● 09.15.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 15/09/2023: More Terminal Emulator Hipsters

Posted in News Roundup at 7:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Whoops! Another basho has started and I havn’t managed to type anything. So far, we have another Yokozuna-less tournament with Terunofuji and Hakuoho being kyujo. Poor Hakuoho, who has smashed into the yusho race after some 4 basho, has had to have some shoulder surgery. In the cut throat realms of sumo, this means he is likely to be out for several basho and drop down as far as Makushita or even Sandanme. However, I am sure he will smash his way back up. Hopefully all heals correctly! I am glad he is taking the time to heal.

• good days tell me that bad days come. unfortunately i wonder and wander. hope what type kit keep go. Lost among the darknesses and lightnesses. to wonder. I think that making up words will become a bigger part of the future than we can imagine. I think entirely new languages will develop in response to large language models. I think there will be secret codes based on feelings and secret thoughts. I hope this to be true. I think the stream of consciousness style will make a resurgence. I think that’s why. I like reading Ulysses. Sometimes. My dad liked Ulysses. I think about it. I like to be reading it. Everyone is impressed with me when they see that I am reading this stupid book. There are moments of beauty.

• In my desire to simplify and lighten my internet, I’m looking at some of the lesser known ‘corners’ of the web like sdf.org and all the tilde sites. It’s also a non-commercial approach to the internet, a place where sharing is more important than making money. But for someone like me, a former Apple fan and Graphical User Interface (GUI) user, it’s not easy because it uses SSH, Unix command lines and Text-based User Interface (TUI). I’m not completely stupid and I have memories of command lines, especially in bash (I sometimes write some scripts for myself or for work), but in the era of mouse and keyboard it seems very anachronistic to me.

• I have emerged from my little break to focus on myself and my studies! A lot of weight has fallen off my shoulders. One exam went well, the other one was a fail, but I feel very at peace with it. It’s even better than not knowing the outcome and speculating on the grade for weeks. I have learned a lot and tried my best, and next time will be better. For the fact that I had a lot of health issues this summer that prevented me from effectively studying, I did surprisingly well.

• Those were some really tough weeks with a lot of tears, but I have bounced back almost instantly after the last exam was done. Thinking about how much time I will now have for reading, coding, exercising, taking walks, sewing, gaming and other things just fills me with joy. I smiled a lot today, randomly throughout my day. Ironically, now that I don’t /have/ to, I feel oddly motivated to continue studying for my upcoming semester. I am forcing myself to do more enjoyable things I did not get to do the past few weeks before I get back to that though.

• You wouldn’t think that books about astronomy and archaeology would have a lot in common, but Four Lost Cities (Annalee Newitz) and Under Alien Skies (Phil Plait) pack some odd similarities.

• Both are about places we (mostly) can’t visit in person: Faraway planets in one case, the distant past in the other.

• I started a new job this past Monday! I’m working at a (culturally) Roman Catholic bookstore on a part-time basis before I travel to study music. I’m learning a lot about Western piety and Western Christian practice that I had no idea about before, such as scapulars, novenas, what the heck an alb is, and where a ciborium goes on an altar table. I’m much more familiar with Eastern liturgical objects and practice (but we don’t sell those things!)

Politics and World Events

• The policies of the world’s leading countries are forcing the transition of the car fleet to electric vehicles. But this transition does not call our lifestyles into question, quite the contrary.

Technology and Free Software

• The whole STIR (Secure Telephony Identity Revisited)/SHAKEN (Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs) thing first crossed my path a few years ago at The Enterprise. At the time, I wasn’t sure what the difficulty was in stopping spam/robo calls and that the Oligarchic Cell Phone Companies were complicit with said calls because it made them money. The actual story, covered in the above article, is much more complicated and nuanced than my own cynical take on it (worth reading, even if it’s a bit long). By the time I left The Enterprise [2], we were starting to support it with our offering (which was “Caller Name ID”—that is, given a phone number, map that back to a name), along with a process that was attempting to classify the originating side of the call as legit or not if the call wasn’t attested (that was being done at another department within The Enterprise). If you use a certain Oligarchic Cell Phone Company, and see the name “Potential SPAM” as the caller name, you were using code I worked on.

• I know that for Proton Mail users, you can just gpg –locate-keys their address and you’ll get their keys.

• I wanted to set up something similar for my own email and it was a headache and a half. This is more of a li’l diary entry and causerie than reliable and complete documentation.

• I stopped using Gnome Terminal when I stopped using Gnome. It’s a fine terminal, but it requires a ton of library packages that you don’t need unless you’re already running gnome. I think I might have had some problems with fonts as well, but it’s so long ago that I doubt that would still be an issue.

• I switched to Konsole for a while, which suffers a similar problem wrt required packages, but not to the same degree. It’s also lighter in resource usage, iirc.

• Read enough of my posts over the past year or so, and it’s clear that I am not happy working at The Enterprise. The process über alles, the overly managed and useless laptops, the bad communication (which I don’t think I’ve mentioned, but man, I didn’t expect the telephone game [1] to be an actual strategy of a company), the so called “agile development” that is anything but agile [2], the twice daily scrum meetings (because my manager wanted his own scrum meeting with *just the team* with no other departments involved—that’s the *other* daily scrum meeting), and the testing.

• syncterm works nicely for getting cp437 art to show up nicely when I telnet into somewhere, but I miss being able to click on links.

• so I decided to make cp437 telnet work in the version of urxvt I have. Preferably without writing my own programs or patching. I’ve ended up with a short shell script to hold all the parts together, and a few symlinks and Xresources, and a config file.

Internet/Gemini

• I recently changed the certificate for AuraGem because it wasn’t being validated properly in some Gemini browsers.

• I found the culprit. I put auragem.letz.dev in the Common Name (CN), since it’s the common address for the capsule, and I put the alternative domains in the Subject *Alternative* Name (SAN) field. Should be fine, right?

• NOPE! It *was* fine before 2011, but apparently in 2011, RFC 6125 was published which includes Section 6.4.4 which basically states that if a SAN exists, the CN MUST NOT be checked. When that was published, every website that had its cert with the main domain in the CN but not the SAN became invalid as soon as this RFC recommendation was implemented into browsers. This also applies to CAs and HTTP over TLS specs as well.

• I came across two articles on Gemini, discussing what would happen if Chinese switched to using pinyin instead of characters. I want to share my thoughgts as a native speaker.

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