Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • In Which I Acquire an Undeserved Honorific

    I was in the music store messing around with a pedal I wanted to try before I bought it (a Tera Echo), just sitting there with a red single-cutaway Epiphone into the TE-2 into a Princeton. Cascading a bunch of chords and rhythmic harmonics through the shimmer and reverb of the pedal and amp. Twisting dials, just confirming everything works the way I'd been hearing on YouTube.

    It's twenty to eight. Almost closing time. I go to turn off the amp, and hear, "excuse me, sir."

    I look over - a scruffy teenager in a hoodie holding a black Strat, sitting by a nearby amp.

    "What's up?"

• Politics and World Events

  • How to stop tyrannical imperial presidency (of both parties)

    In spite of the U.S. Constitution's separation of powers between Congress and several States, and the Tenth Amendment guarantee of state sovereignty, the federal government wields extraordinary power over the conduct and policies of state and local governments.

    The progressives are beginning to discover this in the Trump presidency.

    Many people do not realize the pervasive encroachment of federal politics into their communities. Their neighborhood schools, community non-profits, town libraries, road maintenance crews, and in some cases, even faith-based charities are controlled by the White House and the whims of distant D.C. politicians.

    This tyrannical control is made possible through a huge legal loophole: federal grantmaking authority.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • BitTorrent and Archives

      I first discovered BitTorrent back in 2006, and I still use it today for downloading Linux distros and other large amounts of static data. Over the last two decades, I've become familiar with both the technical workings of BitTorrent and the culture surrounding it use, though I wouldn't consider myself an expert on it.

      Of course, BitTorrent isn't the only method people use to send data to each other. When one wants to send a collection of files to someone else, a common choice is to pack all the files to some kind of archive, such as WinRAR or a tarball, and send the archive using a service like Dropbox.

    • A bit of a deep dive into the Feedly bot

      One suggestion for one request for /index.atom having 37 subscribers, and another for /index.atom having 16 subscribers was one was originally for http: and the other for https:. That's a decent explanation, given we have 8 subscribers for //index.atom, telling me that Feedly is treating http://boston.conman.org/index.atom, https://boston.conman.org/index.atom and https://boston.conman.org//index.atom as entirely separate feeds, even though I now redirect http: to https:. But even though I do redirect http: to https:, it's with a temporary redirect, not a permanent one (because I'm still wary about making the redirect permanent) so that one is totally on me; the //index.atom is obviously a typo so that one is totally on Feedly.

      I still can't tell the difference between the fetcher [4] and the poller [5]. Even the pages describing the two are identical, except one says “Fetcher” and the other says “Poller.” That's just really weird. And what's with the plain “Feedly/1.0” bot?