Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Christina's August questions

    I love Christina's questions. I'm glad she's asking again.

    1. What trinket would I miss the most?

    I'm sentimentally attached to everyday tools I miss badly when I misplace them: Casio MQ-24 wristwatch, Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen, print-out schedule for the week, Nalgene acrylic water bottle.

    2. Who's a national treasure in my country?

    Dead: Harriet Tubman, A. Philip Randolph, C. Vann Woodward, the Wright Brothers, Lorinda Cherry, Charlie Chaplain, William Faulkner, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson, Billie Holiday-- easy to come up with many.

    Alive: Lady Gaga, Adolph Reed, Luigi Mangione?

  • K for Kentucky

    I was born in a Commonweath. I never learned what distinguishes it from an ordinary federated state. Our rich are lords of their manors or gangsters. Our poor are peasants tied to land owned by a lord, or in and out of the workhouse. We don't hold wealth in common.

    Kentucky pays, though, to repave state highways every summer, widen as population grows. It invests state workers' pensions and pays out. It spends on state prison infrastructure and wages.

  • Now Playing

    ... Lenny Bruce, Lester Banks, Leonard Bernstein ... Broderick ... Bourdain ...

• Technology and Free Software

  • operating system utopia

    Do you ever think of what your ideal computer environment would be like?

    I can think of a million reasons why I don't like the current state of computers, and as a result, being the human that I am, I create little utopias in my dreams about the ideal computer system where I could live the rest of my life. I come up with many different ideas, some lofty and vague, some more accomodating to the current state of computer technology, but it is always something entirely different from what we have today.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • “Bro, ban me at the IP level if you don't like me!”

      Nice! I was digging through all the information and I know the register got to it today before I got you a draft, but here’s the thing during my deep dive into the OSI. I discovered something very interesting. However, in their bylaws, it says specifically and explicitly declares no members. Yes. I had to read that three times because I couldn’t believe my eyes. You can’t make this stuff up!

    • The Mortalitron

      The first parameter is a Gemini URL. At the moment, the resource must have a mime type of text/gemini. This may change. The second parameter is a boolean true or false indicating whether you want the server to resolve relative links in the document.

      You can call the function multiple times but once you've received more the 64k of data, an error is returned. For example, the first call to fetchGemini might return 128k of data as the underlying page limit is higher. At that point, you're done. Subsequent calls will fail as the 64k limit has been met. These values are subject to change.

    • Anti AI zip bomb with Caddy

      Found this nice post[1] on how to publish a zip bomb[2] on my website as a honeypot for AI crawlers that don't respect the `robots.txt` directive. The idea is that I have a hidden link on all pages of my website that points to a URL that returns the bomb. You don't see it. Legit crawlers won't follow it. AI crawlers will do, and I hope they spend some CPU cycles trying to download it.

    • Commenting runtime state changes

      As I was banning Thinkbot [1], I saw the previous entries in the “badbots firewall rule set”. The first one was banning a particularly bad Gemini bot that would make an invalid empty request only to immediately follow up with a valid request, for every request it made! That was the first bot I actually banned, and it was very recent ban too—June 19^th.