💾 Archived View for ruario.flounder.online › journal-2022-01.gmi captured on 2022-04-29 at 13:41:57. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-03-01)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The following is a 'stream of consciousness' (micro *log style).
Re: You Rascals! 😆
Not me this time I swear! 😜
PCR test is back. Negative.
It is more the wasted time that bothers me, and the music, and other noise, now he is at home. Plus the "Pappa‽ … … …" every 5 mins.
This feels like a repeat of last week when we also thought he had Covid and kept him and my daughter home…
[Spoiler: They didn't have Covid]
I know everyone has these issues (and far worse)… but I feel like ranting! 😜
P.S. I have almost completely given up for the day if I am 100% honest. I am basically considering this day a write off and will make it up to my employer another time.
This whole Covid thing is such a pain. Today when my youngest woke he had some minor cold-like symptoms, so we checked him with a home (lateral flow) test. Negative.
I got him ready for barnehagen (kindergarten) and brought him in. On the way into work (after dropping him off) my wife called me and said she looked at the test again and it seemed like there was a faint "pink" line after all. I rushed home and looked at it. We discussed it a little and wondered if perhaps it was a weak response because it was a bit early. So I went back to the barnehagen and picked him up. Once home, we both experienced self doubt. Perhaps this "pink" line was actually some colour seeping back from the control line? The test had been left on the counter for over an hour, rather than thrown away once completed (as we would typically have done).
I have since done two things.
I am however increasingly convinced that he does not have Covid 19. Sadly though I have wasted a bunch of time ferrying him back and fourth from barnehagen and bringing him to and from the test centre. In addition I now have him here with me as I attempt to "work from home", which is proving exceptionally hard. When will it end? 😔
I spent some time on Twitter this evening and it is the most depressed I have been with the platform for quite some time. I know Twitter is problematic, especially in recent years (Trump, Brexit) but there are aspects I enjoy and friends I have met there. Plus others I know from before, where Twitter is the only major platform I still use to interact with them.
Anyway, today I noticed yet more NTF/Crypto promotion. This time in the form of "NFT Profile Pictures" (first announced a week ago but I missed it). I absolutely despise all this stuff. Honestly, I have this strong feeling that eventually I am gonna have to quit Twitter.
Twitter Blue Labs § About NFT Profile Pictures on Twitter
Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs [YouTube]
I love that Konsole (KDE) recognises URLs. This means when using a terminal based Gopher client, I can just Ctrl+[click] links in text documents (type 0) and assuming I have correctly setup my URL handlers everything just works!
Linkification in Gopher clients
Linkification in Gopher clients (Part 2)
Ok, after a quick search
nc command's -k option [StackExchange UNIX & Linux]
apaul answered Mar 31 '15 at 13:55:
[…] If you can't make it work, consider using ncat which is part of nmap package. (there are many netcat implementations...)
Re: On HTTP vs Gemini simplicity
@alexey raises some fair points about HTTP servers.
Though, I figured I woud try his one-liner HTTP server example.
$ nc -lk -p 1234 -e /bin/sh -c 'printf "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n\r\n"; sed "/^.$/q"' nc: invalid option -- 'k' nc -h for help
Some information about my system.
$ cat /etc/os-release NAME=Slackware VERSION="15.0" ID=slackware VERSION_ID=15.0 PRETTY_NAME="Slackware 15.0 x86_64" ANSI_COLOR="0;34" CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:slackware:slackware_linux:15.0" HOME_URL="http://slackware.com/" SUPPORT_URL="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/" BUG_REPORT_URL="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/" VERSION_CODENAME=stable
Here is the package info for the netcat installed on this version of Slackware.
$ head -n 16 /var/lib/pkgtools/packages/nc-1.10-x86_64-4 PACKAGE NAME: nc-1.10-x86_64-4 COMPRESSED PACKAGE SIZE: 56.0K UNCOMPRESSED PACKAGE SIZE: 170K PACKAGE LOCATION: /var/log/mount/treecache/slackware64/n/nc-1.10-x86_64-4.txz PACKAGE DESCRIPTION: nc: nc (Netcat network utility) nc: nc: Netcat, or "nc" as the actual program is named, is a simple utility nc: which reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or nc: UDP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that nc: can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. nc: At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and nc: exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection nc: you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities. nc: Netcat was written by *Hobbit* <hobbit@avian.org>, and is a product nc: of Avian Research.
