Gemini* and Gopher

• Technology and Free Software

  • The 95-card Cubelet

    A cubelet is a shared deck for Magic where you can play any card facedown as a land.

    Sometimes the advice for cubelets is to stick to three or four archetypes but here’s a template for a full ten-archetype cubelet.

    Put in twenty “mega-glue” cards that are each good in exactly four archetypes each (for example five per color and the card should be good in all four archetypes of that color and not good for other archetypes).

  • Hobbyist magazine archive

    As I've mentioned in an earlier post, before personal computing became practical and affordable in the early 1980s, my technical hobby of choice was amateur radio. The barrier to entry was quite high because there were formal technical exams and a Morse code test to pass, so although the effort you had to make was rewarded, it clearly wasn't for everyone.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Beware of Open Web Proxies and Fix Your Config

      And while he was able to identify the site belonging to the IP, there’s a piece of the puzzle missing: it’s not the capsule that crawls, it’s web crawlers using the open Gemini-to-Web proxy to find their way into the Geminispace. The capsule becomes an involuntary relay in the crawl, exposing its own IP address to the crawled capsule. And because the crawlers only look at the `robots.txt` of the web proxy site, even the friendly and well-behaved crawlers will happily crawl everything in the Geminispace, all the while bad bots don't care if the web proxy site’s owner or the web proxy itself disallowed all proxied URLs in the web’s `robots.txt`.

    • ROOPHLOCH 2026: @Griffith Park Observatory

      OK, prolly gonna b another short phost. Too many muggles. Gonna try m0ar experiments in the field, in the Great OutDoors at the world famous Griffith Observatory. I think it opens to the public @ noon, but lotsa school busses and children.