Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 04, 2022

A Gemini client^* is needed for the following links.

• Launching Altesq

  Hey! I've been currently busy with doing something that's really important to me recently, namely Altesq.

  Altesq is a pubnix (public access unix server) running on Linux. We share the resources, while creating, chatting on IRC, perhaps speaking on Mumble, having our own shell forum via Iris, and more. The point is to bring back the intimacy of the old WWW. Altesq is not for one group or type of people, we want everyone in so we can build a tight knit community. For anyone that's damned tired of the current state of the internet and want a breath of fresh air, this is for you. I say we should use technology to our best benefits of actually socializing and enjoying ourselves.

• Void Linux Post-Install and 1 month later notes

  I've now been using Void for a bit over a month. I really enjoy it and want to convert my last Ubuntu computer to Void. I'm going to wait another few weeks, just to confirm stability, and then make the full switch, but mostly I think it'll just be fine. But Void isn't a simple works-out-of-the-box install, so this is a document of my own work in order to be able to reproduce it.

  Below are my notes and a collection of useful snippets. To be honest, I don't feel confident this is a 'final' level of configuration. Maybe a first step. For example, I didn't try to set up a printer, bluetooth, and the like, and I want to try some machine learning work to later on with the machine. At the end of this post I'll link to some info on others' more extensive post-install scripts and guides.

• Large fonts for terminals

  I created a program called `termfont` to display strings with large characters like below in terminals, it is similar to `figlet`.

• Minimum support for webmentions

  I just now realized I've released a version of `mod_blog [8]` during the holiday season going back as far as 2016. With that in mind, and with the fact that I finally received my first webmention [9] on my blog couple of days ago, I have just released the latest version for this Christmas season. The big change this release is that I now show webmentions per post, even though I've only so far received one.

  Hey, it's a start with the webmentions.

  You can also see from the sidebar list I have, that I changed versioning schemes a few years back. I used to use semantic versioning [10] but upon reflection, I didn't feel it's not really fit for applications and instead switched to a monotonic version number. While the code has changed dramatically over the past 23 years (come this Debtember 4^th) the data format has not changed one bit. It's still the “one HTML (HyperText Markup Language) file per entry, using the file system as database” scheme, which has worked quite well for me over the years.

• Run Hurl tests against a Node.js server

• Authentication gateway with SSH on OpenBSD

  A neat feature in OpenBSD is the program authpf, an authenticating gateway using SSH.

  Basically, it allows to dynamically configure the local firewall PF by connecting/disconnecting into a user account over SSH, either to toggle an IP into a table or rules through a PF anchor.

^* Gemini links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.