Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — BHIRSUY Wordo: VASES

• Technology and Free Software

  • End Times Vibes on the Old Frontier

    The last few years have been really bittersweet for me online. Four years ago, Clarissa asked me if I'd heard about Geminispace - how it's a bit like gopher, a bit like the web - to which I said, no I haven't. She gave me a few links. I read them and was intrigued. The easiest way to get started being via pubnix. I remembered those from the 90s and 00s. sdf.org, I think, though my memory may be a little off. A whole revolution in the 2010s creating a constellation of these, now called tildes. Get an account, get writing.

    I was kind of taken by this. It had been a long, long time since I'd had anything resembling a net presence that wasn't a simple social media profile. Same as most of us, I'm sure. I kept up personal homepages until the mid 00s. These were varying degrees of personal. All under my name, but designed for different audiences. This one for my Computer Science studies. That one on my ISP's webspace, for friends and people who know me offline. Another one elsewhere, on friends' personal domains, where I was still [winter], but first name only, the hope being that the people I didn't want to find me, wouldn't. And they did. And so in the end, that was maybe the end of the website as a deeply personal conduit for me. I kept up on forums. One for the TV show Andromeda (Ex Isle). Another for the open source game Vega Strike. Later, the Harmony Central guitar forums, while they were still good. But into the 00s I could feel my activity dropping off, the gravitational pull of social media too strong. Why go on forums when I can catch up with all my old friends on Facebook? It's hard to keep in mind how revolutionary it felt then, before it started facilitating genocide, before it started putting AI martial arts fighters and thicc babes up and down my feed. It used to be good, and by the time it wasn't, it had trapped people in its stupefying, infinite feed.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • AuraGem Twitch Proxy is Back!

      The Twitch proxy is back on AuraGem! You can now search channels and view a channel's vods.

      The pages will include an https link directly to the vod which can be opened up with yt-dlp (to download) or some other application. Smart clients (like the upcoming update to Profectus) could use yt-dlp to download the video and pipe it directly into your video player of choice!

  • Programming

    • -ui sluggishness

      I think I've written about this a couple of times now.

      Every time I start an old PC, like my Pentium 133 from 1997, this effect becomes immediately obvious: If that computer is running period-appropriate software, the UI doesn't feel all that much slower than modern PCs.

      Sure, individual tasks like image processing will be objectively slower. But not the UI. Not as much as you'd expect from a machine that's 20-30 years old.

    • How to debug a C script