Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Everything Must Go

    Another possibility is that the thing gets archived, meaning it enters a long term storage system with the hope that you or posterity might one day appreciate having it, even if it still has no immediate use.

    The archive is different to the other fates that befall Stuff. We have to tackle the miasmic stacks eventually, perhaps in a burst of spring cleaning, but I think we expect not to have to clear out archives - ever. We imagine that the box of keepsakes should be kept indefinitely, because these are the Really Important things.

    Of course this becomes impossible eventually.

    How many archive boxes are you allowed? Maybe you have a big house, so you can have a lot. What about the people that inherit them? How many of your boxes are they obliged to preserve, on top of boxes of their own? How much physical storage space are you allowed to claim for yourself, indefinitely? What happens when your successors decide their Stuff is more important than yours? Accumulating Stuff without limit means accumulating cost without limit. Who pays?

  • beyond the frame

    I brace myself
    for the question that never comes
    and find out the answer
    is shaped like a question
    

  • How my memory works

    Last night, I was walking with my daughter when we stopped to talk to a woman with a dog. She knew my daughter’s name. I had no idea who she was.

    I tried to place her while we talked, but her face gave me nothing. Then she turned to my daughter and said, “Do you remember Toki?”

    Toki was the dog.

    Suddenly, I remembered the woman. I remembered meeting her several times on other walks and seeing her once with her husband.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Announcing Perigee

      I recently published Perigee, a Gemini server written in Rust.

      The project README gives a detailed overview of its capabilties, so I won't go into them here, but briefly, it supports static files, user directories, client auth, and dynamic content via CGI and SCGI. It is configured via a YAML file, in which you can specify one or more rules describing how requests should be handled. Each rule has a "match" component which describes *when* it will be used to handle a request, and an "action" component which describes *how* it will handle the request.

      Perigee also supports multiple hostnames, which was actually a large part of the motivation for developing it: now I can serve requests to "bunburya.eu" and "gemini.bunburya.eu" side by side (pointing to the same content). When I set up this capsule I went with "gemini.bunburya.eu", without really thinking about it. I'd rather use the more concise "bunburya.eu" going forward, but I don't want any of my existing pages or posts to suffer linkrot so I will retain support for "gemini.bunburya.eu".

    • Thoughts on a Gemini MCP

      BBS was abuzz with discussion earlier this week^ over the release of a model context protocol for Gopher and Gemini.^^ A model context protocol is a standard used by LLMs and other AI tools to interface with external data sources--in this case, it enables AI tools to directly query the Gopher and Gemini protocols. The announcement of this MCP caused a great deal of consternation on BBS, especially since Gemini's recent draw has largely been to avoid the saturation of dopamine-targeting AI generated-content on the mainline Internet.

      This is far from a new discussion in Geminispace. Capsule operators in particular have been discussing the problem of scrapers and crawlers for a long time. As an operator myself, I'd like to share a few thoughts on the situation.

    • Presentations in a browser

      Making presentations over Zoom has become a regular part of my working life ever since the dark days of the pandemic. Those days may be a distant memory, but zoom has become a fixture.

      I started out using Powerpoint and Impress, its Libre Office equivalent, but I've never got on with PowerPoint and didn't enjoy the experience.