Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Making friends with cats

    Today I would like to talk about cats. I like cats. They are murderous little fiends that can be horrible for birds and smaller animals in habitats where they are not suited for, but in the ecosystem they are long term part of (or strictly in human homes), they can be a great joy. Provided you know how to interact with them. This improvised guide is certainly not fool proof (cats contain multitudes). But it sounds fun to write.

  • ROSE TINTED INTERNET

    Back again to that old story of mine that I never got around to writing. The plot was centred around a guy who builds a sentient computer from code and computers collected from a university where he works. It hacks into communications systems and manipulates society by subtly changing all the communications that everyone sees to shape each individual's specific behaviour. First he uses it for his own fun and benefit, then to try and further social causes he's passionate about. Then the story goes on to have the hacking traced back to the guy's house, the computer gets shut down after the guy flees the cops, but when this complex system of manipulation is removed it plunges society into chaos as nobody believes anyone is who they thought they were. The economy collapses, new political divisions quickly develop, and eventually civil war breaks out. The guy, however, was left a hint from his computer on where to go for safety, and eventually encounters a bizarre armed cult, preparing since before the switch-off, and entirely devoted to following him. The cult, with its arms and organisation, is able to establish growing territories under its control. Slowly the guy realises that perhaps the computer had planned this all along, using him as an unwitting tool towards achieving his own power as a new ruler. But who, then, was really in charge?

  • A DREAM

    I thought I'd had a relatively easy weekend. I certainly didn't achieve much, but plotting a route to another dam I couldn't quite be bothered visiting, and re-organishing the various electromagic connected to my TV to pull out the old USB IDE HDD enclosure that I finally replaced with a smaller USB HDD with larger capacity (still 15 years old though) after surpassing 160GB of video data. Now everything actually fits in the cupboard of the TV stand instead of half on a cardboard box in front, which is nice, although I do now have out some old PC speakers to use instead of the TV speakers where one has busted its cone and gone 'buzzy'. That now gives me stereo too (the TV has two speakers, but no stereo, which was a bit cheap for a 1990s model), so in a way it's an improvement.

    I should have been concreting the foundations for my tank/antenna stand, or ordering new bushings for the Jag, or learning MIG welding, or tens of other things on the list next to me now, but I didn't. Yet by the end of yesterday I was tired out with a killing headache and went to bed at quarter past seven. I do bugger all on a weekend and then one day of work still wears me out completely? Though I do feel refreshed this morning. I don't know.

  • ON COLLECTING

    I've talked here, directly or indirectly, about many of my collections, but I haven't really opened up the subject of collecting as a whole. That's funny really because privately I feel like more of a success in the task of collecting things than most of my other endeavours in life. I haven't thought about why I feel that way until now. It's probably becuase the goals are entirely set by me. I like to entertain the idea of showing someone, well, some girl, around it all, but it's never happened and fundamentally that doesn't matter because it's all about what _I_ find interesting. The goal is achieved when I feel satisfied by looking though the things I've obtained, they don't have to interest others, they don't have to work. I can pursue those too, but that's a separate activity, if it fails it doesn't harm how I feel about the collection itself.

    As such I don't get too hung up on the sorts of popular collecting patterns - hoping to complete a set of everything within a range, or to climb up the chain of item values. Nor do I bother to document anything very well - certainly not to the extent of all those people with collection websites that must have taken endless hours to compile. I do try to display things in attractive arrangements where space allows, but that's about as active as I get in collector behaviour beyond actually buying the things I collect.

  • Portrait of a Re-arranged Office

    They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. What they don't say is that the adage was coined to sell ad space, which makes it total bosh. The worth of pictures or words is subjective, and neither is of greater value in a general sense.

    But this is gopher, and you knew that. Plaintext is beautiful, etc. I'm just preparing you, because I'm going to describe something that would generally warrant a photo. A photo would be faster, but you're not here because you're in a hurry, right?

  • Roller derby

    Yesterday some friends of ours had to cancel a planned get-together due to illness, and so with our suddenly and unexpectedly open schedule we went to see a nearby roller derby game, our first one ever. We had serendipitously learned that it was happening earlier in the week and had been disappointed to realise that it clashed with our pre-existing plans, so when the opportunity presented itself to go after all, we seized it. We went in not really knowing what to expect, only roughly familiarising ourselves with the rules the night before, and ended up having a really good time. The sport is not huge here, the league is small and games in our home town seem to happen pretty infrequently, but we'll definitely try to attend future ones.

