This list is necessarily incomplete, partly due to the complexity of
modern HTTP and HTML, but it hits the high points. If you think
there is something critical missing, please contact me by email.
I’d like to announce a new website I’ve created, called Gemini Quickstart!. It’s a guide to getting started on Gemini for non-technical users with no experience with Gemini, Gopher, or other alternative internet protocols. It walks you through installing a Gemini client, finding things you’re interested in to read, and creating your own space in the Geminiverse.
If you’re reading this, and you’re not on Gemini yet, check it out!
After I decided to give KOReader another try, I knew that I needed some way of getting news articles onto my Kobo. The methods that KOReader supports are RSS feeds, Send2Ebook, and Wallabag. I investigated each of these methods at least briefly.
I ruled out Send2Ebook because it involves the client app sending your documents to an FTP server, and I’m not willing to run an FTP server in the year 2019 CE.
Finished upgrading all of the computers in my home from Fedora 30 to Fedora 31 over the long weekend. It was pretty uneventful!
My own laptop went smoothly, though slowly, because it has a mechanical hard drive. All of the packaged software upgraded correctly and with no intervention, including the stuff installed from RPMFusion. I had quite a bit of self-compiled stuff, mostly relating to sway, and some of that had to be re-linked.
Minor germinal update: link syntax So, the Gemini link syntax was finalized:
Link Syntax Finalized
The one place this affects Germinal is in the generation of directory indexes. Germinal’s directory indexing code has been updated accordingly.
I have also updated the links on my Gemini site.
Unless there are changes coming to the response header line format, this is probably the last Gemini change that actually affects Germinal. Pretty much everything else is client-side.
Where next for brutaldon? Over the last couple of evenings and lunch breaks, I added basic polling support to brutaldon. You can view polls and vote in them, without needing JavaScript, though some support for the HTML5 <progress> element is helpful. If you have JavaScript, it’s progressively enhanced with Intercooler.JS, the way a lot of things in brutaldon are.
Composing polls I have specifically not written support for creating polls yet.
Is the gemini map format intended to be reflowed? One question that hasn’t been addressed in the Gemini speculative specification is whether the Gemini map file format text/gemini is intended to be reflowed. By reflowed, I mean mainly that the line-length of the file itself is not intended to be mapped exactly to the output device, which should instead lay out the text with appropriate line lengths. This is what HTML renderers do, and what MarkDown renderers do, usually by way of conversion to HTML.
Germinal is a server for the Gemini Protocol that I’ve been writing in Common Lisp during my lunches and some evenings.
It is named after the early 20th century Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper Germinal. I wanted to name it after an anarchist publication to convey the idea of people sharing information and ideas with each other, in contrast to the way the web is used to push advertising from corporations to people.
Good netizen solderpunk has been writing about the design of a protocol that is slightly more complex than gopher, but significantly simpler than http; while at the same time being significantly more powerful than gopher. I have thoughts about this, as I’ve posted about before, and I’m interested in contributing to this project and the conversation around it. These are the main documents where they discuss it. If you only have time for one, read just the FAQ, but they are all worthwhile and short, easy reads.
Since I’ve started reading gopher logs, I’ve noticed that a lot of people write very personal journals on their phlogs, where they are perhaps pseudonymous. I really want to write that kind of thing, but it wouldn’t work for me to have it on my blog or phlog. For one thing, my main online identities, like this blog, are tied to my public identity. And for another, I am a very private person.
If you don’t have a gopher client handy, you can browse the gopherverse using the Floodgap Gopher-HTTP Gateway. It will proxy gopher pages to you over https, so you can read them in a browser that doesn’t support gopher. The OverbiteWX extension for Firefox uses it to handle gopher URLs.
This is a very useful service, but the design is not very appealing to me. Gopher is supposed to be simple plain text, it’s true.
As part of the ongoing revitalization of gopher, there has been quite a bit of discussion about what, exactly, is good about gopher, and whether you can separate that from what’s bad about the world wide web. From another angle: are there good things about the web that we can import to alleviate gopher’s shortcomings?
The discourse A recent thread of that conversation has been an exchange between ~solderpunk and ~enkiv2.
