Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 06, 2023

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

• Re: FLOSS Equivalent of Wordpad?

  I use AbiWord on machines like my OpenPandora. It's lightweight and does even more than Wordpad did. Sadly the GTK3 (or higher) versions are much slower than the old GTK2 versions i prefer :/

• Internet/Gemini

  • Taking Accountability for My Vanity .onion Address

    Some folks probably already know that my website, gopherhole, gemini capsule, and finger server can be accessed over the tor network at the .onion address vigreyd6wrsvudjto7ccmt45avabdstveitqej2f4or75sjxkrijv3qd.onion. Heck, if you are reading this blog post using the Tor Browser, you likely would have been redirected to that .onion address. The first 6 characters are "vigrey", just like the first 10 characters of the DuckDuckGo .onion address are "duckduckgo" and the first 8 characters of the Facebook .onion address are "facebook". I am currently of the opinion that making a vanity .onion address was a morally wrong choice for me to make, even if it was a mindless choice at the time.

    Generating a vanity .onion address is essentially the same process as Proof-of-Work systems like Bitcoin use or trying to crack a hashed and salted password. In all of those cases, you make a random guess, see that your guess was likely horribly wrong, throw that guess away, and guess again. Do that over and over again until luck is on your side. All you had to do was waste a bunch of electricity on the way. In the case of my vanity .onion address, I statistically would have generated about 32^6 (1073741824) .onion addresses, likely throwing away over 1 billion addresses that didn't start with "vigrey". I did that once before and lost that .onion address's private key, so I did this twice in total... I also did this when .onion addresses were only 16 characters in length, so I likely threw away at least 3 billion .onion addresses needlessly.

  • Trying Gemini (again)

    I want to give Gemini and its community another try. Earlier this year I visited the geminispace in a curious but fleeting manner, and had a lot of fun in it, but it was more of a chance encounter than a move.

    I've been feeling increasingly disillusioned with the bloat and maintenance of my website, and the constant need to move social networks as each hub collapses. I am hoping that this will be a more sustainable way to document my thoughts and socialise in a way that is fulfilling but not so reliant on specific services.

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