● 08.24.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 24/08/2023: gmid 2.0 Alpha

Posted in News Roundup at 8:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Hey gopherites!

• Macro news:

• There were a couple of rain showers today. The air has cleared up from “smoking a whole pack of Export A cigarettes at once” to “1980s LA smog.”

• Down in the Kelowna area, it sounds like just under 100 houses burned. They haven’t announced how many burned in the North Shuswap. Needless to say, more rain would be great.

• So it rained last night. Hard. Twice.

• The smoke is almost gone. The rain washed almost all of the ash away. Hopefully this is the end of the fire season for us this year.

• Thank you two gopher friends who wrote after my last diary entry. I missed pandemic conviviality. It was good to hear from you guys.

• Evy woke up last night gasping. In her dream we had to dump out some spoiled milk. To avoid being seen the three of us ducked in a cave and traversed it. When we emerged there were still people. We’d disposed of the milk, but we ducked back in, to exit by our original entrance. I jumped in the water. There was no bottom. Daughter and I were pulled down. Evy jumped in to rescue us, was also pulled down. Drowning in the dream she woke up gasping because her sinus infection migrated to her lungs.

• Because of a silent WhatsApp group protesters use to locate MK Simha Rothman, chairman of the Constitution Committee. wherever he goes and to protest there, Now Rothman tries to appeal to Jerusalem Magistrate Court in order to issue restraint orders against 400 protesters. In addition, he wants to shut down theie WhatsApp group.

• When talking, most people expect that the cooperative principle is in play.

• “If, for example, at a particular stage I need four screws, I expect you to hand me four, rather than two or six”, as Grice put it. But four is a subset of six so giving six screws is logically complying with the request, you might object. If that’s your reaction, you might wanna read up on the cooperative principle, and try to find some applications and examples of it.

• Yo. This is the second (and a half) iteration of me making a blog. The first time was… something.

• First, I used Bash and the Neocities API. Lots of appending, and the RSS feed was.. garish to say the least. But it worked! No one ever read it though. The gist is on my Github somewhere. I should really make this project parse links and images. Like gemtext!

• Second time, I used webpy by Aaron Swartz (RIP.) I still *am* but just without the templates and fancy stuff. Minimalist, if you will. I figured that it’ll be easier for me to just write and add services with webpy rather than just reskinning the same website over and over. I’ll post the new code somewhere soon enough.

Technology and Free Software

• I was digging around in the configuration of my email server (probably a separate post on that forthcoming), and kept stumbling over the many various extensions which have been made to the email protocol over the years. SPF, DMARC, MTA-STS, oh my! Most of these extensions have been bolted on top of email in the hopes of preventing spam and forgery of messages, but at this point there’s so many that I began to wonder which are actually necessary from a server admin’s point of view. So I did some research.

• One of these extensions is DKIM, which stands for… something. It doesn’t matter. The aim of DKIM is to prevent undesirables from spoofing the From address of an email. This is accomplished by sticking a public key in a well known DNS entry, and then signing all outgoing messages with the associated private key. Mail servers receiving email which (ostensibly) comes from your domain are expected to check that the signature on the received email matches the public key on the DNS record.

Software Releases/Announcements

• It took quite some time. Last September I was thinking I would have 2.0 ready for December, and here we are. Better late than never I guess.

• This time I decided to do a round of public testing before releasing 2.0 itself.

• I decided to call this an “alpha” rather than a first RC to better convey the idea that I’m still open to change (even in incompatible ways) the new feature set before the release. It works perfectly for me, but since it’s used by other people as well I felt the need to wait a bit and gather some feedback.

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