● 07.23.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 23/07/2023: Publically Accessible GNUnet Hostlist and New Arrivals

Posted in News Roundup at 3:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Most of this year we’ve been having supper with friends on Sunday. It started off with them coming here (their house wasn’t finished yet, and the apartment they were renting was small, dark, crowded). The last couple months, we’ve been taking turns hosting. Some weeks, it’s felt like a lot (children require active Entertainment). Other weeks, something to look forward to. Regardless, people moving here from Toronto is not the usual migration destination. We’re very glad they did, and thankful to be able to see them regularly and often, rather than every year or two.

• So this has been a regular fixture of the summer, one less meal to plan during the week. The arrangements always that they cook, we bake. I say “we”. This is a lie. My partner, it’s understood by everyone, an exceptional baker. In the fridge right now: strawberry macarons, made with another friend, this particular batch delicious to me, unloved by them. “We wanted to try out a new filling recipe,” my partner said ruefully. “It didn’t set the way I wanted.” I stress again that they taste amazing, but I’m probably a poor judge.

• So a little over a week ago I attended the PNW Pen Show, a revival of an old event that used to happen pre-pandemic. I don’t think I’ve talked about it here before but I’m a fountain pen nerd. I wish I could say I constantly journaled but it’s more like a feast and famine thing.

• I’ll write through a 400pg a5 notebook in two months and then take a year to finish the next one. That’s probably pretty normal, though, but I’ll say that I’m probably at my best in basically every way when I’m journaling more. Is it symptomatic or causal? I don’t know.

• I was at my favourite independent bookstore this afternoon, and picked up a CD by Tigran Mansurian. I’d maybe (maaaaybe) heard the name before, but I’d picked it up because it’s part of ECM’s New Series, and it’s basically a disc full of music I’ve never heard. For various configurations of strings and occasionally piano.

• I picked it up because Kim Kashkashian plays viola on it, and she’s one of my favourite violists. I’m a poor player, and her sound and musicality are things I wish I had, even in the smallest quantity.

• I want to write about interesting things, but I was sick last week. I’m still getting over it. Not covid luckily or the recovery would be even slower. The worst part was I was so cranky it was hard to relax and sleep it off.

• I think there are people out there who genuinely don’t understand where their trash goes. How it’s handled.

• They can’t possibly understand because then they’d care. Ugh.

• I bought a house recently. My first true home. And I keep having to clean up stupid problems that the last homeowners left for me. Like their trash.

• i love charseraph’s style and spec bio. this piece is actually from may but i came across it yesterday and couldn’t not share it. the title itself is extremely evocative on its own, and paired with the nearly clinical drawings of these entirely unknown life forms? it’s just beautiful.

• I am a set of continuous processes in motion, interacting with each other and the world around me, with its historical and societal aspects. There is the saying, “I feel like a completely different person,” and it did happen to me a couple of times. Our selves go through small, imperceptible, changes which we gain by interacting with the outside world, or its reflection, our inner world. Eventually, a big leap is reached, a qualitative change, where we feel we’re completely different from the older “version”.

Politics and World Events

• That’s not important. What’s important is that you referred to just one gender in that paragraph. How *dare* you!

Technology and Free Software

Internet/Gemini

• There’s more details on the official capsule, but the short version is that it’s essentially ‘Gemini email’. If you’ve implemented a Gemini server then it should be pretty simple to refactor that to support a basic version of a Misfin server too. (I say a basic version, because implementing certificate verification is a bit trickier and I feel that the spec could do with some clarifications in that area).

• Misfin uses gemtext (text/gemini) as its message format, so once you have a functioning Misfin server, it’s simple to set up a ‘webmail’-style interface on your capsule for reading messages.

• I’ve made my foray into the smol net. Hooray! But who am I?

• Quick announcement. I’m running a publically accessible GNUnet hostlist at `http://clehaxze.tw:9876/` due to me failing to bootstrap 3 new nodes today. I was experimenting and this issue really annoyed me. I don’t know what happened with the default one. `https://v15.gnunet.org/hostlist` is down. But `https://gnunet.io/hostlist` is running correctly. That should be enough for nodes to botostrap.

• Anyway, for GNUnet users seeing this post, you can point your hostlist daemon to use my server. **I understand this is unencrypted HTTP**. But a) that should’t matter as bad actors will get stopped by GNUnet’s crypto anyway and b) I’ll fix it later.

• I’m slightly confused by the verification flow on the receiving side for misfin(B). Apologies if some of these questions are already obvious in the spec/best practices/reference examples and I’ve just missed/misunderstood!

• I’m specifically trying to implement the case where the server’s certificate is a self-signed CA and there may be multiple mailboxes (each with certs signed by that CA).

• It has been about one year and two months since I’ve written my first post, not only on here, but in general. It’s definitely interesting to read my old posts, they give me a glimpse of how I thought in the past, and how much my opinions differ now, being more refined in some aspects.

• I’ve thought about deleting some of them. Perhaps editing. In the end, I left them up because I think it represents fairly well my evolution. I can certainly say I write better now than I did the year before. Writing is an unique medium to not only sharpen your opinions, but to have rather meaningful debates with others. It’s a rare medium that is omitted nowadays for the audio-visual, but it’s full of knowledge that we wouldn’t otherwise get.

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