● 06.22.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 22/06/2023: Self-hosting and Belated Happy Birthday to Gemini

Posted in News Roundup at 5:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Sometimes I have trouble getting to sleep at night. Some nights I don’t sleep at all. Tonight was one of them. Apparently insomnia is more prevalent among autistic people but I can’t blame my autism tonight. No, I dosed myself with too much caffeine because Final Fantasy XVI released at midnight last night.

• Catherine and I have both been looking forward to the game, especially once a demo became available a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been a FF fan since I was 12 and after Cat and I got married she got dragged into it.

• I’m your exception to this! We have a bag of decaf coffee at home to make for when we want to enjoy coffee at night, or want to add coffee to a cocktail. I wished that decaf coffee was just as available and tasty as regular coffee. It’s gotten better, but not quite 100% there. Believe it or not, I have also wished bourbon to taste exactly the same, but remove the alcohol. I enjoy the taste, but often I wish it had no alochol due to the possibility of dependence, impact on sleep, etc.

• I’m done with two weeks of antibiotics. I was very very weak and I think I lost even more weight: I’m probably close to 50 Kg and BMI of 20.

• My appetite is slowly coming back and I feel much better since Monday or so. I was able to carry my flugelhorn (in its heavy wooden case) to my lesson, play it (loudly!), then carry it and myself back home. And I was OK afterwards! No pain, no heartburn while playing, no tiredness on Tuesday.

Technology and Free Software

• I’ve been asking myself lately. Epically after Large Language Models becoming the new hot girl in the town. – Thing are, mostly, owned and propelled by large mega-corps. The situation of the field of AI is even worse. So far only Facebook, Google and Microsoft have the capacity to build new LLMs due to how much data and how expensive it is. I don’t see this trend breaking any time soon; we are heading straight towards some version of the cyberpunk dystopia. – How can I throw a wrench into the steam engine driving us towards the grim future?

• Today I booted up the laptop to start transferring my TinyCore extensions. However, I was in for a shock – memory errors and a failure to boot! I checked the codes online and reseated the RAM as suggested to no avail, so I booted up with my copy of the Ultimate Boot CD into what was basically FreeDOS and had a look around. It seemed as though I was running out of memory, so I started removing newly added things from the onboot.lst file. I then added norestore to the syslinux.cfg file and rebooted and (eventually) it was working. I removed the norestore and rebooted and it was broken again. I rebuilt an extension that had been causing issues in case it was linked and readded it, but that didn’t help the memory problems. In the end, I just deleted the .tor directory from the home directory backup and that seemed to do the trick. It means I can’t use Tor anymore, but I have a copy of it tar.gzipped up so I can always put it back if I need it.

• [...]

• I’m writing this entry from the laptop in question, resting on an atlas and then on my lap so I don’t have to clear my desk. It’s hot today and that combined with the laptop on me has me sweating. I may need more insulation between the laptop and my legs…

• I recently started my own pubnix where I now host my blog and everything else. I started learning about OpenBSD and decided to give it a try, and I love it so much I decided to move there permanently.

• Or… not live because I’m typing this up several hours later. Oh well!

• There are only a few games that I’m following very closely here, which surely exposes me as a Fake Gamer, which is fine.

• Summer has been really kicking off up here in the north the last couple of weeks. During the weekend I visited a friend who is living in his girlfriends parents cabin out in the woods during summer. He has been going big on gardening and is growing his own tomatoes, chilis and various other stuff out there, and we have been helping him out a bit while also enjoying the nice weather that we’ve been having. I’ve gotten a bit sunburnt already, and even so I was taking precautions by wearing a cap and sunscreen. We’ve also been having some nice sauna-sessions, cooling ourselves of from time to time in the nearby lake.

• [...]

• I’ve also been working on an old PC donated by a friend. He had an old Pentium II MMX system that had been used in their summer vacation cabin that they were now selling, so I got it for nothing. It’s a bit newer than the 486-system that I’ve been playing with during winter and spring, but I installed a CF-reader and a network card in it to be able to experiment a bit.

• I’ve spent some time these last few months to accumulate flux-images of floppies I got from various sources. Most of them were acquired from an auction-site regional to me, similar to eBay. They turned out to be mostly Amiga formatted disks, but also contained the odd IBM-formatted disk, and some Atari ST stuff as well. I had an Amiga 500, but never really used it much, since I got it very late. With emulation being what it is, it is trivial to run the old stuff found on these floppies on a modern system though. But, with hundreds of dumped images, this turned out to be a real hassle. Because of this, I recently started looking into different methods to look through these dumps to find interesting files.

• I started thinking about all this due to recent changes in the banking market here in Norway. However, if that is of no interest to you, skip straight to S. “The workaround”.

Internet/Gemini

• I know on my end, where I have a web presence, am on Mastodon, a tilde community, and in my own IRL communities, Gemini and this capsule provides me with a different space to express myself and explore. I can keep a separate identity from my main professional work. I don’t have to make sure my work here matches my professional goals or even my presence on social media. With minimal tools, without commercial interests, ads or monetization, I have a place I can enter on my own terms, engage with like minded folks, and then slip out the back door, without having to do a ton of setup, negotiate or dance around a corporation, or even spend much time on drudgery.

• I just noticed that whois.geektools.com and geektools.com both return NXDOMAIN now… Checking the internet archive, they had posted a notice on their site back in May stating that they had ended the service:

• geektools.com has shut down. We started this service in 1998 as the first smart whois that would automatically query the correct server(s) to get the data you need. A lot has changed since then and it’s time to move on. Most modern command line clients on *nix-like systems will select the appropriate whois server. Check your system’s man page (“man whois” for those of you who don’t know what a man page is). If you prefer to use a browser interface there are many sites that perform the same function and they’re easy to find with your favorite search engine.

• SDF just recently released a reddit-style webpage for the community which I think is pretty nifty.

• Reddit is interesting in its own way. I was only a casual user of Reddit but it’s one of those websites that does something that is really hard to replicate: Be incredibly niche while being incredibly popular. I think only Wikipedia comes close.

• You can’t depend on how tabs will be rendered in preformatted text blocks. You probably shouldn’t use tabs in your preformatted text blocks. You should convert tabs into spaces and use that in preformatted text blocks in Gemtext.

• i only learned about the small web fairly recently. i like the reasons behind it — simplicity, mindful curation, valuing humans over corporations — things that seem to be increasingly rare on the web at large. i’ve been browsing around it for a couple days now and it’s really cool to see people just writing about things that interest them

• I have noticed a strange thing about the Japanese corner of the Internet: the number of pages presenting themselves as dialogues. Often times when I look up something in Japanese and click a result, I see some character asking another character how something works and the page continues in a dialog format. Alternatively, the explaining character may start with “today I will explain XYZ” to the second character who asks questions.

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