  • Life is supposed to be fun

    Alan Watts points out that life is fundamentally play, not work.

    All of our inventions in the name of progress were supposed to make our lives easier. We must not forget this. We must not let the things own us.

    We can live like royals. We can bathe and feast and travel daily. If your life is harder to bear than it would have been 1000 years ago, you must change it.

  • cats

    3:21 am. Another one of those nights where I couldn't find where my head was, much less put it on a pillow. Found a cat instead. He's sleeping next to me now. This has really become a tradition at this point. Whenever I can't find how to drift away, I get up and watch cats sleeping. If I'm lucky, I get to record some purring sounds. More than 20 recordings now I think. Hey Smudge, want to have your voice recorded too?

• Technology and Free Software

  • Mice and keys

    Yeah, I am mostly used to ye olde virtual terminal, and to environments such as that of emacs, where everything is done with the keyboard. I find it a lot more immediate to issue my commands through a simple keystroke than chasing menus around with the mouse.

  • Artnol

    Artnol is an artist-driven alternative to Artstation, there's not loads of artists there but I hope it finds its niche.

  • PHONY PHONE SERVICE

    So last week 3G mobile phone reception finally went away where I live, a little after the official Australian turn-off date at the beginning of the month. Now it's only 4G and 5G, and 4G reception, in spite of claims, is proving worse than 3G. My father now can't make calls inside his house because the signal drops out, although funnily enough my old mobile broadband modem which doesn't support the new lower 4G frequency band has still been getting reception. That might be luck though since in the past it's gone for months with consistent 4G and then had a week or two of only seeing 3G signal, so I still need to get my antenna finished (annoyingly the second-hand antenna signal meter I've got for adjusting it won't work now because it was 3G as well - I didn't think it could take me this many years to get things finished).

    I documented my original plans for buying a replacement phone to keep in the car in my post 2023-06-10Facing_4G.txt. In spite of my best efforts to understand all the complex compatibility requirements, I was on completely the wrong track and ended up buying a phone that wouldn't work with my telco (even though it was branded the same as the one I was already using!). I can't do phones, somehow even though I know about the theory of the electronics that work them and the code that crafts them, they've managed to make such a compatibility nightmare that I just can't get my head around it.

  • Time to ditch x86: why I have switched to RPi5 as my main desktop

    If there is a single redeeming quality that the modern era of computing has, it's the abundance of single-board computers. We can call it modern if we forget that some of the earliest home PCs (like ZX Spectrum) also mostly were single-board: obviously the components were larger but replaceable at home, something that current SBCs totally are missing. If we return to the modern side of the topic, then, besides the highly dubious area of "internet of things", single-board computers nowadays have matured enough to replace your average desktop while eating less electricity. And this is what I decided to check out myself as the low-powered computing is one of the main topics of this phlog. And here's what I decided to do: get a Raspberry Pi 5 starter kit and install Alpine Linux on it. Of course it would be Alpine, what else could it be? Who needs a huge "official" blob of Raspberry Pi OS (ex-Raspbian) when you should use such amount of computing resources sparingly?

  • CAT S22 Flip: a keypad Android flip phone done almost right

    Since KaiOS flopped (and I'm sure it's already pretty safe to declare that), the question of finding a decent keypad phone with modern application support is relevant again. And things like Xiaomi Qin1s or AGM M7 are not exactly the kind of support I'd have expected in 2024. Luckily, Bullitt Mobile to the rescue once again, and the model that still can be found new (although sometimes unofficially), CAT S22 Flip, seems to deliver the very experience I was looking for. It has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 215 (although its Fastboot menu was compiled for 430), 2 gigs of RAM and 16 gigs of built-in flash storage with, of course, ability to expand it with a microSD card which I surely did. I

  • A mysterious but extremely cool Orient Eroz from 2007

    What I'm wearing right now is a watch that anyone should have heard about but no one actually had. It's an automatic mechanical three-hander with date window in a 37mm case. Made in May 2007, if I decoded the serial number correctly. Amazingly comfortable and handsome looking. Yet it's almost impossible to look up any information about it on the Internet. I'm talking about Orient BER0Z002K, although this model number might say nothing to you, and I would understand it. It really seems like a mystery, a forgotten gem from the end of pre-Epson era of Orient. Yet here it is, and I'm going to tell everything I know about it.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Meet ii, a new old distributed plaintext communication network

      Remember FidoNet? Now, imagine something like that but much simpler and over TCP/IP (as of now, even over HTTP(S)). This is a very vague description of what I'm gonna talk about.