As an additional test I tried on one of the macOS machines in our test lab.
$ nc -lk -p 1234 -e /bin/sh -c 'printf "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n\r\n"; sed "/^.$/q"'
nc: invalid option -- e
usage: nc [-46AacCDdEFhklMnOortUuvz] [-K tc] [-b boundif] [-i interval] [-p source_port]
[--apple-recv-anyif] [--apple-awdl-unres]
[--apple-boundif ifbound]
[--apple-no-cellular] [--apple-no-expensive]
[--apple-no-flowadv] [--apple-tcp-timeout conntimo]
[--apple-tcp-keepalive keepidle] [--apple-tcp-keepintvl keepintvl]
[--apple-tcp-keepcnt keepcnt] [--apple-tclass tclass]
[--tcp-adp-rtimo num_probes] [--apple-initcoproc-allow]
[--apple-tcp-adp-wtimo num_probes]
[--setsockopt-later] [--apple-no-connectx]
[--apple-delegate-pid pid] [--apple-delegate-uuid uuid]
[--apple-kao] [--apple-ext-bk-idle]
[--apple-netsvctype svc] [---apple-nowakefromsleep]
[--apple-notify-ack] [--apple-sockev]
[--apple-tos tos] [--apple-tos-cmsg]
[-s source_ip_address] [-w timeout] [-X proxy_version]
[-x proxy_address[:port]] [hostname] [port[s]]
Some info on that machine.
$ uname -a Darwin megatron.viv.osl 19.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 19.6.0: Mon Apr 12 20:57:45 PDT 2021; root:xnu-6153.141.28.1~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
🤷
@alexey what kind of fancy-ass version of netcat are you running?
Damn… the script I created to extract (selected) journal entries has a (off-by-one) bug with the timestamps used on the URL (and link title). I have fixed now but it is a shame I got it wrong for my first (test) transmission to Antenna. 🤷
I was just looking over some of Strava stats.
Last year I estimate I cycled over 3,900km (2423 miles) with the overwhelming majority on "non-sensible" cycles. And I did 67,508m (221483ft [or 42 miles straight up]) in elevation gain (yes… Oslo is hilly).
This is the order of most used cycles.
…
My Strava account [Velocipede Rider]
There is also a Hacker News discussion on the original article.
Re: Gemini is Solutionism at its Worst
Re: Gemini is Solutionism at its Worst
An interesting little read. Not mine (just something I stumbled across).
Gemini is Solutionism at its Worst [✍ 13:17 +0100]
Like so many others I have now fallen into the habit of playing Wordle every day. 😉
Hi Patricia! 😘
Ok, I fixed it in the end. It was simple and stupid. Some updated packages had added an extra dependency. Slackware does not do dependency management. I just had to get slackpkg to install a handful of packages recently added to Slackware and and everything just started working again. I have been using Slackware for more than a decade but I sometimes still make newbie mistakes. 🤷🏼
At the office for the first time in a long time. I needed to install a bunch of updates to my machine here (currently running the Slackware 15RC). After the updates KDE is all screwed up. I am sure it is fixable but not something I want to work out or have time for right now. I switched to XFCE for the time being but starting Vivaldi and several other apps, all my passwords were (initally) gone as they are secured against KWallet. That part is sorted now… but… arggh. It is just too much to deal with when you want to sit down and get to work!
Lagrange 1.10.2 just arrived with a nice little fix—for me at least. 😉
Thanks @skyjake!
Suggested Gopher improvements for Lagrange
Re: Non-Gemini URLs on Antenna
This morning I noticed that that @ew0k publicly replied to me. I have since updated both my original Gopher post and the follow up Gemini one with all the comments I collected from @Szczeżuja, @nytpu and @ew0k.
