Gemini Links 20/07/2024: Gopher Catchup and Old Computer Challenge
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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another year older
well, this year's birthday celebrations were so extravagant i'm almost embarrassed about it. so many different people called and wrote with wishes, including some i've given up on hearing from ever again. i hope this means we get to rekindle our connections. i'm going to think about this luxurious birthday as the universe's recompense for all the shitty ones. when i was a kid it had always been a family affair, an opportunity for the adults to sit around and get drunk (and of course it was ever so rude of me to leave the table and do my own stuff! i was the birthday boy, after all). having a birthday in the summer meant no school friends ever knew of it or cared about it, away on their holidays. no candy for them, or a useful interruption in lessons for the day. then when i was older the classic "nobody came to my party" experiences... gifts that were so off-base i'd prefer to get nothing at all, rather than the reminder of being so completely not-known, un-seen by those close to me. but mostly just some money - not bad, i admit! but never felt very celebratory.
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The fascinating phenomenon of narrative insecurity
We're finally back in the saddle after four days of power outage, three of them while hosting a visitor and performing out.
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Textural and blazing
You see that jackass over there? He was ruffled the other day and seems to be still, over this and that. What happens in the world, the idiots, and some sense that things aren't what they should be. I love him for it. But between drinks he said that he was disappointed because someone's textural guns were poised but not blazing, and damned if he wasn't talking about me. At least that's how it hit me. Maybe I'm just afraid that someone will think I don't care, that the passion doesn't burn inside me more than this whiskey. It does.
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Oh, what a lovely day!
But not for everyone, from the looks of it. I'm slated to start work next week, and I've finished signing every document I need for work. It looks like whatever is going on with the IT outage hasn't hit my new workplace. It has, unfortunately, hit some places a few relatives work.
By far the worst hit is the nearby hospital that an aunt of mine works at. In the family gc, she's reporting a lot of internal panic from fellow nurses, people trying to re-work plans to allow their patients to stay comfortably while improvising on treatment plans. I asked what the plan was in the event a patient dies because they couldn't get treatment, and she believes a lawsuit would result from it. Meanwhile, another aunt working at a local call center says she's been given a few days break. No clue when work will return, she says.
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Oslo's public transport is unfriendly to foreigners
I have been living in Oslo for the past two years and there are many good things I can say about the city. It is generally clean, the people will largely not bother you, and it has great access to many nature areas for recreation. These nature areas are best reached by the public transport system which is largely excellent.
There are no gates, no complicated ticket types, subscriptions, and discounts, the metro, bus, and tram drive rather frequently, and you can even take the ferry with the same card. There are however also many, many aspects of Oslo's public transport which rub me the wrong way. Instead of just listing my issues with the system however, I will highlight specifically why these matters are particularly detrimental to foreigners.
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One Step Short
I've complained before about not having enough to say[1], but recently I've run into an extremely specific version of this, which although not as much of an impediment in my life, is still quite annoying.
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how to kill a ghost
They are often dressed in striped pants and torn oversized sweaters and can usually be seen walking in a stretched line following the sun. A spectacle rarely appreciated by anyone but small children and those of weakened minds, the procession of fools is one of many natural reactions to the ticking clock of technological insanity that aims to decorate the otherwise oblivious face of our Earth.
During a rudimentary journey to the local grocery store, just off the intersection where the main road plonks the abandoned highway that has now for decades been host to the world's 7th least fun mini golf course, I spot the procession of about twenty fools making their slow way across the road towards what used to be a field, just past the butcher.
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Janet for Mortals
Janet has parentheses. Okay? That’s all I’m going to say about it. There are some parentheses here. Maybe more than you’re used to. Maybe more than you’re comfortable with. I’m not going to try to convince you that parentheses are somehow morally superior to curly braces, or waste your time claiming that really it’s the same number of parentheses and they’re just shifted over a little. In fact I’m going to try to talk as little as possible about the parentheses, because they just aren’t very interesting at this stage. They’ll get interesting, once we start talking about macros, but right now the conversation can’t really progress beyond “Ew, I don’t like them.” I know you don’t. And if you can’t get past that, that’s fine. If you draw the line at parentheses, this book comes with a full money-back guarantee.