      As lightweight protocols are among my hobbyist interests, I was delighted to find out about the existence of such a protocol as ii. Gopher, Nex, Spartan, Gemini etc. are nice but they don't solve the problem of distributed communication. Email does but it's too complex and bulky. Misfin is fine for one-to-one communication but totally impractical for mailing lists or so. We really need something like Usenet/FidoNet but without all the crutches of the past.

  • Software Releases/Announcements

    • A New VF-1 Client

      I was quite excited to read that there were some updates to the gopher client VF-1 recently![1]. If you don't use VF-1 to browse gopher, you should, and you may download and read about it here:

      https://git.sr.ht/~solderpunk/VF-1 gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~solderpunk/vf-1

      I have 0.0.12 installed and am looking forward to 1.0.0. I was just thinking this morning that software should be stable, it should arrive at a destination, instead of the current status quo of forever being in progress and forever being updated. I like that VF-1 doesn't change much, and that is approaching an even more stable place.

    • More info on VF-1 updates

      In my recent post updating progress toward my various "Operation Blazing Star" goals, I mentioned that I had made a new VF-1 release (the first in over five years!!!). This post is to say a little more about that and the planned 1.0.0 release in the nearish future.

      It's been a long time since anybody wrote me an email about VF-1, or since I saw anybody mention it in their phlog. Which is perhaps not surprising, given that there hasn't been in a release in such a long time. But I remember fondly the days when it was newish, and this happened a lot then. I got really nice emails from people I'd never met before telling me how much they enjoyed using it, and it was very gratifying. I felt like VF-1 was a genuine success, that it was popular, that people liked it. I hope that's still true these days, that there exists a "VF-1 user community" not only in my head but also out there in the world. If there is, I hope this post reaches that community. If you think you can help make that happen by sharing the link via some channel, please do so.

  • Programming

    • Books by Brian Kernighan

      I remember reading the AWK book at home after my return from Oslo in 2021-12, and the UNIX book in the CS department’s library in late 2023. Good times.

    • Omnia mea mecum porto (feat. Tcl/Tk)

      Two posts ago, I ranted about the lack of sane and decent desktop GUI solutions. Now, I must emphasize that whatever I said there only applies to compiled programming languages. The domain of desktop GUI scripting hasn't been vacant for all these years and hasn't been only limited to JS, VBscript (remember that shit?) or some obscure languages from the past like Rexx. Popular interpreted programming languages like Python and Perl have been having their own bindings to all possible C/C++ GUI frameworks in existence, and some languages like Rebol and Red even have self-contained GUI facilities. There is, however, one particular language that's simple enough to learn it and start rolling functional GUIs in a matter of minutes, lightweight and cross-platform enough to be sure your GUIs will run anywhere, mature enough to deter any hype riders trying to parasite on it, and dynamic enough to ward off "static typing is everything"-type snobs. That's why, in the light of a recent new major version release of this language and its accompanying graphical toolkit, I'd like to talk about Tcl/Tk today.

    • Goodbye Bopher, hello BFG: a practical case of Tcl/Tk's GUI

      Tcl 8.6 is a powerful tool indeed, and I hope my previous post have shown why. As I have already written, I could see having my personal portfolio of small but useful Tk GUI apps. And, of course, I had to start somewhere. So, as my first "real" Tk application, I decided to write something that I myself would use a lot: a new Gopher browser instead of my pretty limited and unmaintainable Bopher-NG and the already bloated Lagrange. What I came up with is now called BFG ([1]), short for "Back/Forward/Go". Yes, I put it up on Codeberg because I might need some bugfixes and contributions from folks from the "outer web", who knows... Of course, I decided to replace Lagrange completely, which meant that my own replacement should at least support not only Gopher, but Gemini, Spartan and Nex too. And it does, along with Gopher-over-TLS if you ever need such a thing.