Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 27, 2023

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

• Technology and Free Software

  • Installing Ethernet

    My house used to be connected to Comcast before we switched over to a local fiber ISP. This switch has happened years ago and the house was outfitted with coax back in the Comcast days. Of course now, there is no use for Coax. The local antenna stations are not great and we don't have cable coming in either. So I figured that I would replace our existing coax with ethernet.

    We have three coax ports. One in the basement that goes outside along the wall. And two in the house that share the same wall across two floors. The basement port was very easy to replace as I just had to poke the ethernet out the wall and re-enter into the boiler room—where the networking is located.

  • hottail -- tail -f with a heat-map

    I am a big fan of log files. As I develop and test, and deploy code, logs provide invaluable information for debugging and improving (and sometimes, understanding) the system.

    While watching logs with 'tail -f' works pretty well, I would _really_ like to see a heat-mapped view of a log. By that I mean colorized lines which start hot and slowly cool -- allowing me to instantly see if anything happened recently, as well as the relative age of entries -- at a glance!

    I assumed that anything I can think someone has already done -- the world is now big enough for that. But it appears that no one has, in this case. There are many ways to colorize a log based on its content, but not time-based.a

  • Finishing the BITX40 Case

    Last time I had powered up the front panel to test the radio, and were just about to try some power filter components to get rid of the "tuning clicks". I experimented and found that the clicks went away with a 56 Ω series and 33 µF parallel low pass filter added to the Raduino power input. I went with a 330 µF capacitor to have some extra margin.

    Next I soldered shielded cables to the volume knob, the audio out jack and the and microphone in jack. The "mono" cable used for the jacks was quite nice to work with. The "stereo" cable used for the volume knob was a bit bulky. I didn't have a crimp tool for the Molex KK connectors used on the BITX main board, so I soldered the wires into the pins (I had bought a lot of them). I continued with a red-black twin cable for the power and a short run of RG316 coax for the VFO.

  • The Semi-Ultimate ATRAC Encoding Comparison

    In which I present samples of ATRAC1 and ATRAC3 audio compressed using various methods, so you can both compare different ATRAC encoders as well as the different ATRAC versions and bitrates.

  • Backups of RK3588 TRM and Datasheet (on the decentralized web)

    My plan of running language models on my RK3588 board failed because the official SDK segfaults with the simplest of examples. Nothing I can do until Rockchip fixes it. In the mean time, me and my friend cam across the RK3588(S) Technical Reference Manuals on GitHub (not linked in the hope that Rockchip will not spend time to take it down). We decided to look into it and see if we can build our own drivers and SDK. I also made backups of the datasheets and TRMs in case they get taken down.

  • re: Installing Ethernet

    ttocsneb wrote about their plans to run Ethernet through the house. Running wire through the wall is a complete pain! I've heard a chain is a great way to pull calbe from the attic up, and I've used cable fishing lines before for smaller jobs. Even used speaker wire for a recent project haha.

    I got lucky in my house that the phone jacks found in each room were actually wired with Cat5e, all going to a central location in the basement. Was easy enough to replace with RJ45 keystone jacks. I did have to run new cable through to the garage for my PoE security cameras though. Went up through from the basement, through a joist and terminated with 2 keystone jacks. I still have to run one to the back patio though, and I've been dreading that job. Will probably have to drill through my siding and exterior wall to run the cable into the basement. I hate making permament changes 'ya know?

  • Internet/Gemini

    • ✍ Gemtext enhancements...

      I believe I found a method to make tables and ordered list in GemText without any major changes. I will post my take on this subject ASAP!

    • gemini feed'

      I'm looking for a protocol description of 'gemlog' and 'gemini feed'. Can anyone point me to links? (I am studiously avoiding the word 'definitive' here intentionally) 🤔

    • 2023-W26: Locrian.zone

      Locrian.zone has a “Friday link roundup”, which initially piqued my interest in the capsule. The “Friday link roundup” has links of interesting things from multiple protocols.

    • Gemini, the Devil's Advocate

      People who write Gemini software, like myself, are occasionally annoyed by the incompleteness and ambiguousness in the spec. But oh man it is so, so, so much more comfy to write Gemini software than nearly any other network protocol ecosystem. Maybe IRC comes close but even then Gemini beats it in brevity.

      Folks have been repeating variations of the above five criticisms since at least I joined the Gemini community nearly four years ago. In 2021 some of these had some merit, and I had my own specific complaints about Gemini born from actually writing software for it (URLs were still the wrong choice vs IRIs, TLS was still the wrong choice vs a custom noise channel, etc), but it is becoming increasingly obvious now that all the people who criticise Gemini on rational and objective merits have an egg on their face.

    • On communities, centralization and capitalism

      I recently watched a YouTube video talking about the demise of a website called Tumblr (well, demise... the place is still working, but its current numbers make it a very low traffic place), how the NSFW content there made it what it was, how it turned into a very queer friendly place and how ads, revenue and the subsequent companies that owned it didn't want to do any with that content... and that was it.

    • My (third) first gemlog entry

      The FIRST first was on gemlog.blue, which I quickly left after realizing it was completely unmoderated. The SECOND first was on smol.pub, which is a lovely place with a great dev, but over time I came to decide I wanted to keep my gemlog here on my capsule and maintain it myself.

    • Re: The Devil's Advocate

      I'm a relative newcomer here I guess. This capsule's first post is dated from March 5th of last year. I had a capsule up for a few months the previous summer but had a pretty bad hardware failure with data loss. Gemini was pretty much exactly what I was wanting for the past twenty years really. I missed the start of the internet, as I didn't even have a computer until the turn of the millenium, but once I did get started I had just enough time to realize the potential of the web and start learning html before Web2.0 came along and began to slowly swallow as much of the open web as possible under corporate umbrellas. I always felt cheated for having missed out on those earliest years of the web. More to the point, I absolutely hated the change from thousands of interlinked island nations to everyone having a little studio apartment on a few big corporate servers. By the time I had my own blog it was so difficult for anyone to find it that it really was like shouting into the void. I hated everything about SEO and Adsense and social media features creaping into every space that they didn't fit. Gemini, with a spec that was actively designed to make it next to immpossible to extend, gamify, track and advertise immediately resonated with me. I didn't know if anyone would read my capsule, but it still felt like the place I should be.

  • Programming

    • Interleaved 2D Notation for Concatenative Programming

      A really cool 2D concatenative programming language. There's even an online IDE for it.

    • errno

      errno is a global variable; anything can change it within a process. errno may also remain unchanged across who knows how much code, until it emerges with some non-zero value. This can be surprising, especially as the abstractions pile up and errno emerges from who knows where.

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