Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Serenity Dialectics

    One vital and underapplied part of how we’re gonna beat climate change is learning and teaching mental coping skills.

    Letting ourselves be wholly aware of the full severity of the situation while also juggling the even more important, and seemingly contradictory, flame of committing to fix, improve, prevent, mitigate, and/or adapt to the situation is a pretty big ask that I can’t take for granted. I can’t assume that everyone already knows how to do that.

    So many can’t. They either steer way clear of the abyss or they fall in. They haven’t been taught to make a enough of a security fence around it to know where it is and be able to look at it or even navigate it.

    You’ve got to learn it. I can do my best to try to come up with ways to convey it, whether that’s GTD or just sitting, and others can pick up that baton too, and we can all help each other learn it, but I’m gonna lay out the case for why there are no alternatives to that ask, to learning to juggle those two flames.

  • Hockey Jersey Ethics

    It’s an open question in philosophy to what extent ends justify means.

    In the twisted world of “Hockey Jersey Ethics”, the team justifies the means. This mentality acts as if no act is too evil if it’s done by your own team. Stopping and asking if we’re the baddies is derided as a lack of team spirit. “Good” they define by who’s doing it, not what they’re doing. The end goal? They lost track of that a long time ago. It’s forgotten.

  • Paul Graham — “Writing, Briefly”

    …except it’s just the third paragraph, and I replaced all the semicolons with a newline and an asterisk so I could understand his advice.

    …oh, and I also curled the apostrophes.

    You should go there and see the original. There’s a parenthetical at the top to get an idea of how much time he spends writing a thing — and also, crucially, his writing-to-rewriting ratio. If you’re thinking “am I spending too much time rewriting?”, the answer is “probably not”.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AEILNTZ Wordo: QUIFF

• Technology and Free Software

  • Hope your cronjob runs daily

    If you’re normal by Let’s Encrypt standards and your cronjob runs daily and doesn’t even call out to the Internet most days, then you’ll probably be fine.

    I wonder if Gemini clients are going to be nudged to update everything — like to not throw up an alert if a certificate changes. The meme here in Geminispace is Trust on First Use (TOFU), but if I’m hosting a Gemini capsule and also using a TLS certificate for other things on the domain, then it seems silly to have two separate certificate update procedures.

  • An Introduction to SSH

    SSH is a word that you might often see thrown around when talking about servers and connections. It is sometimes used as a noun in sentences but also as a verb. Its colloquial and sometimes unconventional usage in certain contexts might leave you confused on what exactly it means. Is it a program or does it denote an action that we do? Well, its technically the former. SSH abbreviates to "Secure Shell" and it is a program written by Tatu Ylonen to serve as a replacement to the telnet program. Ever since the early days of computing, users often found it necessary to connect to another computer from their local machine. This computer, often called a server, had specific pathways or ports open for users to establish a connection if they had the proper credentials. Telnet was widely used in these early stages but one of its biggest problems was that it transmitted all data in clear text.

    This essentially meant that any malicious actor sniffing the traffic could not only intercept the credentials of the user but also any information that was being passed to and fro. Telent had to be relegated to the past primarily for this reason which made way for its faster and more secure replacement, SSH. The Secure Shell program brought in several mechanisms to address the limitations of telnet. It introduced asymmetric encryption so that all the traffic remained indecipherable. It also protected the integrity of the data that was being transmitted, while also providing alternate ways of authentication. Within a few years of its inception, ssh was adopted worldwide as the de facto standard to establish connections to servers. However unlike its daunting capabilities, using ssh is quite straightforward.

  • Toby's tinylog

    I've been working on porting #FreeBSD to the #PinePhonePro and happy to report that I am releasing a developer build that you can try out! If you are a FreeBSD developer, the image contains the kernel source and build tools for development on-device.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Some Notes on Social Media, April 2025

      I have an account on a smaller server - just over 300 active users. Not one of the instances with a handful of users (or just one), but a far cry from mastodon.social. And honestly, I've had zero issues. I realize that's not true for everyone, but the point is, if you want to change your Fedi experience, join a different server. Or two. That's the entire point. Make a new alias on a new server. Online identity used to be a very loose thing, before the big tech companies decided we should do everything under our real names (I wonder why that was). All but a handful of the accounts I follow are from outside my instance. If my server ever becomes blocked by others en masse, I'll make another account elsewhere and move on.

  • Programming

    • Making a gemini version of the hacker jargon glossary (by ~sfelicio)

      I decided to write a bad python script to parse the source of that old hacker jargon glossary and make a cool gemini page out of it.

      [...]

      The source seems to be just one big XML file that accumulated many contributions over the years. At first glance XML does not look as bad as people say nowadays; this seems like the right kind of job for it. A lot of semantic markup, doubling down as a kind of text database that doesn't get updated often. Cute.