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. Be well everyone!