● 08.04.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 04/08/2023: Gemini Client Preferences and FreeBSD Minimum Desktop Guide

Posted in News Roundup at 12:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Alas, the fate was sealed And ’twas decided that he ought to live in peril And to roam in vain For an eternity unknown Until his undoing cometh.

• And to be forgotten both above and under the earth. Thus was decided for him And thus it shall be …

• Her cracked lips are leaking. Both eyes still work, but cannot grasp the damage. The skeletal fingers tip-toe from her shoulder up the neck, looking for the point of impact. There it is, a screwdriver through the throat, barely missed the trachea. The hand grabs the handle.

• “What the fuck are you doing?!” The shattered blade exclaims through a flooded speaker in its hilt. She spits into her other hand. Oily blue mixed with blood reflecting the hot orange light of antique lightbulbs in the ceiling. “Don’t fucking pull it out, stop!”

• When I was a kid, I’d sometimes have the clarity to realize how truly meaningful or special a moment was.

• Once, a friend from a previous town had come to visit for the summer. We spent the days in the woods, exploring or building forts, and the nights inside playing PlayStation. I knew the summer would be over in the blink of an eye, my friend would return to his town and I might never see him again. But I had a trick.

• It’s going to sound odd, but I would squeeze my tear ducts with my thumb and pointer finger and massage them. Yes it’s strange, but this would give me a moment of clarity, a moment where I felt truly in the moment, instead of being swept away by time. I would feel my mind clear, the weight of life lifted from my head. I’d do this often, trying to remember moments like that summer.

• But for a few unavoidable exceptions, if something doesn’t load in elinks, I consider it not worth my time. There are plenty of good reads in Gemini, and simple personal websites some of those authors create. Ain’t got time to watch a page load, jump around so that I wind up clicking on the wrong links, suddenly displays an overlay or popup requiring a click to make it go away, etc.

• So I kind of have August off? And it’s flipping wild, tbh, because I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally taken more than a couple of days off at a time in my life.

• I think one of the cruelest things anyone has ever said to me was a decade ago when I was dating someone who had spent a lot of time telling me I needed to open up, needed to learn to rely on them, &c. and then when I was talking about how hard shit was in grad school they got quiet and said

• It’s not that I stopped having dreams. But I stopped remembering them. Perhaps they weren’t so special anymore.

• Maybe it’s because I became busier with life, and at the end of the day I was too tired to keep thinking, let alone remember.

• Oh my gosh, how I loved “Garbage 2.0″!

• Kinda makes me wonder if we might have some favorite bands/albums in common, given you’re almost exactly a generation younger than me, but I was a huge fan of much 1990s music.

• This is, I never had anyone my own age to communicate with about it, because most people my age are often insanely stuck up about the music of “our” times/day.

• I rarely whip out the CDs anymore, so I’ve forgotten a lot of band, album, and song names. And it’s not *just* because I’m lazy, having been coddled by Alexa so quickly playing what I want/need with little to no fuss. But it’s that we’re generally too busy doing things requiring focus to have great songs trying to kidnap that focus. I’m not nearly as capable of doing things to music as I thought I used to be.

Politics and World Events

• France I recall being pretty car centric but there were plenty of walkable areas, and often good public transportation options. “The United States is a unique outlier” when it comes to car-slaughter, and public transportation generally ranges from “lol” to “no”. Or, let’s play granny frogger on that six-lane stroad! How bad varies by location; a tourist from Florida was quite happy that those sitting in cars were not actively trying to murder him on his bicycle; we were chatting at some intersection in Seattle, maybe it was the Elliot and Western mess, in the usual car exhaust with all the usual noise pollution.

Technology and Free Software

• This section was absent in the original RFC (RFC742, from dec. 1977), which was an incredibly succinct document. It was, however, present in both RFC1194 and RFC1196 (both from late 1990), with a slight variation on the final sentence:

• I’m not going to cover the installation process, but it is worth noting you might want to add your user to groups ‘wheel operator video’.

• The few services I use by default are local_unbound, powerd and ntpd. local_unbound caches dns requests and needs no configuration, powerd adjusts cpu frequency as is needed and enables hibernation and suspending, ntpd makes your clock synced.

• Once it’s installed, I get the handbook from the post-installation menu. One benefit is that this will also set up pkg and save you 10 seconds, when you install packages for the first time.

Internet/Gemini

• I recently had the displeasure of needing to join a (non-usenet) google group. Google doesn’t make this easy to find anymore, but they do allow you to subscribe from a non-google account.

• The ideal would be to have an actual SOCKS5 interface built-in to the client, like the Firefox Web browser has. I haven’t yet come across a gemini client that has SOCKS5 support. So, I’ve had to use torsocks. The tricky part is torsocks doesn’t work well with all clients. In particular, Lagrange has this problem where, if I try to run it on top of torsocks, the feed reader occasionally crashes and causes the whole application to freeze up. At one point, I actually patched Lagrange to disable the feed runner from running, but I found it was easier just to delete all my feeds from the Lagrange feed reader, and load the feeds up using my gmisub aggregator instance. But if the client had proper SOCKS5 support, I wouldn’t have to deal with torsocks at all.

• I’m glad I don’t. I’m merely an occasionally humble user of it for giving me a fast path to efficiently putting easily nicely rendered text in others-accessible places where the quality of others in somewhat the same space seemingly defies Sturgeon’s Law on a regular basis.

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