● 06.26.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 26/06/2023: Cypherpunk and Praise of elinks

Posted in News Roundup at 12:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• if you could earn your living toiling 3 just hours a day, what would you do the rest of your day?

• and I guess it maybe sorta conforms to some physical sensational whatevers

• but I do feel uncomfortable with food that won’t fit the spoon or fork such that there will likely be collateral lip soiling

• one of the most difficult things

• Our wedding ceremony was very nice and reflected us well. No priests or churches, just us and our family and friends.

• Fun were had, went to sauna, saw cute ducklings, listened to wide variety of music together… And I even danced.

• The growth of this place is straining my equanimity. It’s not the amount of people moving here, per se, but rather the built environment ‘developers’ (what a strange and misleading name for mindless corporate organisms that eat land!) have made to accommodate them. We needed significant density to house this mass influx of humanity, and we got unchecked suburban hell. Hundreds of thousands of wild acres–a precious resource for many peoples over the last 10,000 years–are gone, buried under a hideous sea of identical 4000 square foot houses and big box stores. Malvina Reynolds was mostly right, but it’s not little boxes on the hillside, it’s pharaonic tombs in three different Richmond-approved colors. And the cars.

• Hello I am leaving to CHI for a year! Does anybody have some tips for living in the CHI

• it’s been exactly two weeks since my last post and a few things have happened since then. i was mostly busy getting my life back in line, reestablishing my routines that make me feel safe in my own four walls even when my mental is subpar. running has helped me quite a bit to distract myself from the many stressors that rest on my shoulders at the moment. i looked at my calendar this weekend and i almost wanted to cry at just how busy all my upcoming weekends are. but that’s just how it is sometimes. it’s not like i signed up for things that i don’t want to do. quite the opposite. it’s just a lot at the moment, really. i’m no good at planning ahead of time and keeping tabs on so many things at once is challenging my grey matter more than i thought.

Science

• I’m seeing a lot of “oh it’s great that we discovered these easily-pluggable, low-hanging fruit emitters like methane leaks and diked-out peatlands, yay” and on the one hand, yeah, fixing the low-hanging fruit, the 80/20, the squeakiest wheels is definitively something we’ve got to do…

• …we already knew we were in trouble before we discovered these issues and these sites. We need to fix a lot of the normal stuff too.

Technology and Free Software

• I’ve spent the last couple of days working on an image format, based on QOI, called QOI-Remix or QOI-R. For those who aren’t familiar, QOI is a lossless image format created by Dominic Szablewski; the spec fits on a page and it’s enormously faster than PNG, while achieving reasonably good encoded file sizes. I thought this was a really good area to be exploring, and one relevant to my own interests and to permacomputing (under the larger umbrella of efficient software.) With that in mind, I did several changes to the image format, adding a little bit of compute overhead but frequently achieving substantial reductions in filesize – and remaining far faster than PNG.

• We now resume a dialog already in progress.

• Josephus.— See here, there is a “connected” method to check whether a TCP socket is connected.

• Aloysius.— The peer could close the connection the very next second.

• Josephus.— But I want to know whether the socket is connected right now.

• Aloysius.— This is also not possible; the peer may have already closed the socket, and one cannot tell the difference between the ESTABLISHED and CLOSE-WAIT states.

• I was trying to rescue my new Manjaro installation. But, I had never tried chrooting into a BTRFS volume before.

• chroot lets you rebase the file system from a running system (like a live USB flash drive) to the file system of a stopped system (like a broken Linux installation on your hard drive). By changing the root (chroot), utilities run inside the chrooted environment act as if they were being run on the computer that you are troubleshooting. So, if my Manjaro installation is not working, I can use my installation disc, chroot into my system, and run updates, check the logs, or run other utilities. In this way, chroot combines the functioning of the live system with the file system of the broken installation.

• I’ll jot down some quick thoughts on Lemmy, a Reddit-like service for the Fediverse. When it first was announced a few years ago, I thought “yeah, right, it has a really long way to go” and instead of helping I just sorted it under “vaporware”. But now it’s becoming usable♥.

• My general principle is that private conversation between known entities (like friends & fam) is usually a good thing and something humanity is well adapted to (since that’s how offline has worked for millenia) while anonymous immutable persistent broadcast is danger zone and unlike anything previous generations have had to deal with. Even a skeevy bathroom wall can be cleaned up or painted over.

• Whenever I read a Gemlog entry that I think I might want to reply to, I bookmark it for later.

• Old School Stylish (OSS) is an interesting zine supplement of 28 pages (counting both covers) for Old School Essentials (OSE). OSS drops the class system and instead lets characters pick up “styles”, which are small collections of capabilities. As they adventure they can find and acquire (with suitable effort) more styles. Everything, from hit points to spells to thief capabilities to Armour Class, are part of styles. Characters can have multiple styles active, and can switch out styles for other ones they have learned. By default characters still have levels, but there is a option for dropping levels as well. As you might guess from the cover image this zine takes inspiration from martial arts and cultivation media. OSS offers a lot of ideas for how to acquire styles in play, from petitioning masters to learning a style by observing special circumstances. It provides several tables to help you come up with interesting ways for characters to learn styles. It also suggests that the players NOT use the book to select styles for their character, but leave it up to the DM to place styles to be found in the world, which I thought was interesting.

• I’m enjoying the simplicity of Debian v5 (Lenny) on the old desktop [0]. I realized shortly after the install that I didn’t have to rely on the DVDs I had burned to install packages on this box, I could take advantage of the Debian archive mirror itself, which works with Lenny and this sources.list

Internet/Gemini

• What a wonderful BBS this is. I was able to sort out an error on adding a certificate within minutes ! Great job, Skyjake

• The rise of community-oriented services on Gemini, especially Bubble, has helped introduce more people to the protocol than ever before. Recently I’ve seen several different newcomers looking for more information on how to set up a capsule and have a more independent presence on the platform. I’ll share how I do that in this log.

• This is not meant to be a guide, but rather a non-technical overview of how my capsule is set up, and it’s written for an audience that is not as tech-savvy. It goes more into concepts than the particulars of the technology behind them. My hope is that recent arrivals to Geminispace can find this document, see what goes into operating my capsule, and get a better sense of how easy it can be.

• As I spend more time in text-based tools on the command line, I’ve become quite appreciative of the elinks browser. I’ve been building various portable Raspberry Pi based computers over the last while and I’ve realised that web browsers like Chromium and Firefox are the bottlenecks in terms of performance, because they are so resource-hungry. Netsurf is a nice alternative, but works quite poorly if using a touch-screen input, for example scrolling is quite finicky.

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