💾 Archived View for en.gmn.clttr.info › archive.gmi captured on 2021-12-06 at 14:29:53. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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While messing around with the package manager some packages got borked, some tools didn't work anymore. So i decided to do a fresh install on my laptop.
Instead of sticking to my long-time companion Xfce i decided to give Cinnamon a try. I've used Mate for some time a while ago, but it felt a bit "outdated". Cinnamon looks pretty polished although it seems to occupy some more ressources then the old Xfce installation. My first impression is that it would be a suitable DE for migrate windows users to linux.
We'll see if this first good impressions survive a few days of daily use.
version 1.1 of cgmnlm has just been flagged, changes are:
My colorized fork of gmni - cgmnlm - has just reached the 1.0 milestone. Nothing spectacular happened in the last weeks, but there were two small bugs left that i wanted to hunt down before flagging a release.
It's only a small step for gemini to replace the "common web"...now that there is also a capsule about Amiga software
Re: Solderpunk: Smartphones vs real cameras
For me, solderpunk completely hit the point in why using a "real" camera for taking photos is a completely different feeling than using a smartphone: A tool that is dedicated for taking photos vs a tool that is dedicated for carrying around and which tries to accomplish a vast variety of tasks.
The imersion a camera with a dedicated viewfinder can create leads to a hugely different approach on taking photos and leads to different results than the "point and click" style of smartphones.
Just give it a try - although you'll probably need to get familiar with the basic physical concepts of photography in the first place, the ones that usually some sort software in your phone tries to take care of.
In the recent days i was looking for a mechanical keyboard as i'm typing quite much especially at work, The downside is the there are almost no keyboards with mechanical switches that have a "ergonomic layout.
I'll decided to give the Matias Ergo Pro a try as it seems to be quite flexible in the setup. I'm typing this shortlog entry on this keyboard and although i've only used it for a few minutes it feels like it can become my daily driver. The position of the right ctrl key seems a bit awkward tough, it's placed left of the n key...
There are some special keys like single keys for cut, copy, paste and some media functions as well which seems to work out of the box with linux. This is a big pro. We'll see how the next days with go.
Olivier's Log: Receiving a large file over the internet
I've been in this situation a few months ago, a friend of me needed to drop a file of some gigs to me. We tried different things like my private nextcloud instance, but eventually failed with all the "fancy" approaches. In the end we set up a VPN connection between our homes and i fired up a simple ftp server. This was done in about 2 minutens with a short phone call. This would have been the fastest and most reliable way from the beginning.
In the recent days i was looking for a mechanical keyboard as i'm typing quite much especially at work, The downside is the there are almost no keyboards with mechanical switches that have a "ergonomic layout.
I'll decided to give the Matias Ergo Pro a try as it seems to be quite flexible in the setup. I'm typing this shortlog entry on this keyboard and although i've only used it for a few minutes it feels like it can become my daily driver. The position of the right ctrl key seems a bit awkward tough, it's placed left of the n key...
There are some special keys like single keys for cut, copy, paste and some media functions as well which seems to work out of the box with linux. This is a big pro. We'll see how the next days with go.
Our survaillance cam (to have a look at the dogs while we are away) was still running Debian Buster, so i did the upgrade to Debian Bullseye this morning. After that motion was not running anymore when started using the systemd unit.
I took me a while until i realized that Bullseye switched to a systemd unit for motion and you need to DISABLE the daemon mode in motion config.
I've switched to "PHP Server Monitor" a while back for monitoring my public services. While this was working quite well and included a public status page, it was a bit overkill and i needed to rent additional hosting for it. I now moved back to good ol' monit for monitoring. I have no need for a public status page at all, getting an alert when something goes down is enough for my use case.
All machines that run some sort of Debian here (like geminispace.info does) are updated to Bullseye. The "dist-upgrade" was pretty straight forward and worked flawless. Right what you'd expect from Debian. :)
I'm quite happy how geminispace.info works after the recent updates. It seems stable and fast enough to handle ongoing growth of gemini in the next months.
This makes me comfortable investing more time in new timesink CB radio. It's quite a challenge as things have changed a lot since i quite some 20 years ago, but it's also fun to explore and learn in another area again.
Re: ew0ks whishing for stricter gemtext
Having used Gemini and Gemtext for i few months, i mostly agree with the points taken by ew0k about stricter gemtext. Thi is surely backed by my habits to already follow some of his ideas. Especially the restriction to a single mandatory whitespace as delimiter would make life as a gemini dev easier.
I don't agree with the part of "stick to the first 3 chars" as this seems counter-intuitive to me from a user-perspective.
Solene has proposed an "old computer challenge"
This is somewhat appealing to me. I'm more and more annoyed by the increasing complexity of modern software, UI/UX changes just for the sake of it and "undocumented behaviour" (aka bugs). Things are breaking again and again.
I think it's a good idea to take a step back and think about what it was like a few years ago and if we can learn something from the way we've gone during this time.
Unfortunately i don't have any hardware that meets Solenes requirements, but i'll probably join with a stripped down VM running Haiku.
Additionally the source of cgmnlm is now available for browsing via gemini
cgmnlm saw 2 small updates recently which should make browsing capsules easier:
A few days ago i joined the codeberg non-profit org which runs the gitea-based codeberg software forge.