My two posts now essentially cover the same thing. Choose your protocol of choice to read the replies (and my follow up comments). 😉
Non-Gemini URLs on Antenna - @ew0k
Can you submit phlogs to Antenna? [Gopher]
Re: Can you submit phlogs to Antenna? [Gemini]
I tweaked the format of the '<content>' section of the Atom feed for this journal. I think links are a bit clearer and more readable now. In addition I am no longer wrapping preformatted text (e.g. shell scripts) and thus no longer breaking snippets that someone might want to copy and paste, e.g. § 2022-01-14 @ 14:35.
So I started scanning through @nytpu's capsule again and found this.
(trying to) finally get off social media + announcing my flight log
§ my flightlog
My brain refuses to let me write anything on my gemlog that doesn’t meet a minimum amount of effort, I guess I feel that it needs to be at least decent quality and long to justify posting it. The flight log gives me a middle ground to write shorter snippets on what I’m thinking about without needing to go through the whole thing of a gemlog post[…]
Nailed it! That is exactly how I am using this 'journal'. In addition, I also am more likely to write things here that directly relate to Gemini. I have two different Twitter accounts—yes, yes… I know, I know—but neither of them feel especially relevant to posting about Gemini (yet). This is particularly true when talking about someone who is active on Geminispace—like I am now. so I am finding this journal surprisingly useful. Sure, I realise that probably nobody reads it but it might be interesting for me to look through or reference in the future. Indeed pretty much everything I write on my capsule (or Gopher hole) is primarily for me and if anyone else bothers to read it, that is just a bonus! 😉
Twitter account (VelocipedeRider): Cycling
I got a nice email from @nytpu about my experiment with Gopher and Antenna. It then occurred to me that having seen "nytpu's comitium subscriptions" mix in phlog entries, might have been what (subconsciously) gave me the idea in the first place.
🤔 Hmm… It seems I steal all my best ideas from @nytpu!
nytpu's comitium subscriptions
Re: Simplicity 2
I really enjoyed @ew's latest Flightlog entry and not just because it was another response to me. 😉
I too work in the tech industry. Indeed I am involved in the web browser industry… don't hate me!
Anyway @ew's solution to weight tracking is exactly the one I would go for, no matter how tempting "Solution 1" sounds from the geeky, "play with tech" perspective—well not the crypto/blockchain bit, so much.
~ew's FlightLog — Simplicity 2
I was just reading @alex's journal and I came across this snippet.
when you google "[when] was email invented" google tells you about a man who bizarrely has obviously falsely claimed for decades to have invented email and has attempted to build an entire public career off of this claim. he's also apparently an antivaxxer republican
😆
None of these things surprises me in slightest!
Re: Can you submit phlogs to Antenna?
I had a little fun on Antenna earlier. I am curious if I will see any reactions.
Can you submit phlogs to Antenna?
So I put an update to Vivaldi Browser out just now (on the weekend) rather than on Friday, as I should have done (see § 2022-01-21 @ 16:39 ).
I think everything is fine but if it is not, it is harder to "organise the troops". So I shall now have to spend the next couple of hours biting my nails… waiting… in case something goes wrong.
Minor update (6) for Vivaldi Desktop Browser 5.0
A big shout out to jonmc. Welcome to Gemini—or at least Gemini via a web proxy. 😜
Re: Wow! What is Happening in Geminispace!?
Good things @ew0k, good things! 😆
More seriously, in addition to being great news, I like these "stats from Antenna". Make sure to give us an update on how it is going six months from now. 👍
As a side note, even in my very short time here—[check's notes] roughly two months back—it does feel like it is growing. I also feel I am seeing increasing references to Gemini on the "big net"—though perhaps I am just more aware now I use it myself. 🤷🏼
Wow! What is Happening in Geminispace!?
Damn the procrastination is especially strong today. Will I ever finish my work, so that the weekend can actually start? I probably could have an hour ago if I applied myself.
Ok I have added in summary and content to the feeds and limited it to the most recent 20 entries. It should now be possible to follow this journal without ever visiting this page (unless you wanted to read the older entries). 😉
Re: Suggested Gopher improvements for Lagrange
@skyjake replied and I updated the original post accordingly, with his comments.
