Internet Speeds, Piracy, Lightsabers
2019-02-01 9:45pm
emar over at the republic wrote a wonderful phlog largely about
connection speed and modern data payloads. It made me miss the
napster days. 56k did the job perfectly well for me then, and the
only thing that has gotten better with better speeds is streaming
video now being a thing... but I would have been fine with a more
moderate increase in speeds and just torrent things. I was in
high school in those days, just the right age to have a string of
crazy/tacky websites that no one ever really saw, but I poured so
much time and energy into. It was so fun! I have read a lot of
articles recently about how the fun internet has died. I think
that is largely true, but has been true for over a decade. :-/
I have recently revisited my feelings on piracy. After many years
paying for downloads... I have grown wary of paying for things
that I do not own. While I do not do it often, I have started to
torrent things occasionally (something I did not really get in on
until now... like I said: napster and soulseek were my jam back
then). I also wrote a scraper/downloader for bandcamp today. That
one mostly just to see how it would work (I had never built some-
thing like that before). I've largely tested it with my own music
and it works really well. Super fast downloads into folders named
for artist and album with mp3 titles formatted as track number
followed by song title.
People have been talking about gopher clients as the lightsabers
of our piece of the internet. I agree! I have built two and have
had a great time doing so. I started writing a post about the pr-
ocess of writing one and the decisions that go into it. It is on
my work computer, so it wont get posted until after the weekend.
My wife is very big into web accessibility and we are going to be
going to an accessibility hackathon next month. I was thinking of
trying to add text to speech and a simple form of navigation to a
gopher client to allow the blind or otherwise visually impaired
a way to use one of my clients. I've done a basic survey of the
options available to me and there seems to be a lua library avai-
lable to handle the text to speech portion. Lua does not provide
full/proper multithreading, so listening for controls while it is
reading will be tricky. I may be able to figure out a way to make
it work with coroutines... not sure. I'll think on it.
There have been lots of great posts here lately. I am an alright
fiction writer, but do not seem to be able to put together very
solid content in my gopherhole. But it is nice to be able to jot
down some thoughts from time to time.
Oh! I am also working on a note-taking app for the terminal. Itll
allow for syncing via scp or sftp (dealers choice) to allow note-
taking from multiple machines.
Finally, I have been enjoying dvtm. I wish it had better docs but
they are good enough to get the ball rolling.
