● 08.25.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 25/08/2023: Old Computer Challenge Tools, Internet Appliance

Posted in News Roundup at 11:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• This week it’s actually hit me that I’m starting this full-time faculty job in almost exactly a month. I had to have official copies of my transcripts sent over to the school, do some other paperwork for the start of the term, &c.

• I spent today writing the first week of text for my online intro to logic class and I’m starting to write lecture notes for my in-person classes.

• Pop culture narratives, such as movies, spend a lot of time on conflict, but whenever they do give us a few crumbs of competence, people tend to think it’s really awesome. So maybe, just maybe, it’d be pretty good if they threw out the screenwriter’s manuals and started to give us a li’l more of competence.

• One of the most memorable and quoted moments from the biggest blockbuster movie of 2012 is a guy talking about how he successfully copes with his emotions and anger. I’m into that.

Politics and World Events

• So a lot of talk on Gemini lately from guys who wanna appropriate women’s gender expression and I didn’t wanna get into it but as usual we can count on a fresh perspective from Librehacker.

Technology and Free Software

• I noticed that there was some mechanism for sending arbitrary data directly instead of just poking stuff into the DHT. kind of makes total sense, I’d just been distracted poking at the DHT stuff.

• I’ve finally got around to uploading the fork of astro[1] I adapted for use on TinyCore. Because it uses the ash terminal, I called it ashtro[2]. It uses a tool I also had to build (to make up for the lack of termcap etc.) called termsize[3].

Internet/Gemini

• Last weekend I watched LGR’s video on The Netpliance i-Opener, an Internet Appliance. When I saw the UI and a few screens it brought back memories of how exciting the Internet was back then. It was also a throwback to see that news could be read without obnoxious flashing ads and banners and auto playing videos and stupidily narrow margins. The shopping page in particular reminded me of how much more quaint the WWW was at the time. Unfortunately those days are long dead and gone.

• Browsing the Mastodon profile of someone from my city, I found this post, a couple months old now, about the ways in which Twitter keeps breaking. As the article’s subtitle says, “everything worked fine until Elon Musk took over”; it details the ways in which Musk’s chaotic reign has supremely fucked the site and alienated not just its users, but also the developers in the Twitter ecosystem, the people who make all kinds of software that hooks into Twitter’s API.

• Unfollow bots, literary bots, where’s-Musk’s-plane? bots (the latter of which was naturally the first to be banned) – these all generally rely on API access to get information, send tweets, send DMs. Now, there has always been a precarity in making one’s living in the public APIs of major sites: you’re relying on not just stability, but goodwill, and it’s very easy for both to vanish. In Twitter’s case, both did. The stability was remarkably okay until early July, when (it was supposed) some unpaid bills (or at least fuck-you-I’m-not-paying-these-bills) lead to rate limits and yet another bluebird exodus. But if the stability was mostly okay, the goodwill obviously wasn’t.

Programming

• If the script is executed without any arguments, a browser is opened on the landing page of your selected invidious instance. If the script is executed with a however many arguments, all the arguments will be parsed as a search query.

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