He seems like a really nice guy. 👍
Suggested Gopher improvements for Lagrange § Comments
Could a tiny/micro log be a replacement for Twitter?
After adding an Atom feed for this page (see my previous post), I have started to think about this some more.
How would such a simple setup work and how does it compare with Twitter or Mastodon?
Now, the whole thing is decentralised but the architecture is very minimal and only uses standardised technologies. To take part you only need hosting (self hosted or any basic provider). You would learn about new people to follow from the lists of others (on their site as mentioned above) or directly from friends. For companies or organisation you would get to the microblog from their official website.
The one thing you could not do is @ someone who does not follow you already and expect them to read it… but… maybe that is not a bad thing? 🤔
Maybe it is just me but I do think this is a better "solution" than Tiny log with dedicated clients like lace and the same goes for Twtxt, for much the same reason. RSS/Atom clients are much more common.
Although, maybe I am over enamoured with it because this is what I have just done. Well, after the ripping the idea off @nytpu first of course 😉
Rather than 'Tiny log' format, I added an Atom feed.
Honestly, why anyone would want to subscribe to this bullshit I don't know 🤷🏼 but it is there if you do. As much as anything I added it 'because I could', taking inspiration from the Atom feed on @nytpu’s flight log.
Lagrange should handle this just fine. Alternatively, since 🐟flounder also presents my content over the web, you could use a 'normal' RSS feed reader to get notifications.
The feed over https, so that it usable in regular feed readers
The script I quickly hobbled together to do the conversion
Worth a look if I do decide to switch to Tiny Log format in the future.
I decided to update the timestamps on this journal to be clearer. I might eventually switch to Tiny log format but I have some reticence because of the rules around newlines. These make it impossible to have pre-formatted text with 'extra' newlines and I do not want to be limited in that way.
Procrastination is my mortal enemy!
I should go to sleep.
A short shell script to fetch the contents of a page over Gemini. It makes no attempt to check the validity of certificates or anything else 'fancy'. You just give it a gemini://… URL as the only command line argument and it fetches and prints it to the terminal.
#!/bin/sh d=`echo "$1" | cut -d\/ -f3` echo "$1" | openssl s_client -crlf -quiet -connect $d:1965 -servername $d 2>/dev/null | tail -n+2
@skyjake and @Acidus You both make truly amazing stuff. I can't thank you enough!
Got a few more steps along with automating the deployment of posts I make to both my Gemini capsule and Gopher hole. Most recently coming up with ways to automate fetching and uploading files and re-writing links. So all in all, a good day! 😉
Up Buttons for exploring capsules ~Acidus
This is where Elaho's "up" button helps. It takes you "up" a segment of the URL.
* /dir/file.gmi -> /dir/
* /dir/ -> /
Having navigation buttons like "up" in the client makes it very easy to explore new parts of a capsule.
[…]
I've tried some other GUI clients (Lagrange on macOS, deedum and Ariane on Android) and while I like parts of them, they don't have an up and I really miss it. […]
@Acidus I presume you are looking for a dedicated button but FWIW Lagrange on macOS, does have the keyboard shortcut ⌘↑ (Go to Parent), which does exactly what you want. In the AV-98 terminal client you can also type 'up'. So this is not totally unique to Elaho but perhaps the feature is not where you are expecting it. 🤷🏼
That all said, I do agree with you it is a nice feature and clients should include it and make it readily available.
Regular expression § Standards (Wikipedia)
The IEEE POSIX standard has three sets of compliance: BRE (Basic Regular Expressions), ERE (Extended Regular Expressions), and SRE (Simple Regular Expressions). SRE is deprecated […]
[…] ERE adds ?, +, and |, and it removes the need to escape the metacharacters ( ) and { }, which are required in BRE.
GNU grep has the following options: "grep -E" for ERE, and "grep -G" for BRE (the default), and "grep -P" for Perl regexes.
In the POSIX standard, Basic Regular Syntax (BRE) requires that the metacharacters ( ) and { } be designated \(\) and \{\}, whereas Extended Regular Syntax (ERE) does not.
I am not really a vim user but I thought I should check and yes it too defaults to BRE (like sed and grep)
What's the difference between vim regex and normal [sic] regex?
ew0k:
The possibly funniest thing is that * still works.