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Galatea
The structures that now adhere to an erstwhile rubble-mound were a dream I had epochs ago when I gazed from our station orbiting Neptune outside the Adams Ring with one eye closed like a cyclops through my telescope. If the rifts and crags are poems scrawled across the so-called surface of the moon, my greenhouses are diacritics and vowel marks that allow them to be deciphered. The sprawling atmosphere machinery is calligraphic accretion and wheezes rhythmically like the bellows of an accordion in time with a truncated metrical pattern.
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🔤SpellBinding: DGHOUSR Wordo: DOERS
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Politics and World Events
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Technology and Free Software
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Day 6 of the 2024 Old Computer Challenge
Well, the CrowdStrike thing impacted work a little today, but not so much the challenge - score 1 for Old Computers!
I got emailed a 9.8MB image today and spent much of my time trying to figure out how to open it. It takes too much memory to show it in flpicsee and ImageMagick has 12MB of dependencies so won't load either. All the image shrinking websites require JS, apart from one that I found that seemed to go down after my first try with it (sorry whoever runs that site). This one has me stumped. I'll have to wait until Sunday to view it.
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PulseAudio with changing machine-id
I've been using Devuan GNU/Linux on several of my machines in the recent months. On one of these machines, I have a somewhat elaborate audio setup with multiple input and output devices plugged in. Not long after setting up Devuan unstable, I noticed PulseAudio ('pulse' for short from here on) would forget my configurations after each reboot. I would set the default input and output devices and their volumes to my liking, only for pulse to forget it all on the next boot. Interestingly, I'd never run into this issue on Debian or its other derivatives like Trisquel over the years.
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FRST: Personal Computing and the Model 3
_This is the conclusion of a first attempt to compose my thoughts on "Personal Computing" and how I sought to address it for myself, primarily, with my FRST Computer project, and the Model 3_
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After long silience
Hello, folks!
I was too silient in blog for long time but I've made a lot of things for Agon Light(and Console8) computer.
My main pride is "ZINC"(ZINC Is Not CP/M) - tool that works very likely to Wine in Linux or MacOS world - it's reimplementation of CP/M API for Agon's MOS.
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Snail big rewriting
I've started big rewritting my gopher browser for Agon that will allow use it as local hypertext viewer, allow extend markup a bit(possibly it will be ported later to another platforms) including simple text coloring.
I'll work in a bit slow tempo - my day job grabbing a lot of my time now but I'll prepare snail and will improve some my other projects(including GUI library for Z80 based computers).
Wish you all best!
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OS Wars
I've been down a rabbit hole recently watching videos about GNU/Linux vs. other operating systems, or namely tracking how many more people are driven away from Win or Rotten Core with their absolute dog-shit decisions.
The complaints I once had about GNU/Linux when switching from Win10 more or less boiled down to this: it was not working like my Win10 workflow. I wish I had been smart enough to realize that it was never going to be like that. Linux OSes were never going to be a facsimile replacement for Win. They don't work the same way, and I've come to realize that's a beautiful thing.
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Native apps suck
I'm only half serious about this title, or rather I'm serious about half of native apps sucking and being nearly useless.
If your app requires an internet connection to function, it should NOT be a native app. I'm talking mailers, food delivery, food ordering, video conferencing, streaming audio or video, etc.
If the web app devs are doing their job, there should be no difference between the web app and he native app. Of course that's rarely the case, but then again, I don't have faith in a lot of so-called web developers.
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Computer Museum Blues
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Retro Workshop, Part 2
Continuing my Retro Workshops thread from a couple of weeks ago ...
But before I get on with that, I have to say I'm honoured to note that Cyber Scrapheap is now one of the 78 phlogs aggregated by Bongusta! [1] An honour I'm not entirely sure is deserved, given I haven't written much and only for a short while. However I will do my best to be worthy of the distinction.
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Bad AI
We're planning a long-distance move, and had one moving company insist on a virtual walk-through for the estimate. The idea was that just before the scheduled time, they text a web link, which opens a video call. During the call, you walk around your house holding up your phone, and the person on the other end takes screengrabs. In my phone conversation with the salesperson beforehand, he made a point of saying that they use an AI to estimate weights of household items, and that the AI had proved accurate to within 5%.
