Gemini* and Gopher

• Politics and World Events

  • What to write

    Sometimes I sit here in front of my laptop and wonder what I am writing. Given the state of the world, I'd like not to partake in the big enraging. But at the same time, I feel like the world needs more people watching. I'm not a journalist. I don't do investigations. But I sometimes feel that future generations will wonder: "What were they thinking?" Like that book I have about foreigners visiting Germany in the years before World War II.

• Technology and Free Software

  • SMTP Pipelining

    Probably what the facebook coders are doing is something like what is shown in this code, but without evidence this is a guess. There might instead be a bug† in OpenSMTPD, or both sides could be buggy. One would need to log the entire SMTP dialog for clues as to who is at fault, and why. That being said, I've seen really bad SMTP client implementations in production where the programmers had a bit of Java that squirted some strings to a remote IP address. Error handling? Nope. Retries on temporary failure? Nope. Fucks given? Nope.

  • 💭 Toby's tinylog

    I've been working hard on my Bubblewrapped Services (BWS) tool for self-hosting services on Linux. BWS is an alternative to using Docker/Podman. Instead of containers (which contain a whole OS), it uses sandboxes that re-uses the host OS. This makes it much more lightweight, easier to debug, and easier to manage.

  • GitHub from the command-line

    I tried both `git-hub` and `gh` and failed twice. Years ago, I tried some git-forge integration with magit in Emacs, too. It didn't work.

    In comparison, just `git` works.

    Somebody sends me the URL to their repository in an email with an explanation. I add a "remote" using their name, and fetch the info I need.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • ROOPHLOCH 2025 round up

      October is here! And thus, that's a wrap on ROOPHLOCH for yet another year. If you made a qualifying Gopher or Gemini post before the end of September 2025 in your timezone but have not yet notified me of the URL, please do so as soon as possible! All of the posts which I know about so far have been listed at the link below. We had another good turn out this year, and I'd like to thank everybody who participated for helping keep this fun little tradition alive.

    • ROOPHLOCH 2025 round up

      In addition to modulated light, we had both amateur radio and LoRa used once again, and on the exotic computer hardware side we had an AlphaSmart Dana Wireless. There were also posts in Polish and Spanish - I think perhaps non-English content is a (welcome!) ROOPHLOCH first, as well.

      Thanks again, and I hope to join many of you again next year for ROOPHLOCH 2026!

    • Hello Gopher, an update

      I don't have anything particular to write about, but that's no reason not to write. Writing can be a pleasure, especially when there is nothing to say.

      My file timestamps tell me that it has been about three months since I last wrote. Now, that's about two months more than I would like, at least. I enjoy gopher, and it works better if we all write something regularly. It's a small space, and it needs our content.