Because it is not in the list (below): ‘?’, ‘+’, parentheses, braces (‘{}’), and ‘|’.
GNU sed manual § 5.2 Basic (BRE) and extended (ERE) regular expression
Expression (BRE) syntax is the default in sed (and similarly in grep). Use the POSIX-specified -E option (-r, --regexp-extended) to enable Extended Regular Expression (ERE) syntax.
In GNU sed, the only difference between basic and extended regular expressions is in the behavior of a few special characters: ‘?’, ‘+’, parentheses, braces (‘{}’), and ‘|’.
With basic (BRE) syntax, these characters do not have special meaning unless prefixed with a backslash (‘\’); While with extended (ERE) syntax it is reversed: these characters are special unless they are prefixed with backslash (‘\’).
Regexp Issues in GNOME Terminal(?) ~ew0k
EDIT: I should mention that yes, these characters have always needed to be escaped in order to be interpreted as literals, but the behaviour is the opposite now: I have to escape them in order for them to be interpreted as modifiers.
I think you still have that in reverse, at least for sed and grep without the '-E' switch. Read my earlier posts (below) from today, starting with § 10:43 and working up.
@ew0k: It might be that you (or your distro) had previously setup shell alias so that sed, and grep were always called with -E by default and that these aliases are now gone or no longer applied for some reason. Just a thought! 🤷
@ew0k: Here is an arbitrary Stackoverflow answer that touches on this (found via a quick search) and aligns with my initial answer [§ 10:43].
using extended regular expressions in sed (stackoverflow)
From the first reply:
[…] sed doesn't use extended regular expressions by default. If you're using GNU sed (type sed --version to confirm this), you can use the -E option to enable extended regular expressions:
```
cat text.txt | sed -E 's/^4[0-9](-4[0-9])?,//g'
```
or you can use backslashes to let sed recognize the (, ), and ? characters:
```
cat text.txt | sed 's/^4[0-9]\(-4[0-9]\)\?,//g'
```
[…]
Regexp Issues in GNOME Terminal(?) - ew0k
This morning I ran into something extremely weird and frustrating: the modifiers +, (, ), {, and } no longer work in either sed, grep, or vim. […] I found that they work (at least in vim) if I escape them with \, which makes absolutely zero sense!
@ew0k: I feel odd stating this and perhaps I am the one missing something but… just in case you somehow did not know, sed and grep have always required you to escape the likes of "+, (, ), {, and }" for use in regular expressions, unless you use "extended regular expressions" by way of the '-E' switch (or in the case of grep, you can alternatively call 'egrep'). Also, unlike *BSD, older versions of GNU sed might expect you to use '-r' rather than '-E'.
Szczeżuja's tinylog @ Tue 11 Jan 2022 08:58:09 PM CET [gophermaps and permissions]
@Szczeżuja: I looked at the gophermap for your home page. This is easy to do, just change '/1/' to '/0/' in the URL to force it to be served as text.
Szczezuja's gopher hole - raw gophermap
iSzczezuja's gopher hole Err 1 1 i======================= Err 1 1 0About me /users/szczezuja/about.txt sdf.org 70 1Gopher novice /users/szczezuja/novice sdf.org 70 1Phlog /users/szczezuja/phlog sdf.org 70 i Err 1 1 i-- Err 1 1 iszczezuja.space CC BY-SA Err 1 1
I noticed the "Err 1 1", which suggests to me that perhaps you did the gophermap entirely by hand, which is fine of course and a handy thing to know but since SDF uses Gophernicus, you could make your life easier.
If you look at mine, it looks as follows
Ruari's Gopher hole - raw gophermap
iWelcome to Ruari's Gopher hole null.host 1 i null.host 1 1Phlog - Random thoughts /users/r0/phlog sdf.org 70 i null.host 1 i * * * null.host 1 i null.host 1 0About me (+contact info) /users/r0/about.txt sdf.org 70
But that is not how I wrote it. I simply wrote.
