● 06.06.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 06/06/2023: Bubble 4.0, Neutral News, and Older Bits

Posted in News Roundup at 9:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• A weary traveler stands outside the pub, dusting off his clothes and checking his pockets nervously. He pulls a worn and slightly crumpled business card from his left jacket pocket, turning it over in his hand to examine both sides. The embossed logo of a door with a moon in the center stands out clearly in the dim light of the alleyway. Looking again at the front door of the Midnight, he raises a fist and knocks three times.

• as a kid i was enamored of many things: succulents, rubik’s cubes, computers and also trains. the larger-than-life feeling of entering the hall of a train station, the incomprehensible announcements through the tinny speakers, the neverending onslaught of wagons dragged by freight trains, the ridiculous speeds at which these massive metal worms drag people from point a to b. unfortunately i never got around to traveling by train much as a kid. then and now going by train isn’t exactly the cheapest way to get around, and since my family was perfectly happy going everywhere by car, i didn’t have a choice.

• Hearing someone disapprove of socks and sandals, or wearing pyjamas outdoors may be the fastest way to identify an idiot. The recategorization happens instantly, and they find themselves unknowingly in the company of every Victorian man who might have chided someone for not wearing a wig, or powdering their face enough.

• “News sources are biased”, and “everyone lives in a bubble”, we all hear constantly (or perhaps that’s just my bubble). But what would a non-biased news source look like?

• Taking a strict middle-ground gives immediately ridiculous conclusions. Perhaps the UK’s food banks suggest some problem, but not much of a problem? This seems less wrong than saying food banks don’t suggest any problem, but still wrong. And should this neutral position exist on a per-country basis – so all the countries can have balanced, and unbiased, but totally different news stories – or planet-wide? ( – I can’t even imagine what madness that would summon)

• Facebook’s hardware efforts on the other hand have landed pretty well—the Oculus does what people want at a good price point. Their “Metaverse” software is failing because it’s not what people want at all, but we’re getting on just fine by ignoring it completely.

• With Google going “too cheap” and Facebook hitting “just right”, the idea of Apple entering the fray at a ridiculously high price point—$3500—is both fitting and hilarious.

Politics

• Once in a while I hear of someone who’s decided to not have children because of bad ideas. I don’t want to argue that anyone should or should not have children, but I do want to remove those bad ideas.

Technical

• I was recently reading a detailed account of Apple UNIX, a Macintosh-compatible UNIX operating system published by Apple for Macintosh computers with m68k CPUs. The account appeared to have been written in 2001, based on one screenshot of the author’s PC desktop. The account concludes by recommending that operators of m68k-based Macintosh computers who wish to run UNIX on their machines find an alternative to Apple UNIX for a number of reasons. They recommend NetBSD.

• [...]

• Oh. Zsh came out in 1990; it’s older than Linux. Huh.

• People have parroted the phrase ‘depends on the threat model’, so often, so quickly, and so vacuously, that I find my toes curling at the sound of it. But after a run-in with the mods on Reddit’s /r/privacy, some noteworthy gaffs came up which I think I can give a non-vacuous example of where the threat model really matters.

• I’ll miss pens when they go. I like how they feel. I like that handwriting is almost impossible to fake. I like that when I receive a letter, I can tell who sent it just from how they write the address. But it all has to go.

• Pens have some advantages over computers. One can generally access a pen-record faster – just open the notepad and it’s there. Modern software is so badly programmed that it’s often easier to find a page in a notepad than to open a text document. And it’s resilient – even if rain doesn’t do paper any favours, anyone can still read a page which has been rained on. Taking out a computer in the rain is just madness.

• Here is a simple dice game for y’all.

• Everyone needs four pawns or markers, and then you need three dice, and then make a board that has ten spaces numbered four through thirteen, plus a little starting area before the “4” space where everyone’s pawns start out, and also make sure that the “13” space is right next to the edge of the board.

• This is a roll-and-move game of the misère variety since you lose when you move your last piece off the board, and you win by hanging on the longest.

• My role-playing group has 3 Game Masters, and we rotate week-to-week on who is running their campaign. I’m using the more generic ‘Game Master’, because we wander away from and back to Dungeons & Dragons, though ‘DM’ would be appropriate right now, because right now all campaigns are using the D&D system.

• It is usually between two Dungeon Masters, as it has been a couple of years since I ran adventures consistently. But that is changing I have been putting a lot of effort in developing a new campaign, named ‘Death of the Duckling’. There is a story behind the name, but it didn’t stop the players from creating characters based on the name of the theme, with increasing references to cartoon characters such as ‘Darkwing Duck’.

Science

• A massive review of what we currently know about #LongCovid has been published today. Below are the highlights that jumped out at me, you can read the whole thing at nature.com[1].

• tfurrows wrote a phlog post yesterday centred mostly around responding to severe weather advisories and warnings. Right at the end he mentions participating in “weather spotter / Skywarn training”, something provided by the US National Weather Service. This seems to basically be a program to “crowdsource” early detection of heavy weather (what did we call “crowdsourcing” before that became a term?). I would certainly be interested to read more about this experience!

Internet/Gemini

• I always hear (usually from bloggers) “everybody needs a blog”, or “everyone needs a Web page”. Fair. But what everyone sort of “needs” is e-mail, which is why Gmail was such a smash hit in 2004 (and beyond). @yahoo.com and @aol.com e-mail accounts really were overzealous in their presence online (I mean, not a lot of alternatives at one point).

• But before 2004, in 1998-ish, people wanted a different thing altogether. Not JUST a different platform (for search, Yahoo – for chat, AOL) but a different way of using the WWW that wasn’t JUST that. Essentially, a self-made, en masse invention of Internet usage/culture.

• My previous hosting provider changed their pricing plan so it was time to move. If I’d known people were using it I would have tried to ensure minimal downtime but until just now I hadn’t realised this, so I took my time about it. There was an evening of wasted effort trying to shoehorn it into AWS Lambda before I decided to just add it to the VPS running this site.

• Every time you access a web page there will be a few dozen network requests to a few different servers. Before every network request can run there will be a connection made to a DNS server to look up the IP address of the website server.

• If you visit the same website again soon after your computer will remember the result of the previous DNS query and not need to ask the DNS server for the IP again. However I’ve noticed that this cache expires fairly quickly and that network requests to the same server, often only minutes later, involve a DNS query that seems redundant – DNS settings don’t change all that often.

• In the early days of the fediverse user numbers (aka hosting costs) were low and enthusiasm was high.

• Admins made their instance because they wanted to. Moderators volunteered because it felt meaningful (or whatever). We all had similar values and vibes were good. When the hat was passed around everyone happily threw a few bucks into it. Setting up a small instance can be done fairly easily by using a pre-configured docker image so only basic linux skills were needed.

• I’m in the process of preparing to migrate Gemini servers. This is a journey for me to learn how to do this, so I’m chronicling some things that I learned here. When all is ready, playonbsd.com will move from the current Vultr server to OpenBSD Amsterdam – for more storage space and more “OpenBSD-ness” of the whole project.

Announcements

• bbs.geminispace.org has been upgraded to Bubble v4. This week’s feature update adds some useful new tools and fixes several bugs.

• [...]

• You can now mute posts, subspaces, and individual users to hide them and notifications related to them. Together with follows, this allows tailoring what one sees in their Bubble feeds with quite a lot of precision.

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