● 07.21.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 21/07/2023: Offline-first and Oversharing

Posted in News Roundup at 7:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• This morning I got an email from the University stating that I had a duplicate account and that it was going to be terminated within 24 hours if I didn’t verify my account.

• Naturally I was nervous and clicked the link in the email, which appeared to be from the university website, but it took me off to a different “jotform.com” site. I was confused and then tried typing in the link from the email only to have it 404 me. It was at that moment I immediately realized what just happened, I’d been the victim of a phishing attack. Fortunately it appears to be not a very sophisticated one as it was just a hidden link. So unsophisticated that I wonder if this was just a fake phishing attack by the university itself, which they do as little practice drills.

• Wow! What a tournament so far. There has been some strange happenings for sure.

• Kirishima (former Kiribayama) has returned and been doing fairly well. He won his first bout as an Ozeki so the gods will be happy. Hopefully he can get his kashi-koshi and avoid being kadoban with Takakeisho in at Aki.

• It always feels unfair how winter keeps getting colder even after the solstice. It’s not like I’m ungrateful for the extra daylight, even if there is no warmth to the sun. And I understand enough about orbital mechanics and latent heat to know why it works that way. I just can’t help but feel cheated.

• Recently, for the last couple of weeks i am in a somewhat *meh* mood with missing energy for nearly everything.

• The thing is: Over the last three to five years my wife and i were constantly on edge, there was our barn conversion project, there were many problems that needed attention NOW, there was the ilness of my dad (he MUCH better now, thank the nonexistant gods!), there was the pregnancy and birth of our son… to make it short: We had simply no time for anything besides the immediate needs. Now, with the big project finished, our son now five months old and new habit settled in there is again free time… but i somehow have no energy left (and no real interest) to do anything with that free time.

• I see the word ‘woke’ more in contrast to the word ‘asleep’. The “woke” are convinced they’ve a better grasp of morality than those they consider asleep with respect to the same.

• And they’re religious about it. They’ve their bible, i.e. left-leaning news media. One might say left-leaning media scripts are the woke’s script-ure. They consider any other points of view heretical. They proselytize. They shun to the point of cancellation of the unrepentant. They’re basically a secular religion.

• (NOTE: from my point of view they don’t merely “lean”… they “apocalyptically, twin-towers-grade crumble and fall” every hour, on the hour..)

Politics and World Events

• I have a bone to pick with WOKENESS, one of my least favorite newspeak words. WOKE is one of those: when I hear it, I know that any chance of a productive or even remotely interesting or satisfying conversation — are out the window. There will be no deviations from the party line from here on – left or right.

• Note that it is simply mentioning this word as an adjective¹ (except in the context of linguistic misuse or perhaps quoting some fool), is enough to indicate to me that the person using it is likely a rabid, brainwashed simpleton, or possibly feeble-minded idiot. You just know what follows. There is simply no point continuing the conversation — just not politely nod and back away!

• I may agree with what they are saying (though probably not entirely). “My dad is, like, not woke.” “Perhaps you are right. Oh, look at the time.”

Technology and Free Software

• I’ve taken an offline-first approach to computing. I find it benefits me greatly, by using more resilient utilities, having technological sovereignty, and nonetheless spending less time on the Internet, more offline, even if it’s on a computer.

• I don’t recommend data hoarding, I think each should keep how much data they consider to be useful, if they have the space required for it. Keeping offline wikis, dictionaries, translators, backups, passwords, can always prove to be helpful, relying less on hosted services, and more on yourself (Argos translate comes to mind as an offline translator).

Internet/Gemini

• For the last three days, once a day I’ve sat down with my UMPC and created an empty Gemini log file. I’d fill in the date and format all the links, then move my cursor to the body of the post. Minutes would go by, then hours. Each time I would find that I had written nothing. Eventually I’d close my editor in frustration, delete the file, and move on to other things.

• Rob’s Gemini Capsule has been relatively quiet this month, but it hasn’t just been this month. I posted 30 fewer entries to my log over 12 months in 2022 than I did over 11 months in 2021, the year I launched the capsule. So far in 2023, every month except July has seen the same number of posts or fewer per month.

• Since we’re on the subject of reverse-proxies today, here’s something I wrote in C# which parses a binary (v2) PROXY-protocol header from the beginning of a Stream.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.