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cgNAT Blues
I'm a bit bummed out this morning.
For a while I've been entertaining the notion of hosting the LL using my own hardware. Currently I rent a VPS on an insanely cheap plan. (This seems to no longer be offered by the hosting provider but they still seem happy enough to keep me on for now.) While a VPS comes with some advantages over local hosting - the principal one for me being the ability to run my own SMTP server (outright impossible from residential IPs) - the ongoing costs (even the tiny amount I pay) and having to rely on somebody else for such a basic service leave me vaguely unsatisfied.
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Project Typewriter 2.0
I have, for some time now, been interested in developing some sort of machine which is only capable of writing. Those who have read my the previous iterations of this blog may remember the typewriter which onto which I wired a USB output. The typewriter itself is also such a system, one which allows me to record my tough's onto paper without the possibility for further distractions. Today, I have developed a new system. It is by-far the most usable one, which I am proving by writing this very post on it (excuse the above-average amount of typos).
Before getting into how exactly this system works, let me outline what it needs to be capable of doing. Any system on which I write must of course have an input method as well as some sort of feedback to the user. A screen, a piece of paper, potentially even sound. Secondly, the system must be able to store the written files in some digital manner. Lastly, I want to keep the system as minimal as possible, preferably being able to run it off a battery ban. It goes without saying that the system also needs to be accurate and fast enough to keep up with my (admittedly modest) typing speed.
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Cloud gaming review: Xbox xCloud and Amazon Luna+
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Cloud gaming review: Xbox xCloud and Amazon Luna+
The Xbox Ultimate subscription bundles a game library for Xbox and Windows games with high price titles, this makes the price itself quite cheap compared to the price of available games as a high-priced game is more expensive than four months of subscription. However, I have mixed feelings about the associated streaming service: on one hand it works perfectly fine (no queue, input lag is ok) but the video quality is not fantastic on a 1080p screen. The service seems perfectly fitted to be played on smartphones, every touchscreen compatible games have a specific layout customized for that game, making the touchscreen a lot more usable than displaying a full controller over the layout when you only need a few buttons, in addition to the low bandwidth usage it makes a good service for handheld devices. On desktop, you may want to use the streaming to try a game before installing it, but not much more.
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Old Computer Challenge
On the entertainment front I've finished the legend of zelda. Yeah, there was a cheat, I could rewind and forward the state of the game and save at any points. Which made me almost invincible. But still part of the game were challenging, like dongeon 8! All in all it was relly fun, although the end was a tad boring.
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Old Computer Challenge, 2024
It's on! I am participating in this years' Old Computer Challenge (v4, Olympics Edition).[1] The rules this time around say "Choose your rules!", and so I have. The challenge I have set myself is rather more behavioural than technical: my goal for the coming week is to wind back the clock on how I interact with the Internet. Back, say, a quarter century or so, before I had any kind of mobile connectivity, when connecting to the Internet meant sitting down at my big beige desktop workstation and firing up the modem.
Well, maybe not quite. The modem is long gone and I'm not going to set up a dial-up account for the week - although I guess I could, SDF still does that right? But limiting bandwidth is not the intention here. The point is to make accessing the Internet more intentional and purposeful, and not just the default mode for what I do whenever I'm not doing anything else.
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Sixth day of the Old Computer Challenge 2024
Today we went for a long bicycle trip. After returning home again, we were both dead tired.
I also had to mow the lawn, I could not postpone that, tomorrow the waste from the garbage-container for green waste is collected.
Now I sit here with not much energy, and planning to make it an easy evening.
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Last day of the Old Computer Challenge 2024
Today is the last day of the 2024 edition of the Old Computer Challenge.
This year I used an Acer Aspire 522 POVE6 for the challenge. This is a laptop from about 2011. It has an AMD C-60 CPU, 760 Mb RAM, a 10.1 inch display with a resolution of 1280x720. It comes with an old fashioned spinning disk.
To make it a bit more interesting, I decided to go without X, so no X11, or Xorg. No graphics, only text-based terminals.
