Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Summer Update and Books

    Since my last summer update, we have had no rain at all - so it is very dry now, and wildfires have started popping up in our province (and others in eastern Canada). That has put the brakes on pretty much any outdoor activity that one might do in the woods. All crown land is closed to camping, and local parks have closed their trails. It's still possible to enjoy the water, so my wife and I have been doing more kayaking. The rivers and lakes are low, but still fine for boating. Hopefully we get some rain soon.

    Ian at gopher.icu talks about books, specifically physical books and their advantages [0]. He mentions a phlog post where the author passed up some O'Reilly books in a thrift shop. I remember reading that post as well, which made me think that the author was crazy to pass those up (I don't have the link to it, unfortunately).

  • Cooking: Many Kitchens are Bad

    I doubt I'll ever write much about cooking at least as far as posting recipes and offering unsolicited advice. In fact, this is one area of the media landscape that is not doing so bad. Real chefs are out there making videos and articles with the understanding that their audience is made up of mostly normal people who just want to improve a little each time they do stuff in the kitchen. It might not even have anything to do with the food itself - not directly. Having a good workflow, being comfortable in your kitchen, not dreading the cleanup (because you do it as you go along), identifying what tools suck to use and replacing them with better ones, then maintaining those tools, etc. In fact, I have a theory that modern kitchen design is partly to blame for why [anecdotal gross generalization incoming] my grandparents were the last generation of people to just... know how to cook a thing without having to get a professional involved. I never wanted to cook more than eggs and ramen until well into adulthood. Now, going back to my parents' kitchen (and the sad little grocery store nearby) make it clear to me why. Many kitchens just aren't equipped for "serious" effort.

  • between the ribs

• Technology and Free Software

  • Manage vm-bhyve guests with OS X Mavericks VNC client

    FreeBSD vm-bhyve is a great tool to create, install and manage virtual machines.

    vm-bhyve is designed to work with ZFS, which makes it very easy to create new vm's, and make ZFS snapshots of those.

    Virtual machines can either run with or without a graphical desktop. For machines running without a graphical desktop we use SSH.

    The FreeBSD bhyve hypervisor provides VNC access to the virtual machines that boot with UEFI. Expose the VNC port to the network to allow for remote management.

  • Why I like retro

    For me, retro means that I control what I see. When I choose a song on a CD, that is my unaltered choice. When I choose a song on my phone, the distractions that come from my phone will eventually draw my attention away from my music.

    It's the intentionality of retro tech that really draws it to me, as well as the aesthetic of the tech. I do really love the aesthetic of either the beige, transparent, scratched aluminum or the grey. They all draw it to me.

  • EVE Salvage Methods

    So someone asked whether it was possible to assign individual salvage drones to individual wrecks rather than letting them do their own thing. The answer is apparently yes, you can manually assign individual salvage drones to individual wrecks, which is a lot of extra clicking (to the tune of N drones and M wrecks where N is usually five and M a "small" positive integer). Automation? Nope, not here.

    A next question might be, which method takes less time, letting the drones blob up or manually assigning them to wrecks? We're ignoring the player effort part, and assume that the player is perfectly efficient in assigning drones to wrecks. Me, I just let the drones do their thing, and on rare occasions will put them all on a particular wreck, as extra clicks is not what my fingers need.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: stop making news aggregators

      There has been a recent phenomenon where Antenna is flooded with the output of a news aggregator. The content of the news aggregator itself is at least partly interesting to me, except for the articles in a language I do not speak. The problem, which bothers me a little but apparently bothers other people much more than me, is that it is crowding out the visibility of other content on Antenna. And possibly other aggregator sites, but mainly Antenna, in that anyone can submit their page or feed to be added to Antenna.

    • Displaying public transport information in the terminal

      For a long time I have wanted some way to see, at a glance, information about various different modes of public transport in my area, preferably alongside some other useful information like weather. For example, from my house in London I can often take a train, tube or bus to my destination, and which one is best will depend on the time of day and whether there are delays or disruptions, etc. So a dashboard that gives me all of that information will let me easily decide how to go about the journey. Both Trasport for London (TfL) and National Rail provide a lot of helpful information through public APIs, but I wanted a way to show it all together.

      Initially I tried to create such a dashboard myself using simple HTML and CSS, but web UI programming isn't something I'm very good at or particularly enjoy. So I looked at a number of selfhosted dashboard solutions. These are primarily intended for system monitoring, but some of them are extensible. The most promising one I found was Homepage, which looks great and can be extended with custom widgets, which are built using React. Homepage also provides a proxy object to help query API endpoints, but it seems to be intended for use with a basic JSON REST API with static endpoints (where request details are specified using GET parameters). Some of the APIs I would be accessing are not structured in this way - for example, the National Rail API uses SOAP.

    • Re: stop making news aggregators

      Your goal would be having people to "subscribe" to your page, thus make your collection of articles easy to subscribe.

    • Re: stop making news aggregators

      That's definitely true. I'd say it's more relevant to people who use Gemini for "blogging", rather than for "digital gardening". These are two of the biggest types of document on Gemini (the third being "rehosted" material from the Web and Gopher). I don't think people post to Antenna saying "hi, I just updated a couple of pages in my digital garden ... check this out!", and maybe they should.

    • The Endless Escape from the WWW

      Too late to view the internet before its full commercialization. Just in time to watch as it all goes to hell :(

      KOSA is strictly for the spying of the American people by the US Government. A trojan horse, it hides under the guise of "protecting children," which apparently, includes the restriction of trans and LGBTQ topics. This is the only reason it may even pass the house.