+++ 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.
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+++ 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.
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+++ 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].
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+++ 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.
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+++ 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.
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+++ 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.
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+++ 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:
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+++ 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.
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+++ 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.
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+++ 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:
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+++ 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.
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+++ 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?
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+++ 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.
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+++ 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].
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+++ 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.
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+++ 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.
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+++ 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.
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+++ 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).
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+++ 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.
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+++ 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.
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+++ 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!
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