Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 20, 2023

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

• Technology and Free Software

  • formatting

    I have to keep reminding myself that a lot of this formatting is a crutch for good writing, and only really exists in an ad hoc sense due to the digital publishing revolution.

  • Don't step in the gila monster shit! (ADDENDUM)

    For me, the greatest tragedy of the vitality-sucking security morass associated with online spaces is its triggering fear of sharing things that might reveal too much.

    For example, I had a bit of a song-spoof writing/recording career back in my software days that I'd like to share in the Antenna realm, but have to worry about some psychopath who found a sentence of mine insufficiently polite tracking me/mine down to do real harm.

  • Linux is Usable

    For the past 3 months I've been running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my laptop.

    [...]

    There were a few major instability issues that were really starting to get to me, it turns out my Thinkpad T14sG3(AMD) had some major issues on Linux. Of course I kinda jumped to the conclusion that this was a Void issue which fanned the flames of wanting to distro-hop. Only to have the same exact crashing issue, albeit at a (perceived) lower rate, before being fixed after a few kernel updates.

    It took a while to get OpenSUSE feeling comfortable, being a little tricky to get codecs and stuff like that, but after a week or so I had squashed every bug and got it to be usable.

  • Old Computers, and Challenges

    The 2023 "Old Computer Challenge" happened recently over at solene's. I didn't take part, but wanted to write about the notion.

    If my office space was organized differently, I would always have at least two of my old computers nearby, but as it stands, I only have one. My 8088 sits on its own desk, behind my main workstation, as I have most likely mentioned before. I'm writing this post from that system.

  • Don't step in the gila monster shit!

    Little bothers me more than having to manage passwords, certificates, and wasting time/effort dicking with two-factor authentication schemes - especially the latter because I usually have my phone's radio off because I dislike being interrupted by text messages and/or calls.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Blueprinting Gemini Base Tests

      There's been some discussion recently of building compliance tests for gemini servers and clients, as a point of unification. The web had the ACID tests which were a rallying point; the idea is to do something similar for Gemini.

      I'm tentatively referring to this project as "Base Tests", because that's the opposite of an ACID test :) And also the literal interpretation.

      ACID tests specifically tested web clients for compatibility with JavaScript and HTML standards. The exact format of the ACID tests cannot be translated to Gemini. JavaScript provides a method to programatically control web clients from within the client itself in a cross-client compatible way. There is no cross-client compatible way to programatically control gemini clients -- by design! So gemini's Base Tests will need to get more creative.

    • Bots crawling my sites

      I'm thinking about blocking all bots from my website. But where to start? How about this: Check the access.log file (I use Apache as my web server). If the User Agent Field contains the word "bot" that sounds like a candidate? Let's see!

    • Thinking about switching away from Oddmuse

      Oddmuse started out as a CGI script written in Perl. This is great for very small and dynamic sites: Most of the time, nobody is visiting and the process isn't running. As activity increases (and search engines and bots activity increases!) a CGI script is an increasingly bad idea. Every time, you load the Perl binary, it loads the script, parses the script, runs the script, loads the libraries, parses the libraries, and so on.

      These days, I run a Mojolicious server which keeps the script in memory and reruns it for every request. The webserver acts as a proxy server for all of this. And it's somewhat tricky: Every now and then there are processes that won't die, accumulating, see 2023-06-28 Reduced Site Functionality.

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