Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Snow

    I like snow so much. This year it finally stayed long enough I had found some time to snowboard. Wish there would be more snow in winter.

  • The nonsense behind those fake accents in singing

    Someone from the opera world has finally come out and said it: the reason some singers sound weird is a deliberate choice. Some of that is down to a tradition that is not adapting to changing knowledge of how humans use language, but which is nevertheless evolving.

  • Fat, slow, fight

    I love fighting so much!

    The instructor yesterday had a t-shirt with the word: Boxing is Love on his back.

    Boxing felt very good. I can see my body transforming slowly. Not only from the boxing, karate and hiking, but more from my eating habit that has changed since I've stopped watching the tv. I'm back into intermittent fasting, only eating between 12 and 6pm.

  • Void, my old friend

    I search for some passions, for some distractions. Should I pick up a book, watch a movie, play music, draw... All is available yet nothing attracts me, nothing excites me. I could get drunk, get high, I have it all, yet I have no interest.

    What then? A warm bath, a cup of tea, some writing.

    I had a good day at work, a nice chat with a friend on the beach, warmed by the sun, warmed by mapacho. Karate was fun, yet, once alone, there is a yearning for something else.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Rootkid's Spectrum Slit Lights Up Any Room with the Cheery Glow of Visualized Radio Spectrum

    Pseudonymous maker and artist "Rootkid" has built a unique wall-mounted light called the Spectrum Slit, which is designed to respond to the local radio environment, targeting the 2.4GHz and 5GHz spectra.

    "Spectrum Slit is a sculptural installation that renders visible the otherwise imperceptible electromagnetic activity that permeates contemporary interior spaces," its creator explains. "While a room may appear visually calm and silent, it is continuously traversed by dense fields of radio-frequency transmissions generated by wireless communication technologies. This work exposes that hidden layer of reality by translating radio wave activity into light (and sound) in real time."

  • pigc

    i've been working the past couple of days on writing a gemini client in python. i've tried a few times to do this, but i kept getting stuck on some aspects of the OpenSSL library that make it difficult to actually verify client certificates. i finally figured it out though (basically, i had trouble getting server certificates without verifying them against a CA, because i was trying to set VERIFY_NONE and then use getpeercert() to get the certificate from the connection, but that function doesn't return anything if you have VERIFY_NONE set. turns out i wanna call get_server_certificate(), which is called on a hostname-port pair BEFORE establishing the connection. then i can get the certificate fine, compare it against saved certificates to look for a TOFU mismatch, and if it's good, load it to actually verify the subsequent connection)

    but anyway, i'm pretty happy with the way it's coming along so far. i was wanting to write it in C as an exercise, but i'm not very good at C and i'm much more used to python. documentation for OpenSSL C libraries is also either much worse than the python libraries or it's just going over my head how i'm supposed to access it. i'd still like to maybe port it to C in the future, i'll see how i feel about it. python is fine for now

  • Proving intelligence 🧠

    The Turing test is a well known suggestion for how to decide if a machine is intelligent: if you can't tell that it's a machine, that's enough to count it as intelligent. There's a counter-argument, almost as well known, called the Chinese room argument: if someone who doesn't understand Chinese sits in a room using a big book of rules to construct replies to prompts in Chinese, they don't seem to be doing anything intelligent even if the replies they give are convincing to a Chinese person.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Hello World

      I've just set up gemserv on my YunoHost. Writing this in nano until I find a better way to do it.

      Next I want to document my process of how I got everything up and running on YunoHost.

      Still have to figure out how I can generate and add an atom feed to this.

    • How to install and configure gemserv on YunoHost

      This is how I installed and configured the Gemini server "gemserv" on YunoHost. I'm using a mix of YunoHost's Web UI and SSH.

    • Non-disruptive solution for embedding data into gemtext

      While there are already a way to embed files into gemtext by using "data:" scheme it suffers from having to be either be percent-encoded or base64 endoded, which bloats files a lot. I propose that instead files could be embeded within gemtext code blocks, with alt-text section embedding within itself a mime-type of a file, followed by optional whitespace and alt-text, with closing line of backticks having a suggested filename followed by forward slash and link text, presented to the user.

  • Programming

    • Lisp is fun

      Lately I am having lots of fun with Lisp.

      After diving into Common Lisp the last years, I have now mostly been playing with Elisp and Guile Scheme.

      Both are nice languages. Working in these environments give the same feeling.

      When some interactivity is needed, I prefer Elisp. Emacs takes care of the user interface for your Elisp programs.

      Guile Scheme is fast.