Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 25, 2023

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

• Technology and Free Software

  • a kind of chat thing

    I noticed that there was some mechanism for sending arbitrary data directly instead of just poking stuff into the DHT. kind of makes total sense, I'd just been distracted poking at the DHT stuff.

  • Old Computer Challenge Tools 2023 Update

    I've finally got around to uploading the fork of astro[1] I adapted for use on TinyCore. Because it uses the ash terminal, I called it ashtro[2]. It uses a tool I also had to build (to make up for the lack of termcap etc.) called termsize[3].

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Internet Appliance

      Last weekend I watched LGR's video on The Netpliance i-Opener, an Internet Appliance. When I saw the UI and a few screens it brought back memories of how exciting the Internet was back then. It was also a throwback to see that news could be read without obnoxious flashing ads and banners and auto playing videos and stupidily narrow margins. The shopping page in particular reminded me of how much more quaint the WWW was at the time. Unfortunately those days are long dead and gone.

    • Slash and Burn in the Twitter Jungle

      Browsing the Mastodon profile of someone from my city, I found this post, a couple months old now, about the ways in which Twitter keeps breaking. As the article's subtitle says, "everything worked fine until Elon Musk took over"; it details the ways in which Musk's chaotic reign has supremely fucked the site and alienated not just its users, but also the developers in the Twitter ecosystem, the people who make all kinds of software that hooks into Twitter's API.

      Unfollow bots, literary bots, where's-Musk's-plane? bots (the latter of which was naturally the first to be banned) - these all generally rely on API access to get information, send tweets, send DMs. Now, there has always been a precarity in making one's living in the public APIs of major sites: you're relying on not just stability, but goodwill, and it's very easy for both to vanish. In Twitter's case, both did. The stability was remarkably okay until early July, when (it was supposed) some unpaid bills (or at least fuck-you-I'm-not-paying-these-bills) lead to rate limits and yet another bluebird exodus. But if the stability was mostly okay, the goodwill obviously wasn't.

  • Programming

    • How I watch y*utube in ratpoison.

      If the script is executed without any arguments, a browser is opened on the landing page of your selected invidious instance. If the script is executed with a however many arguments, all the arguments will be parsed as a search query.

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