Gemini Articles of Interest
A Gemini client* is needed for the following links.
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Technology and Free Software
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Cutting-edge tech
Found a real gem in the basement the other day - the Sony CD Mavica! It's huge! The photos have 2.1 megapixels! It has 6x digital zoom!
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What I miss in phpactor
I has used Vim for coding in python or php since 2008 for 10 years. Then I switched to phpStorm with Vim motions. I did that because of better ecosystem for Symfony projects. All these easy jumpings between definitians and references, easy jump to twig files or routings, at that time we started to add docblocks and phpStorm do that easily. Same things with setters and getters. And the main thing was correct autocompilations and showing errors on the fly. But... it is quite heavy tool and it has a lot of things what I will never use. I'm the fan of minimalism and I am frustrated by all this needless stuff around.
Before switch I was using phpactor[1] as my main helper to code in php. But it was quite young project and time to time I just got into situation that I code only in pure Vim because service is broken. The creator of phpactor Dantleech is awesome but man's time is limitted project went in its temp.
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Notes on e-mail privacy
What bothers me most is that IMAP and webmail have lead to billions of people and organizations accumulating years and years' worth of private messages on mail servers (strangers' computers). This increased their risk of data compromise to the point of near-certainty. Webmail in particular made people dependent on their online accounts for accessing their e-mail archives. And providers make zero effort to persuade people to move their data offline, even though this could be done with a couple of clicks in the webmail interface.
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Simple Synapse Admin Tool
Small, simple, single-page web tool for handling users, rooms, and registration tokens on your Matrix Synapse server.
I have been hosting a Matrix Synapse server for many years now. Although it has a vast admin API, it lacks a simple admin tool for frequent tasks such as password resets, user management, room cleanup, and registration token creation. Thus, I wrote this tool, trying to keep everything as small and simple as possible. Synapse Admin fits into a single HTML page with <500 lines of uncompressed and readable code. You need a fairly modern browser because it uses Fetch API and string interpolation, but it does not have any external dependencies. The only communication that happens is between the page in your browser and the homeserver that you specify. There is an optional feature to save your credentials, which uses local storage, keeping it within your browser.
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team deck + hmd = *chunder*
Since I have been spending much time on the couch, I had the opportunity to spend time with my Steam Deck. I picked up the Steam Deck awhile back and it was supposed to be my gaming replacement for my aging Alienware Alpha R1 (steambox), which it has, but I think I spend m0ar time using it for general purpose desktop linux tasks and tinkering. It is a really nice device and I'm glad I pulled the trigger on this purchase.
Today I decided to bring out the Sony HMZ-T2 Personal 3D Viewer. It is a Head Mounted Display (HMD) that came out around 2012, before the Oculus Rift and all the recent VR models. There's no head tracking or any of the fancy features like today's VR stuff. It's basically just a display that connects via HDMI. Oh, it's also good for 3D Blu-Ray.
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Internet/Gemini
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Gemski
I continue to amuse myself by finding ways to play games over gemini, abuse of the protocol though this arguably is. Abstract strategy games and interactive fiction were too easy targets, so for a challenge I decided to try a real-time action game. Thanks to gemtext streaming, this is narrowly possible. Here's what I came up with, a backwards ski race down a perlin-noisy slope, inspired by the unix classic 'ski' and uninventively entitled 'Gemski'.
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