Gemini* and Gopher

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • "Social" Media is Unsatisfying

      As of late, the tea I've been drinking tastes significantly better than it usually does. Perhaps counter-intuitively, this has led to me drinking less tea than I'm used to. The same pattern used to hold for chocolate, back when I ate chocolate on a regular basis: if the chocolate was merely okay, I'd snack on it throughout the day, consuming perhaps more than is healthy. But whenever I got my hands on the Good Stuff (tm), I'd eat just one piece a day.

      When you eat a wholesome meal, you don't just enjoy the tastes (and textures, and aromas) of food. You also derive nutrition from the food, and eventually, having eaten enough to satisfy your body's needs, you feel satiated and stop eating. Highly processed snacks have poor nutritional value, so you can keep stuffing more and more of them into your face-hole. Because they don't contain much of what your body needs, some nutritional needs are going to remain unfulfilled, and therefore your body will not give you the signal that says "that's enough, you can stop now".

    • Blog Questions Challenge 2025

      A small Perl script (92 lines of code) that copies drafts from ~/tmp into the blog directory, along with any local files mentioned in the *.gmi file. Then there are two "plugin" scripts that rebuild the index files (Perl, 65 lines) and generate the Atom feed (C, 243 lines). Why? Because it does exactly what I need and I can debug all of it.

      [...]

      By the way, the ex command {:.,$v/^#/d} is a great way to from where the cursor is to the bottom of the buffer to only keep gemini header tags, "v" being the reverse-match of the ed "g" command ("g/re/p" being where grep gets its name from, or probably why the -v flag to grep reverses the match) and here the lines-not-starting-with-# are deleted.

    • The People's Data Centre of Sparwood, BC

      This is sort of a follow up I've been thinking of writing for a while. Needless to say, the landscape has changed quite a bit since I wrote it. In a way, I've got to hand it to the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world—sometimes all it takes is someone doing the Sieg Heil on national television for it to really click with people that maybe this isn't the best place for you to be laying the groundwork of your social movement. But, it remains that these days, you kind of have to be on the fascism website in the same sense as you have to breath the air in the fascism country. I think that's still literally true to an extent today, at least for Meta properties like Instagram, but it's really starting to look like that's about to become secondary to the immediate safety of the activists in question, or at least impossible when they quietly ban all of their pages from Facebook.

      Still, since I wrote that last post I made some progress on getting people to care about independent digital infrastructure, but the reason I realized they care had very little to do with the ideology of it. The reason they cared was because using the internet today is so god damn expensive that it's almost unbearable for a small project. Like, the group in question was paying over 400$ a year just for their website. Meanwhile, I could probably spin up a WordPress site or something similar in an afternoon, hook it up in someone's house with an Ethernet cable and a computer I found in the recycling bin, all for a negligible fee that gets absorbed into your electricity bill. Not to mention, these things require basically no on-site maintenance once set up and barely any maintenance at all, which can otherwise be done over SSH.

    • The bots are at it again

      For a while I just appended new graphs and data to the last post on this topic. This time around I feel it's worse. There are so many bots that I can't even do the WHOIS lookup any more. Or perhaps I just managed to block so few that I never realized how many more there were. In any case, now that I'm speeding things up, there are more bots to block.

    • Leaf trait sampling protocol for SECO

      At the start of the SECO project[1], we had the idea that we would sample leaf traits across our field sites to help constrain models of carbon cycle processes. I wrote a protocol with a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, Matt Rees, with guidance on how to collect leaves from a representative sample of trees at each site, with the aim of calculating realistic community-weighted means of the leaf trait values that would be useful to the modelling team.

    • [Old] A Call for a Gemini Without TLS

      Opinion: the TLS encryption used in Gemini provides very little security, and should be removed. Some questions and answers:

      What is TLS?

      TLS is a key-exchange and an end-to-end encryption scheme used by HTTPS and Gemini clients and servers.

      What does it accomplish?

      * Encrypt all data in both the request and the reply, preventing casual eavesdropping and tampering;

      * Guarantee that the server is in posession of the private key, and therefore, the same one you've talked to before.