Welcome to Ruari's Gopher hole 1Phlog - Random thoughts phlog * * * 0About me (+contact info) about.txt
And the Gophernicus fills in all the rest for me (e.g. 'null.host 1')
[✍ 2022-01-12 11:15] Your problems with having to set permissions after creating files for Gopher are not about Gopher itself. It is the umask that is set on SDF that causes you to have to do this.
@tomasino@mastodon.sdf.org 2018-07-09 23:47
[…] SDF umask defaults will not work with gopher. You'll have to chmod everything to 644 yourself. Set a more relaxed umask in your .profile and it'll save you time later.
And another person who seemingly liked the post, and has even written their own script inspired by mine, which is great (grazie Omar!). I didn't really expect anyone to notice this post and now I have several comments and a reinterpretation.
Convertire text/gemini in testo semplice 🇮🇹 - Omar Polo (yumh)
Szczeżuja's tinylog @ Sat 08 Jan 2022 02:18:13 PM CET
It could be useful.
gemini://ruario.flounder.online/gemlog/2022-01-04_Formatting_Gemtext_for_Gopher.gmi
gemlog/2022-01-04_Formatting_Gemtext_for_Gopher.gmi
Well that is always nice to hear. 😉
Yesterday I sent for a cycle. Two hours and five minutes of unicycling through a ton of snow, using a 24”x4” wheel 115mm cranks. Total distance was 22.4km (13.9mi) with 395m (1296ft) elevation, at -5°C (23°F).
I did this exact route back in March last year, when there was no snow and I was 49 minutes faster. The snow is great fun but it is also amazing at zapping energy trying to cycle through it for long periods of time.
This time, I was completely overwhelmed by the end. I was trying to work out if I could continue or if I should just collapse in a heap and let the snow blow over me.
Some thoughts on unicycling in snow (with pictures)
Another simple thing that I like are hour glasses. I own a few. They were particularly great when explaining to my kids how long something was (in terms of time). For example I would flip one exactly one hour before their bed time, and then explain that when it finished it would be time to go to sleep. This is particularly useful in Norway, where in the summer it stays bright for a long time. A ten minute one is also useful when saying how much more "screentime" they have left or when preparing them for how long until "we leave for X".
While the kids have largely outgrown the need for this type of visual explanation of time, my youngest often still talks about stuff in terms of how many "big hour glasses", rather than just hours. 😆 Anyway, if you have small kids I recommend them. They are both simple and "easy to use". Also handy for adults who want to time things (e.g. cooking) without the annoying ring. Just remember to look at them (and flip them) from time to time. Well… unless you like burnt stuff!
[✍ 15:12: Just an extra tip] If you do buy one, do not buy something overly cheap and double check that is close to the rated duration (if not your should probably return it). I do have one "10 minute" hour glass that is actually around 7½ minutes. A little variation is too be expected (none are super precise) but that IMHO is too much.
Listen to "ew", they get it! 😉
While unicycles are not my fit, I generally agree. And I would add
"Why do I use cash (rather than some electronic wonder?)"
Because it's simple. Yes, of course, cash is not /always/ an option in real life.
[…]
unicycle -- don't miss this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnVjkE87FDY
That will be Brian Kidd, a.k.a "The Unipiper". I have had a few interactions with him on Twitter before (we also follow each other there). Cool guy!
While I do not have a Youtube account, there are a couple of "fun" videos of me on Youtube. Perhaps not as exciting as those from The Unipiper, though 🤔
Harestua - Oslo with Erlend Loe & UniMyra
Ruari's ride through Grünerløkka, with UniMyra
An interesting find when looking at Antenna. A post about Delta chat (email-based chat application). I had never heard of this before but serveral years back I proposed pretty much the exact same idea for Vivaldi's Mail client. We have not implemented it (yet… though I am still hopeful). I am happy to see such an application arrive and also a little sad that we still haven't done something like this yet ourselves.
Corrected: Delta Chat Tips - kwiecie (benk) [✍ 15:21: original post deleted]
Delta Chat (email-based chat application)
Still having really nice interactions on Gemini space. Most recently with emails from James Tomasino and Sandra Snan
Ok, I am a bit late to the party but Happy New Year to anyone who might stumble across this journal and read this. 😉
⁂