The goal was to get some distance, focus more on the smol web and leave the enshittification at bay.
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Old Computer Challenge
Is not that I'm going to do this *this year*, but I'm writing a note here so I can remember about it for 2025, perhaps.
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Internet/Gemini
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Trusting a self-signed certificate
@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social recently announced an IRC server with a self-signed certificate. What if you have an IRC client that keeps complaining about this?
On a system like Debian, you can download the certificate and install it such that all applications trust it.
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first world disaster
I'm in a mild crisis of sorts. My carrier, GFi, which has been great for over 5 years for me know, has a widespread issue where SIMs are flat out refusing to work and erroneously report as "No SIM detected." I believe I already mentioned how much I LOATHE incorrect error messages, but I digress.
From what I understand through various G Community threads is that there's an issue with partner carriers not accepting the current partitioning of SIM cards. I'm on the verge of pausing my service, if not outright canceling it. I'm forced to use my GVoice number instead, which in and of itself is no big deal.
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Gopher server logging dilemma
So I have a (slight) dilemma re my gopher server software of choice, Motsognir: I want better logging / analytics for my gopher traffic.
I chose Motsognir for several important reasons, and I've now created several (trivial) cgi-bin scripts to add bits of flavor to my jonsharp.net and frstcomputer.com gopher holes, so I'm reluctant to switch to something else, but I really want something that outputs an Apache-style (common log format?) access log so that I can use tools like awstats, rrdtool, etc. These are things I used regularly back in the old days of supporting LAMP-stack apps / machines, and as I looked around recently, these tools seem just as relevant today.
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My Server Crashed!
My home server recently failed (as anyone who tried to visit www.sectordisk.pw may have seen if they attempted to go to it for the week or so that it was down). I'm not exactly sure what happened to be honest -- Ubuntu corrupted somehow and just refused to come back to life. Every time I booted in it would take forever hanging on services, and once I finally did get in it could take a command or two before the entire system would hang. This happened after I tried to mount some backups trying to figure out where the heck my Letsenrypt renewal script went (as my sites hadn't renewed their SSL certificates), but it's difficult to tell if the two events were related. The server just hung up at some point while I was working on that, and it never recovered after restart. I tried fsck'ing the volume and even upgrading Ubuntu in place (in case that'd fix whatever broken service or kernel module was causing the issue), but it just wouldn't work. So, in an attempt to mitigate any further possible damage, I ordered a new SSD and rebuilt it from the ground up, copying over basically all my files and configs that I could think of from the old SSD.
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Hosting experiment
About a month ago I started deneb.im. I just wanted to participate somehow in the #smallnet community. Since then I started a gopher hole, set up self hosted email and I still have a few more ideas left.
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SFTP, hurried work, UPS
After fixing a couple of leaks in the libssh2 bindings (one was merged into the upstream, another one still hangs as a pull request), and trying it on a newer system (Debian 11 instead of Debian 9, with libssh2 version 1.9.0 instead of 1.7.0), observed that it still leaks memory. Composed libssh bindings, noticed that it occasionally enters an endless loop somewhere in sftp_open, and loads a CPU core completely with libssh version 0.7.3. But then tried it on Debian 11, with libssh 0.9.8, and looks like it finally works without leaks or loops. Took me a while to find a working option, for such a seemingly common protocol.
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Connecting the laptop to the server via NNCP
First, install the `nncp` package on both systems. In addition to that, install the `openbsd-inetd` package on the server. (In the following passages, I'm connected as `root` to the server.)
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Sending mail from the laptop to the server via NNCP
Debian is using Exim 4. This laptop is not always connected to the internet. Let's do some configuring! I'll keep some of my mistakes in here because I know when I'm having trouble I'm always running into mistakes. Running into and recovering from mistakes is more important than just the instructions.
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Connecting the laptop to the server using UUCP
I recently connected my server to another server via UUCP. Now I'm thinking that perhaps I'd like to connect my laptop as another node to it. I probably don't need it, because I connected the laptop to the server via NNCP. But still. Perhaps @lkh@social.sdfeu.org still wants to do stuff via UUCP. Perhaps it is the completionist in me.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.