Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 01, 2023

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

• Technology and Free Software

  • zshbrev

    zshbrev allows you to mix zsh code and brev code. Not for polished li’l “eggs” but for your own duct tape and chewing gum hacking and automation. Quick and dirty♥.

    The default directory is .zshbrev/ but you can change it with the --dir flag to zshbrev.

  • Did anyone else get a Beepy, aka Beepberry?

    I just got one a few days ago and it's pretty cool. Kind of like a smaller PocketCHIP. I'm using a Pi Zero W in it for now because I already had a few on hand but would like to try the RISC V MangoPi MQ Pro eventually. I wrote up some first impressions on my gemlog.

  • Internet speed, Media computer, File server: Setting up Samba, river Wayland updates

    Still needs a lamp or something. It's too dark in the evenings. Other than that I think I like it here. Depends on what happens in the living room, I suppose, if we suddenly get a teen invasion or something when #3 brings friends that want to use the living room, but that has yet to happen.

    I also re-routed our home network a little to get rid of the cable salad I had made next to the fucking DOCSIS modem. Instead, I have connected a single Ethernet cable from it all the way behind our bookcases to this desk and keep the rest of our network equipment neatly on my desk. The cute and noiseless little PC Engines apu2 which works as our combined router and firewall is my favourite computer in the household and sits just under my monitor now.

    This also means the workstation now gets real Ethernet instead of the Powerline thing it had before. Yeah, I know, I should just give up on the Powerline things already and just wire real Ethernet to every room in the flat.

  • ClockworkPi DevTerm Thoughts

    At the end of March, I received a ClockworkPi DevTerm UMPC. I didn't have much of a chance to play with it in April or May, but since about the end of June, I've been using it as my primary mobile PC. After about five weeks of consistent use, I have a number of thoughts about the platform.

    My model is the DevTerm Kit RPI-CM4. The kit itself is a set of computer components: screen, keyboard with integrated trackball, main board, and peripherals, along with a shell. The kit is very simple to build: no soldering or screws are required. Swapping and upgrading components is extremely easy. Best of all, the hardware is open-source, and schematics and 3D-printing files are available on ClockworkPi's GitHub page. Assembly took only a few minutes.

    A Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 is not included inside the kit itself, but Clockwork does include one in the purchase. Two 18650 lithium-ion batteries are required for mobile use but are not included at all. Fortunately, I had a few left over from a much earlier project.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Splitting the Web

      There’s an increasing chasm dividing the modern web. On one side, the commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web. A web which has only one objective: making us click. It measures clicks, optimises clicks, generates clicks. It gathers as much information as it could about us and spams every second of our life with ads, beep, notifications, vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and fluorescent titles.

      A web which boils down to Idiocracy in a Blade Runner landscape, a complete cyberpunk dystopia.

      Then there’s the tech-savvy web. People who install adblockers or alternative browsers. People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages.

      Between those two extremes, the gap is widening. You have to choose your camp. When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content.

    • Append Write Corruption

      Someone on the #gemini IRC channel had guestbook code up for review; the results of malloc and fopen calls were not checked. These calls can and do fail, folks!

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