Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • sleep

    Get enough of it, and aim for the same times every day, regardless.

    I don't really know what I imagined ever going into this category, so might as well start with the basics. Try to get eight hours a day and go to bed and wake at the same time, every day, seven days a week. If you go to sleep a bit late one day, don't try and sleep a bunch extra, just get up at your normal time.

  • BOFH Archive on Gemini

    The following are all of the BOFH stories from 1995 to 1999 as archived on bofharchive.org. Each story has been downloaded, ran through html2gmi, and published here for your viewing pleasure.

  • returned to mother earth

  • 🔤SpellBinding — AINUQRO Wordo: FROZE

• Technology and Free Software

  • Installed the WPA2 update on Palm TX

    Today I installed the WPA2 update on my Palm TX.

    This is scary, because it wipes the device.

    Palm TX WPA2 Enterprise Security Upgrade

    ----------------------------------------

    When I was working at the university, I had installed this upgrade, to be able to connect to the university wifi network. This was very needed because the digital calender was rather dynamic, sceduled appointments could appear and disappear, move to a different time, a different room or even to a different building.

    Last year, when I wrote the ROOPLOCH 2024 phlog post [1], I discovered that the Palm still held university content. After writing the post I did a factory reset, loosing the WPA2 upgrade in the process.

  • Taming the daemons, the POSIX way

    As you might know, I am also running a fully self-hosted Nex station along with some additional services on my Orange Pi Zero. The way I'm exposing the ports of those services relies on the SSH functionality along with some config tweaks on both sides, maybe I'm gonna cover it the other time. For now though, I'd like to focus on a different aspect of that setup: service management. Of course, I could wrap all the scripts into systemd units but I don't think that's portable enough, and I'd have to move those units into a place I definitely would forget about at some point. So, up until today, I had individual start/stop scripts for each individual service on that Orange. But then, I found all of them too similar to each other and thought that maybe, just maybe, all my custom daemon management could be ruled from a single place. Thus, the DaemonTamer was born.

  • 🖨️ Tiny thermal printer is a lot of fun

  • Tiny thermal printer is a lot of fun

    My daughter just turned 8, and one of her birthday gifts was a tiny thermal printer - the kind that spits out little notes, stickers and Sudokus with no ink, just magic.

  • rc templates

    I run a few different services, which I tend to run inside a purpose built jail, i.e service A lives in jail A, which exists only for service A.

    Some of these services come with their own rc scripts which live in rc.d/ and ensure the service starts "at boot" and can be controlled by the service commands e.g. `service x start` `service x stop` etc. Little things that I have built myself, or delpoyed that others have built and are either not as mature to include such scripts or just didn't think about FreeBSD's init system don't. Thus my very generic magic daemon rc script was born. This can essentially be dropped into all my single purpose jails and used by adjusting a single field. Setting `name="myApp"` to whatever the thing is called, technically even this isn't necessary but may as well. Adding specific flags or changing the user the service runs as can be set in the file or as variable in your rc.conf script found in `/etc/rc.conf`. Leveraging the daemon program gets you simple restarts, privilige dropping and app named logging in a consistent and simple way.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • How to block AI bots with Nginx

      After migrating my code off of GitHub, it appears that OpenAI's web crawler found my links to where I moved my code and started crawling. I caught it early on and quickly blocked it by IP but I realized that I need to do more.

      While most people here are probably reading through the gemini protocol there are some, like me, who dual hosts or proxies their content over http. For those of you using Nginx, here is a simple way to block all the AI bots. It has been reported that these bots have completely ignored the `robots.txt` file so I've moved to blocking them based on user agent. Again, they can lie abouthis but as of the moment beyond direct IP blocking and adding in some sort of crawl detection, this is the easiest and most effective way to block them.

    • new #10th issue of magazine about small web

      Issue 10 is finally out!

      http://elpis.ws/cgi-bin/cms/zine_jul_25

      http://elpis.ws/10.jpg

      We wish you sunny weather, a warm summer, a vacation filled with inspiration and new meanings. May you have time for walks, communication with friends, old places and new discoveries.