● 09.01.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 01/09/2023: LXD 5.17 and Wget2 2.1

Posted in News Roundup at 12:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Louis was doing good the other day, almost human-like still. So we walk out to Dr. Chin’s to see what work he’s got.

• Says he’ll give us forty if we take some bags of oats over to Aiyaz’s mill. So we hitch up his horse and wagon, load it up. Folks’d always laugh at Chin for running horse and wagons like its old times. But now them folks can’t afford the e’trics, and there’s hardly a gas truck anywhere to be got by now. I guess Chin gets last laugh on that.

• So Louis and I are going along with the wagon and Shirley, that’s Chin’s mare, the older one. And the road is bad. Gumbo and deep puddles all through, wherever it’s not washed out. Rain finally came last week. So we’re going along about an hour, and we get into one puddle so deep, the mud’s up to Shirley’s hocks and she won’t move. Louis and me undo the harness and get alongside to encourage her.

• A couple weeks ago I finished Fawn Parker’s “What We Both Know”, a very good novel that is not a happy read. It’s narrated by the daughter of Baby Davidson, a CanLit darling. His mind is going. He has dementia. And as he worsens, as his daughter first helps with, then takes over his memoirs, the family’s awful secrets are slowly revealed.

Politics and World Events

• Jonas Staal is a self-described propaganda artist. In his recent book he mentions the widespread assumption that democratic societies have no propaganda. Typically we would associate propaganda with authoritarian states and assume that it has nothing to do in a democracy where the press holds power to account and there is some reasonable level of transparency. Staal also refers to propaganda as the performance of power. Being in power means, among other things, being able to shape public perceptions.

• The cognitive dissonance resulting from the myth that there is no propaganda in a democracy may be resolved by claiming that the propaganda we see all around us implies that, in fact, we do not live in a democracy. But there is another solution if we admit that democracy can be realised to varying degrees.

Technology and Free Software

• It’s great to hear that my last post resonated [1] with a few other people. Maybe there’s hope yet!

• Before the dust settles, I want to add a few clarifying remarks. Reading through my post now I realise that I never explicitly defined what I meant by “program”. This word is usually taken to mean writing code in some text editor, IDE or what have you, in some programming language or other. With this narrow interpretation in mind, the post might come off sounding a bit gatekeepy.

• When I moved my capsule from self-hosting to EC2, I gave up a static IP address for my residence and changed my jsreed5.org domain to point to AWS. As I have a home server designed for deploying and managing VMs, this change also meant I was giving up the ability to spin up new servers on the fly and configure them to run Internet-facing services. Now I have only one EC2 instance in AWS, and if I want more, I have to pay a monthly cost for each one.

• The decision to move from self-hosting to AWS was a financial one: I saved quite a bit of money each month by changing my home ISP plan from a business account to a residential account. But beyond the ability to self-host, I lost other functionality that I use quite often: using SFTP to move files to and from my NAS, kicking off backup and download jobs on my home connection, and so on.

• [...]

• I use Debian and Fedora at home, and my EC2 instance runs Amazon Linux. There are Yggdrasil packages for Debian and Fedora, but I prefer to build it from source on all my systems, since I already use other tools written in Go and Go is easy to run portably.

• [...]

• IPv6 addresses are somewhat cumbersome, so I maintain a list of the Yggdrasil addresses of all my nodes. I could certainly mitigate this through a hosts file or local DNS settings, but I’m too lazy to do that.

Internet/Gemini

• Ahoy, smolneteers! September really does seem to be recurring on an annual basis. It’s happened five whole times now! Deeply mysterious. Once again, the time for ROOPHLOCH is upon us.

• For those who came in late, the Remote Outdoor Off-Grid Phlogging Challenge, or ROOPHLOCH, is a smolnet community ritual I have organised each September since 2019. Originally a Gopher-only phenomenon, this is the first year I am also announcing it on Gemini, since last year’s edition got some Gemini participation anyway and nobody seemed upset by it, so what the hey, the more the merrier.

• The essential idea is that you should make a phlog and/or gemlog post sometime between September 1st and September 30th (inclusive, in your local timezone), under the following conditions: you need to make your post without being inside any kind of permanent, non-natural shelter (e.g. be outdoors, or in a cave, or in a tent, not in a building, not even a log cabin. Do yurts count? Nobody has tried it yet) and the device you post from should not be plugged into a wall for any reason – get your electrons and your packets some other way! Once you’ve done this, email solderpunk@posteo.net to let me know the URL of your post. At the end of the month, I will post a roundup of everybody who participated.

• i discovered and started visiting gemini early 2022, and started my capsule sometime in april that year (my first microlog entry was 28/04, shortly before my 21st bday). before that, i was already a keeper of a personal website for a while (since 2020 maybe?) and hovering around smolweb and alternative internet spaces (hell, my capsule is hosted by yesterweb).

• [...]

• but the thing is (at least to me) that gemini presents itself as a blank slate, a way to enter somewhere without baggage. and somewhere with freedom to create without pressures of algorithms, clout, blowing up etc etc. it’s the same draw of personal websites, except less technically demanding (gemtext’s learning curve is essentially flat, and i can’t even think of writing html on a phone. i do hate using phones though).

• The best part of the smolnet is that content is king. We blog, post code and recipes, create simple services for social interaction. Every page we go to has a single purpose, sharing content with no noise. The initial Internet was like this too. Content for content’s sake.

• Pretty soon after this initial Internet people wanted to monetize content. Sadly the “best” solution was banner ads. Turn physical real estate in your content into billboards. With dynamic content came dynamic ads. Suddenly you could flood your content with monetization and businesses started up where their primary task was making money while serving up some small bit of content. That’s when content lost it’s privileged role.

• Today we are seeing content producers trying to find a happy middle ground with monetization while corporations seem to be going crazy. Bloggers and podcasters get sponsors, patreon and money through services like YouTube. But the TikTok generation doesn’t always understand why so many services are “free”. Your personal information is sold while you’re actively targeted by marketing. The “algorithms” of these services aren’t there to find like minded individuals. They exist to find the best way to monetize the content you consume.

Programming

• Portability might vary here; these assume ksh on OpenBSD 7.3.

• [...]

• Probably the FOO=’1+2′ and similar forms are undefined behavior, and hopefully never show up unexpectedly in a shell script of yours that is trying to math. (I’d sooner switch to some other language.)

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