+++ OTR for the Holidays +++ | |
Monday, December 30, 2019 at 09:31 | |
I've been doing a lot of old-time-radio (OTR) listening over the | |
holidays, something I mentioned before [0] and have continued to | |
enjoy over the years. Archive.org has a huge (and growing) | |
collection [1] if you have an interest in sampling the shows. Some | |
of the best series include Gunsmoke, Escape, Lights Out, CBS Radio | |
Mystery Theater (CBSRMT) [2], X Minus One, and Nightfall. | |
Continued... | |
+++ On 16 Years of Blogging +++ | |
Saturday, December 14, 2019 at 01:04 | |
Congrats to 'The Boston Diaries' on 20 years of blogging [0]. It's | |
even more amazing that that 20 years is available all in one | |
place. I had to go into the wayback machine to figure out that my | |
first blog post was on 12/19/2003 - so almost 16 years. | |
Continued... | |
+++ Fetching Articles With Images +++ | |
Wednesday, December 11, 2019 at 03:15 | |
I like that Shane [0] provides local text copies of articles for | |
viewing on gopher, and I decided to do the same for the EFF article | |
in my last phlog entry [1]. | |
Continued... | |
+++ EFF Corporate Surveillance +++ | |
Wednesday, December 11, 2019 at 02:59 | |
The EFF has a very informative article on corporate surveillance in | |
all its forms - on the web and in real life [0][1]. It's long but | |
well worth reading. A lot of it won't be new to many of us on the | |
small internet, at least in concept. I was certainly aware that all | |
these forms of tracking existed, but I learned things I did not know | |
about how the various methods work and the lengths the data brokers | |
will go to tie behavioral data to a real person. | |
Continued... | |
+++ Story Telling Response to tfurrows +++ | |
Wednesday, December 11, 2019 at 03:18 | |
Tfurrows has a wonderful post about story-telling [0]. The story of | |
his older friend is very touching, and reminded me of my own | |
experiences with seniors, first with my grandparents as a child, | |
then in high school as a volunteer teacher for an elderhostel | |
program (I taught basic computer usage to seniors - on Commodore | |
VIC-20s, if I may date myself) and later as a paramedic. The latter | |
was not always under the best of circumstances [1], of course, but | |
there were moments I enjoyed, generally routine inter-hospital | |
transfers of older patients who were well enough and willing to | |
engage in conversation as they rode in the back of an ambulance. | |
Continued... | |
+++ Recent Reads Follett and Hertling +++ | |
Saturday, November 30, 2019 at 18:03 | |
I've been reading a lot lately, work has been crazy and I find | |
leaving myself an hour before bed to read does wonders to relax me | |
so I can sleep. Historical fiction has always been a favorite of | |
mine, recently I finished up Ken Follett's [0] Kingsbridge | |
trilogy. I read the first novel in the series (The Pillars of the | |
Earth) in 2018, and just finished the other two. They are not light | |
books (1000+ pages each) but are so engrossing you hardly notice how | |
long they are. I highly recommend them for any fans of historical | |
fiction, in particular early European history. All three books span | |
a period of 500 years, the 12th - 17th centuries. | |
Continued... | |
+++ Ed Rlwrap Tip +++ | |
Tuesday, September 03, 2019 at 13:35 | |
There are a few good tutorials on the 'ed' editor floating around | |
gopherspace, the one I've most recently seen is from KatolaZ [0][1]. | |
It's nice and simple, but I find the actual line editing a bit | |
sparse - neither the GNU nor BSD versions of ed are linked with GNU | |
readline, so you don't have access to the usual arrow, ctrl-a, | |
ctrl-e, alt-d, etc. keys. But it's really easy to add this | |
functionality, using 'rlwrap', like so: | |
Continued... | |
+++ Consume Less, Create More +++ | |
Tuesday, August 27, 2019 at 19:19 | |
Shane posted an essay by an unknown author, "Consume Less, Create | |
More" [0]. It is an inspiring essay. I've been aware of the | |
relationship between my overall happiness and how much I create for | |
some time, in my case my main source of creativity is the material I | |
create for the D&D games I run, supplemented by journal/blog/phlog | |
writing. Which brings to mind another point - you don't need to create | |
for anyone but yourself. Creating is harder if you are constantly | |
worrying what others might think of your creations. | |
Continued... | |
+++ Crappy Cellular +++ | |
Saturday, August 24, 2019 at 13:43 | |
My wife and I were discussing how our efforts to improve at French | |
are hampered by the crappy quality of cellular voice calls. | |
Continued... | |
+++ Privacy Replies +++ | |
Thursday, August 22, 2019 at 19:51 | |
SDF phlogger fallingknife has an insightful reply to my 'privacy is | |
dead' rant [0]. He brings up something I did not about government | |
overreach with our private data. Also this: | |
Continued... | |
+++ Library Nostalgia +++ | |
Saturday, August 17, 2019 at 20:48 | |
Growing up in a small-town, the library was within walking distance | |
of our house, so I frequently made the trip alone (this was the late | |
