Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 12, 2023

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

• Technology and Free Software

  • Going online forward

    That reminds me of how as a kid (roughly 50 years ago) I'd hide notes/messages in library books: sometimes in the cover flaps, sometimes in the spine, sometimes just between pages. It would surely be nice to know if any were ever found.

    Makes me wonder if I can shift my posting motivation from "to meet and interact with interesting others" to "to bless others with serendipitous finds"? Because the former seems essentially impossible.

  • I give you: Serendipitous Finds

    Since I obviously suck at being texturally edgy in ways engendering interaction, I'm shifting my motivation for writing to reporting on placing messages on paper scraps, 3x5" cards, etc. in somewhat hidden public places, making such messages what I want to call "serendipitous finds".

    I'll likely post their content, and then go on to report on whether or not a message has been found. That'll be obvious if/when a message is gone. But I suppose I should place things in ways recognizable to me as having placed by me in case people carefully re-place them. So I should also log the details of their placement to make evidence of having been found unambiguous.

  • Christina's 5 questions

    written on GPD Win 1 via PuTTY as first daughter mumbles herself to sleep: "this a-way, this a-way" (from the song 500 Miles)

  • My Computer Challenge

    I am not actively participating in Solene's "Old Computer Challenge"^ this year--I only heard about it yesterday evening and am not in a position to go all in at the moment. However, I do want to follow the spirit of the challenge this week by reducing my energy and technology footprint.

    There are two ways I'm approaching it. The first is using a smaller machine with more limitations and requiring more active configuration, and the second is reducing the amount of content I passively consume.

  • OCC Update

    All my notes regarding the old computer challenge are now here...

  • Day 2

    I'm a bit busy today celebrating my birthday so I won't have time to do anything for the challenge, but I'm writing this from the old computer.

  • (No) Old Computer Challenge

    I just have spent a nice half of hour by reading of other people' Old Computer Challenge Entries [1]. Pretty interesting but some computer - while really old by today standards - dot's seem to be old to me.

  • Pin-Bored

    Some weeks ago, I submitted a support request to change my Pinboard username. I still haven’t heard back!

    And today, I happened to run across people on HackerNews (yeah, I know) talking about how Pinboard has been broken for them, how their paid archival functions haven’t been working (I don’t have an archival account, so I didn’t notice that), how the owner, Maciej, has been completely incommunicado on the Pinboard blog for *years*... And yet every time someone makes a complaint on HN, he’s right there in the comments with some snarky response.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Announce: OMG [dot] Pebcak [dot] Club certificates changed!

      This is a brief announce to let anyone know that for a colossal pebcak I deleted my VPS, and therefore I had to create a brand new VPS and to create new self-signed certificates.

    • Server updates and Gemini with lowdown

      What I’ve been up to since the last blog posts in this server? Not much, but there’s been changes. Notably it’s running off some old bottom-tier Intel Celeron laptop from ~2007 now instead of the Raspberry Pi 2B as some minor-ish enough updates has been causing it to no longer boot properly, and this issue wasn’t even new, I’ve known it since the last 2 years when trying it with Alpine Linux and wondering why that happens also. This time it’s Debian so I guess better to just throw in the towel with that hardware and just use the laptop I had laying around instead. It was already having troubles anyway before that and giving “illegal instructions” errors when just trying to setup some files for some few packages during apt install. It’s probably the SD card issue, or maybe armhf architecture is too niche and left underlooked, or both, but for sure I don’t want to deal with it anymore. I can at least say that laptop was able to do a major upgrade from Debian 11 bullseye to 12 bookworm sucessfully, so it certainly doesn’t have that issue. I did managed to hastly move some services and datas over to the laptop, only leaving out setting up a Gopher server mostly because I still haven’t bothered to have my site generator setup to do Gopher yet, and the Debian repository, cause I somewhat can’t be bothered to set that back up.

    • Mastodon Blog Comments Automation

      When I post here I usually also put the link out on Mastodon where people will sometimes comment. I've always done this by hand but, since I know just enough bash to be dangerous, I recently started thinking of ways to automate this step for me and also link back to the Mastodon post from the original blog post while I'm at it.

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