gone. It was a gopher hole where you could claim a sector of a floppy disk and store what you liked on it. I applied for a sector a while ago, but heard nothing. When I went to try again... gone.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on?

      This post will be shared to my Fediverse audience through my @ploum@mamot.fr Mastodon account. But Pixelfed users will not see it. Even if they follow me, even if many people they follow boost it. Instead, they will see a picture of my broken keyboard that I posted a week ago.

      That’s because, despite its name, Pixelfed is NOT a true Fediverse application. It does NOT respect the ActivityPub protocol. Any Pixelfed user following my @ploum@mamot.fr will only see a very small fraction of what I post. They may not see anything from me for months.

      But why? Simple! The Pixelfed app has unilaterally decided not to display most Fediverse posts for the arbitrary reason that they do not contain a picture.

      This is done on purpose and by design. Pixelfed is designed to mimic Instagram. Displaying text without pictures was deliberately removed from the code (it was possible in previous versions) in order to make the interface prettier.

      This is unlike a previous problem where Pixelfed would allow unauthorised users to read private posts from unknowing fediverse users, which was promptly fixed.

    • What's New, Jone?

      The challenge was how fast can you eat 1 cup of dry cereal of your choice, along with up to 1/4 cup of milk of your choice. Thank you to all gemini-nauts who participated and sent in their results. Congratulations go to rin for her impressive showing.

    • Is it just me or are most sites just pure cesspools nowadays?

      First time in a while where I'm not writing a post while drunk! Hip hip hooray! Incredible achievement, I know,

      but with my little dumb joke aside... I can't be the only one who has noticed the steady decline of any and all big social media platforms, right?? (or at least most of them).

      Twitter, reddit, tiktok, instagram, discord*, in essence any "big" platform which doesn't pander itself to a specific niche (i.e. tumblr, it has its flaws, but in comparison to the sites I mentioned it doesn't really hold a candle lol) is bound to - in one way or another - end up becoming nothing but a negative feedback loop