Although i still run my own gitea instance, i think it's a great opportunity help a community-driven alternative to the big players and allow other people host their software repos.
transit has seen some additions, check out these interesting capsules
No big news on other storys currently. For the moment I decided to stay with my team at the job. At home we are quite busy with gardening - the previous owners didn't spend much time in keeping the garden in a good shape so we need to put some effort into it to catch up.
Besides that i'm looking forward to get out and visit some new places on the motorcycle.
After several attempts over the last years which all failed i finally managed to get familiar with tmux. A heavily modified binding config inspired by vim helped a lot. tmux is now a daily driver for me - finally.
Did some checks on the motorcycles to have them ready for a ride as soon as springs returns to my part of europe. Due to some other duties that are more present during spring and summer updates related to my various projects may slow down a bit. Additionally im currently thinking about switching to another team in my company - after for 4 years with my current team there's a feeling of "something new might be good". However no decision taken yet.
cgmnlm now features a new 'a' command that toggles the display of preformatted text or the associated alt text (if available).
I finally started a german section of my capsule, you'll find the link above. There's currently no usefull content, not sure what will be there in the future, but i don't intend it to be a simple mirror of the english stuff.
cgmnlm finally made the switch to BearSSL like upstream did a few days ago. The AUR package is updated to match this change.
For some time now i've been thinking about adding a german section to my capsule. Writing longer texts in english is currently somewhat exhausting for me - on the other side i could use some more exercise in writing english.
I'd like to use gmnifaq to build a personal faq selection of some tech stuff i rarely need but need to search for when i eventually need it. gmnifaq - although missing a admin section - is ready for doing such things (including full-text-search). I just need to set down and get it done.
There have been some posts from geminauts who are working part-time on their day job:
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/~ew/2021/20210311-parttime.gmi
gemini://warmedal.se/~bjorn/posts/can-you-work-part-time.gmi
I've gone part-time a few months ago and i want to second the proposals: if you can afford it and don't define yourself by your job, go part-time and use the newly reached free time for yourself. in the proposed german section of this capsule I may eventually write some more info what changed for me.
cgmnlm now supports direct searching in geminispace, obviously using geminispace.info :-D
I'm currently not sure if i follow the upstream change to BearSSL. I gonna keep track of the discussions on the mailinglist. For the time being cgmnlm will stick to OpenSSL.
BearSSL - a smaller SSL/TLS library
I was looking for a new "smart"phone to replace my Galaxy A3. There's actually no compact (like the aging A3) phone available that has reasonable more power than my old phone. I ended up buying a new microSD and will keep using the A3.
In an attempt to workaround the GUS issue mentioned in the 2021-02-26 update i messed up the current index. 🙄 Reindexing is ongoing but will take some hours. Nevertheless i hope the workaround will do...
The last days felt very much like its spring already. My wife and i started to do some gardening here and there. We moved to our new house mid November and it's still much to do to make the yard match our needs.
For gmnifaq[1] i started to work with full text search in SQLite. I need to do some more investigation, but i think it can be a good replacement for the unmaintained whoosh which is currently used by GUS. This would probably solve the problem of index updates blocking the search function.
Still busy with various maintenance tasks around geminispace.info and GUS. At least index updates happen regularly but it's still some manual effort from time to time which needs to be ironed out.
I started migrating from my Intel-based home server to a Raspberry Pi 4 based setup. It's a quite comfortable situation cause both can run simultaneously and i migrate one service a time as i have time.
After some really cold days with lots of snow it seems like spring is coming to my part of the world way too early.
Although i'm really looking forward to jump on my motorcycle for a ride i kinda miss "real winter" feeling as it was like 20 years ago.
The last days i've spent to most spare time learning more about GUS and in improving the robustness of the crawl and index process. A robust process is essential for unattended execution.
I'm thinking about moving my home server to a Raspberry Pi based setup. Some decisions need to be made for special use cases, but most stuff will suite well to a Raspi.
The write-up about a Raspi-based surveillance cam is still pending...i'd rather mess around with some code instead of writing boring documentation. :)
geminispace.info has been announced to the mailing list yesterday, making it somewhat official.
I'll have some small patches pending for GUS and cgmnlm - i really enjoy the ease of hacking for gemini.
There's one of these hype "awesome" type lists for gemini as well, iv'e added a link to the section below.
I'm happy to announce that geminispace.info, a new search provider in geminispace is now available for public testing
geminispace.info is based on the great GUS by Natalie Pendragon.
Feel free to try out and reach back to me if you'll find glitches.
There's an ArchLinux AUR package for cgmnln, but for any other system you currently need to build for yourself. Not sure if i should provide prebuilt packages for one or another system, e.g. the raspberry Pi OS, Debian and so? Drop me a message what you think about it.
Moved my code to my own gitea instance which now runs on my home server
The raspi arrived yesterday and was up to serve my use case in less than 2 hours. I'd expected it to be much more hassel to set things up (ok, i'm a long time linux user with quite some knowledge...)
Gonna write some more lines about what i wanted to achieve and what i did.
i've created a fork of gmni (or to be more precise gmnlm) which i call *cgmnlm* as it adds colored formatting to the gemtext special lines
After quite some time thinking about getting a raspi (or similar) for tinkering i finally ordered one. should arive soon, first use case is to set up a surveillance cam for the dogs. I'll keep you updated how it goes.