70s, and as my fellow Gen-X'ers can attest, kids did things like | |
that then). Down our own street, up the sidewalk to the center of | |
town, and across main street, then in the back door. Past a water | |
fountain and into the library proper, the smell of the books hit you | |
as soon as you opened the heavy inner doors. | |
Continued... | |
+++ Privacy is Dead +++ | |
Wednesday, August 14, 2019 at 16:48 | |
I was listening to a news radio story about a woman who tried to | |
divorce herself completely from the big five tech companies (you can | |
guess which ones), which did not go well. She found it was | |
effectively impossible, given the hold these companies have on the | |
internet. Many of us here in the gopher underground or on the small | |
internet have done the same, but really how effective is it? | |
Continued... | |
+++ Summer in Quebec +++ | |
Monday, July 01, 2019 at 20:52 | |
Happy Canada Day [0] to my fellow Canucks. I've been enjoying the | |
summer weather here and trying to spend more time outdoors while I | |
can - mostly walking and riding my bike. We're lucky enough to be | |
within walking distance of downtown, round-trip is about 4km and | |
it's mainly sidewalk, which is convenient. | |
Continued... | |
+++ Republic Updates +++ | |
Sunday, June 02, 2019 at 16:00 | |
A while back, I mentioned that the Small Internet[0][1] certainly | |
could be a collection of protocols in stripped-down form. Others had | |
this idea as well, including solderpunk [2], who has decided to do | |
something about it with his 'opinionated' and minimal web server | |
shizaru [3]. That now runs on a VPS (thanks to user visiblink) and | |
offers web space to any circumlunar.space user who wants it [4][5]. | |
Continued... | |
+++ Devuan to the Rescue +++ | |
Saturday, May 11, 2019 at 15:25 | |
I mentioned a while back that I was fed-up with systemd [0], and was | |
considering installing Devuan on my personal mail server. I finally | |
did just that and I have to say it has given me reason to like | |
Debian again (by way of Devuan of course). As far as I can tell, | |
Devuan ASCII [1] is indistinguishable from Debian 9, minus the | |
systemd virus. | |
Continued... | |
+++ Various Responses - Sol, Oldfolio, Jynx +++ | |
Monday, December 28, 2020 at 14:42 | |
Sol over at the Zaibatsu [0] talks about social media as an | |
anti-social influence, and discusses blocking large swaths of IP | |
space associated with the worst offenders. | |
Continued... | |
+++ Phlog Update is Done +++ | |
Monday, March 11, 2019 at 03:38 | |
As noted a few days ago, I wanted to re-work my phlog to make it a | |
bit simpler and easier to both update and navigate. There are no | |
helper scripts, I just create the post file in my ~gopher/phlog | |
directory, and add a line to the gophermap. Very quick and painless, | |
and all done from within emacs. | |
Continued... | |
+++ Phlog Revamp, Response to Solderpunk +++ | |
Friday, March 08, 2019 at 19:09 | |
I'm considering a revamp of my phlog much as logout did recently[0], | |
with a main gophermap and a simple listing of all posts for all | |
years on one page. It's certainly possible to to this and preserve | |
the original links, since the gophermap gives you one level of | |
indirection (except for slerm links, which I would just leave online | |
after converting). | |
Continued... | |
+++ Native Gopher on Firefox +++ | |
Tuesday, February 26, 2019 at 01:43 | |
I was able to get gopher working again in Firefox using OverbiteNX | |
[0], which basically allows native gopher rendering using an | |
external network service. It's not hard - just a two-step install, | |
one for the extension and one manual install of the network service | |
called Onyx [1]. It's nice to browse gopher in Firefox now and again | |
and not have to worry about rendering images or other binary | |
formats. I find it preferable to using one of the gopher-to-web | |
proxies, which don't correctly render all gopher sites. | |
Continued... | |
+++ Thoughts on Small Internet +++ | |
Sunday, February 24, 2019 at 18:08 | |
First, let me say that both the Small and Large Internets [0] rely | |
on the infrastructure, methodologies and software created decades | |
ago that were a result of open collaboration between highly skilled | |
and creative people. The effort was funded largely by public tax | |
dollars and created for the public good. One only has to look at the | |
lack of security in the original, core Internet protocols (DNS, BGP, | |
SMTP) to see that the people working on them could not conceive of | |
their creations being used for nefarious purposes. | |
Continued... | |
+++ Quick Update, Thanks and Perl +++ | |
Friday, January 18, 2019 at 01:52 | |
Just a quick phlog post as I've been insanely busy at work and left | |
with no energy to phlog lately. Work on the Republic has settled | |
down somewhat, the new user documentation is done and we continue to | |
get new user requests, we're now up to 12 users! We still have | |
plenty of room, I'll most likely stop once we get to 64 users, so | |
keep those requests coming! | |
Continued... | |