Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Notes on an overheard conversation of two people opening a package

    “Oh, it's a mug from Sunny Farms, in Sequim, Washington.”

• Technology and Free Software

  • Searching for impermanence (a gazebo is too permanent)

    This month, in an attempt to outdo last year’s underwhelming ROOPHLOCH post, I’m going to make ALL of this month’s Scrawlspace posts ROOPHLOCH-compliant.

    (Capsule updates elsewhere aren’t bound to this. If I make any more headway on Wrangel’s _Always with Honor_ this month, it’s gonna be totally indoors.)

    If you’re an avid feed consumer of Halfway to Mars, you probably saw a post this month from a couple days ago. I nuked it because, on second thought, it wasn’t QUITE up to Unambiguously Full ROOPHLOCH compliance; I uploaded the change from a computer indoors even though I composed it kinda sorta outside (well, in my car).

    Now I’m sitting in the shade from an umbrella that could be blown away given a stiff-enough breeze, and I’m on a real computer that can run everything in my publish-it Makefile target.

  • little brother wasn't meant to come true

    it's becoming quite clear that the united kingdom, my home, has become a surveillance state. i've gotta say voting for that fuckwad starmer might be the worst mistake i ever made.

    anyway, in the wake of the online safety act and facial recognition systems popping up everywhere, i have only one thing to say to the system: fuck right off.

    apart from actually leaving this hellhole, each and every part of the government's attempted big brother can be circumvented.

    facial recognition? on the rare occasion i go into the city, i look downward. i'm also thinking of wearing a facemask, which would help (covid isn't gone yet).

  • Corporate Theatre

    Well this helped clarify some of my own thoughts about my job. I need to figure out how to do the job well, for as long as I can, and be able to draw boundaries in much clearer and better ways.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Transmissions into the Void

      It's a great feed aggregator for geminispace. One of the things I think is really innovative about it is that it does no automatic scraping. Instead, when posts are made on some capsule it is the capsule's responsibility to notify Antenna that there's New Stuff. This ensures that

      * it's showing the most recent stuff at all times

      * there's only active sources for Antenna to worry about

      So me being very lazy, I wanted to automate this ping. As part of my pipeline I automatically regenerate my /posts/index.gmi and /posts/atom.xml files. (Incidentally, /posts/index.gmi is in proper gemlog format now, so yay.) I just needed something to notice when one of those files is updated to ping Antenna.