This blog is produced with hugo, a static site generator, and the articles are written in Markdown, a plain text markup format. Since the articles are fundamentally plain text, for some time I’ve been wanting to make them available over gopher, a simple protocol that was created around the same time as the first versions of the World Wide Web. I used gopher before I used the WWW in Lynx and Mosaic, and even after the web was dominant, I used GNOFN’s free dial-up gopher as my access point to the internet.
Introduction A year and a half ago, I wrote about what a federated replacement for Facebook would look like. Part of that was differences from Facebook, and another part was differences from Mastodon, the leading federated social network software. Since then, I’ve used Mastodon a lot more, Mastodon has added and changed features, and my thinking has evolved, so I feel like it’s time to write an update to that article.
A little while ago, I wrote a thread on glitch.social about ephemerality of posting on social media as compared to Usenet. It got a little bit of traction, and one person asked if I could post more about Usenet clients. I haven’t gotten to it until today, and I thought I would post on my blog instead of on glitch. The original thread wasn’t really about Usenet clients; it was mainly about how posts on Usenet expired, which is contrary to people’s current expectations about social media, but actually worked very well.
So, it appears that I’ve (accidentally?) written a Mastodon client! It’s been public for long enough that I probably ought to write about it.
Brutaldon is a brutalist (mostly) web client for Mastodon and Pleroma. You can use it to connect to most instances from almost any web browser — I commonly use it from Lynx and w3m, as well as my day-to-day Firefox, and I’ve seen others use it on retro browsers on 1990s and early 2000s hardware.
What is Prosody? Prosody is an XMPP server; for most people and most uses, that means it’s an instant messaging server that anyone can run, and talk to anyone with an account on any other XMPP server. So unlike centralized chat platforms like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, you don’t have to trust a single big company to run it and to not misuse your data. I’m focusing on Prosody here because I run a Prosody server, and in my experience it’s easier to set up and run than others.
This is a quick update to my article on Firefox Focus for Android, which is to say that I’ve, at least temporarily, stopped using Firefox Focus. But the reason is good for Firefox!
Most people know by now that Firefox Quantum has landed in mobile, and brings the same speed improvements as on desktop. What’s even newer (I think) is that at least Firefox Beta for Android includes a Custom Tabs implementation, compatible with Chrome Custom Tabs.
On a lot of blogs and QA sites, you’ll find the recommendation to, if you have a low-RAM Linux desktop or laptop, to reduce vm.swappiness, the tuning knob that tells the kernel how much to prioritize moving unused application memory to swap to free up memory for the cache. It’s commonly recommended to reduce it to 10, and many guides recommend reducing it to extreme values like 0 (disable swap) or 1 (swap only when the only other option would be to OOM-kill processes).
Based on about six months away from Facebook and on Mastodon, I’ve had
some thoughts on improving your social media experience. There are a lot of
common pieces of advice (turn off notifications, disable Facebook timeline with
a browser extension) which I am not going to repeat. I hope the advice I’m
offering is more novel (if not totally).
This is a quick review/blurb about Firefox Focus for Android, which really does solve all of your web browsing problems on Android. Or at least mine, which may or may not be similar to yours.
What it is: Firefox Focus is a tiny, fast-loading browser comparable to Chrome Custom Tabs. Unlike Chrome Custom Tabs, it is privacy focused, and includes an ad-blocker.
My main problem with browsing on Android is that, while I love Firefox on Android, I have to admit that it uses a lot of RAM relative to what’s installed in my very old phone.
The trend in thinking about social networking is pretty negative, and to an extent this is justified. The usual complaints are that social networking substitutes superficial interactions for more meaningful ones, and that commercial social networking (the only kind most people use) manipulate your emotions for monetizing them. But I want to highlight an under-appreciated benefit.
We are often encouraged to use direct communications rather than social media: phone calls, text messages, email.
About this post I meant to be writing a couple of blog posts on Mastodon. But a thread on Mastodon led me to start thinking about Mastodon:Twitter::X:Facebook. There have been a few alternatives that haven’t really gone anywhere, which is kind of unfortunate, but perhaps they were just too early. And I was thinking about what we’d want today.
I want to write a full article on this, but I started by outlining it, and I think the outline is pretty readable, and I’m just going to post it on the principle that done is better than good.
