Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 08, 2022

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

• My Dream PC

  I grew up with computer surrounding me. My father was really into technology and he collected computers one way or another. Buying prebuilts, offloading broken PCs from his job (and swapping parts - you'd be surprised - 3 busted computers can equal 1 working computer). And as a child this has become magical. And "gifting" to us children his old work machines as they upgraded.

• Builtin Commands

  A somewhat common claim is that "Z is a bash command", presumably because Z can be called from bash. For example, "sed is a bash command". At worst, this implies some sort of ownership or hierarchy that does not exist.

• Notes on configuring Apache mod_md

  I've been tweaking my Apache configuration [1] for the past two days [2], trying to figure out what I need and don't need, and these are just some notes I've collected on the process. I'm using `mod_md [3]` for managing the secure certificates, and there isn't much out on the Intarwebs about how a configuratin for a website should look like. I can find plenty of pages that basically regurgitates the Apache documentation for `mod_md`, but nothing on how it all goes together. So here's an annotated version of a configuration for one of my less important sites...

• Mastodon

  A short note regarding Mastodon. I know everyone and their cousin has already weighed in with their opinion on the recent matters of Mastodon and Twitter and all this Musquerade, so why not add my own perspective to the pile?

  I've been a Twitter user for a year or two I think, several years ago. Then I got fed up and removed it. Of course, I've been interested in Mastodon, so I registered an account this March just so I had one, wanted to look what it's like.

• A side entrance from the big web

  Not from the front door. Nor the one that's in the back, if you go through the kitchen past the sink. This door opened up from a completely nondescript section of the wall. You'd hardly know there was door here, if I hadn't opened it.

  I verify that this is the Midnight Pub I know. I see the familiar face of ~bartender, and Smudge is curled up on an armchair. No, this is definitely the Midnight.

• Hello world!

  Hi gemspace, this is my first log post, kind of as a test. It will remain to be seen how often I update this, but I think everything should work fine, and I've created a second log for when I want to write one in toki pona. Hopefully it motivates me to practice?

  I've been eyeballing Gemini for a while now and originally wanted to host my own server on a raspberry pi, but it hasn't panned out that way yet because I'm dirt poor... but in a fit of maybe mania (maybnia?) I committed myself to a KVM VPS for like $8/mo maybe a month ago. I got it so I could run my own Pleroma instance and, incidentally, my own personal site. It's definitely been a learning curve since I'm ~passively techy~ but have never done any kind of server admin before. But everything's been running pretty smoothly for a while now, and I've been spending my spare time (re: unemployment; all of the time) working away at learning PHP and stuff so that I can use my personal site to host all my own art with minimal effort and in a user-friendly way.

• OpenBSD for Gaming?!?!

  Is OpenBSD an option for gamers? How do I squeeze out the last bit of performance? I have noticed questions in that vein coming up, maybe more than there used to be since gaming of OpenBSD has become a little more visible. Let's examine the current state.

• CSS Themes Exist Now!?

  Yeah news to me too! Seems like according to the MDN it's been supported since 2019 for most browsers and supported by all by now.

  This is so wild!

• Weathering Heights

  This however does not fit within 80x24 terminals, and having to temporarily resize a terminal to make that one application work seems dubious. Maybe there's a flag to make the display less full of empty space and lines?

• The First Radio I Ever Built

  When I was a kid, I came across an old book about crystal set radios. These were simple pre-vacuum-tube AM receivers using a pyrite or galena crystal and a handful of hand-made parts. I decided to build one.

  Mind you, I was a little kid, maybe four or five years old, but the instructions seemed clear to me. There was a big coil, which I made from a paper tube and some string. A pebble made a fine crystal. There was something that looked like a piece of wrapped candy, which I later learned was a capacitor. Candy it was. By the end of the day, my work was complete, and I attached a headphone made from a sponge with a piece of twine.

• Perpetual November

  It was 1979 when Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis came up with the idea of a distributed network allowing users on different servers to post group messages to one another. Up to this point bulletin board systems were lone islands where you could communicate with just the group who dialed in. ISPs didn't really exist yet as there wasn't much to the internet. With Truscott and Ellis' contribution, servers were able to pass along group messages, and the islands were now connected. University students, hobbyists and those working in the technology were still the majority of those on the new Usenet service, but it soon became a rather popular.

  Through the 80's and into the 90's more and more services popped up. During all this time the community on Usenet grew, created customs, coined terms and generally went on as communities do. While people would slowly trickle in, the only times there would be a large influx of new users was in the fall when freshmen college students started logging on for the first time. After a few months things would settle down. New users would get used to the slang, the etiquette and how it all worked. It wouldn't be until the next fall semester when a new batch would show up and make some noise.

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