💾 Archived View for ruario.flounder.online › journal.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 02:17:04. 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).
finger ruario@happynetbox.com
🔔 Subscribe [ruari@plan.cat] (ActivityPub)
Ok, that worked. I am home and still alive. I went a bit slow but not a single problem. 😉
I have had a couple of drinks. I need to get home. I have my unicycle but it is icy (plus those drinks I mentioned). Is this a good idea? I guess we'll see!
The stonecutter story that @ew0k is telling would appear to be a variant of the one Andrew Lang tells in "The Crimson Fairy Book", which itself is apparently a variant of a parable by Dutch novelist "Multatuli", and there is some suggestion that this in turn may be based on something older still. Knowing precisely where this story came from is hard, because each version is slightly different. How can you say for sure if it is:
An example being "The Fisherman and His Wife" by the Brothers Grimm which covers much of the same ground, and yet in other ways is quite different. Anyway, from what I understand, "The stonecutter" is probably not Chinese. That said, it also does not matter I guess because it is a good story. 😉
P.S. I considered linking to a Wikipedia article I found that talks about this story and variants, and what the underlying message(s) is/are. However explaining the message and giving a synopsis would be a pretty big spoiler. So if you don't know this story, let @ew0k finish first before looking it up. 🙂
Just want to say Happy Birthday to Ben Brown! Sounds like you got some nice presents, enjoy whatever is left of your day. 😉
finger benbrown@happynetbox.com
So Strava has bought Fatmap. That sounds interesting. I was not familiar with Fatmap but I am curious to see how this pans out. Potentially it allows for some interesting things. However, my bigger worry though is that Strava itself gets bought by one of the big tech players and then I'll have to delete everything and abandon it.
One of the things that appeals to me about Strava is that it is (currently) independent and using a Freemium model (yes I pay), rather than going the adverts route and selling private/personal data. Yes they do sell anonymised, collective data and I am Ok with that.
They are pretty dominant in their social media, sports niche however and as one of my colleagues pointed out the body-metric market is probably quite lucrative for big tech. It is a lot of data they could combine with other sources. Eventually I see Facebook, Google or Apple looking at them and thinking, we should just buy this.
Strava acquires Fatmap, a 3D mapping platform for the great outdoors [TechCrunch]
Hmm… Chrome released with 6 security fixes. So we'll need an update to Vivaldi stable tomorrow as well no doubt
P.S. Just waiting for the cron job on my browser tracking bot to kick in then these will update
finger browserversion@happynetbox.com
@browserversiontracker@vivaldi.net
If you prefer you can access that with your favourite Gopher client because the Finger and Gopher protocols are essentially the same. 😉
Web Browser Version Tracker [via Gopher]
Pleased to note that my finger based, (desktop) web browser version tracker works. Yesterday Safari 16.3 was released and this automatically updated. 😉
finger browserversion@happynetbox.com
My colleague Ari wants to film a little this week (with me in the video) so asked that I tidy up (my hair and beard) so as to be a little more presentable. 😆
I did but the cycle to work today was coooold! Still, it was about time anyway. I looked like an old hermit.
P.S. In follow up to my Antenna prank yesterday (§ 2023-01-22 09:01 +0100) I got one more reply from @ew0k
Reply from @tinyrabbit@floss.social (@ew0k)
You don't have to worry about annoying me with these little pranks :D It's just harmless silliness
P.S. If you want to read more for context, see the previous posts—or 'Archive' link if you are reading from finger—immediately below.
Well @ew0k replied first with the joy emoji and then the following,
It's been a year since I decided to add inverse rules to the blocklist (i.e. block anything that *doesn't* match a specific pattern). I'll see if I can get to it some time soon
As I replied back to him, I was very nervous about doing it again, even worrying about getting banned but anniversaries (of silly ideas) do appeal to me. Nonetheless, it'll take me another year+ to build up the nerve again, so he has loads of time! 😉
Well… it worked! If you look at Antenna right now, my link is there
I hope that @ew0k isn't annoyed and still takes this in the spirit of silliness. I waited a year so as not to overdo it. I also pinged him on the fedi immediately afterwards.
Slightly trickier though this time. I am taking a bigger risk of getting myself banned. Previously I was unsure if it was allowed but this time I knew it was not since he did say last year.
Anyway, I've decided that I only want gemini links on Antenna.
🤷
So it has been a whole year to the day since last time. I hope @ew0k will forgive me a little finger link to this on Antenna. 😆
Here is some context for those that wonder what this is all about.
Can you submit phlogs to Antenna?
I am genuinely curious if this will work or if @ew0k is one step ahead of me with this '.plan'?
My youngest lost a tooth today, so it is tooth fairy time tonight! 😉
One year ago I did a little trick, where I posted a Gopher link to the Gemini aggregator "Antenna". The maintainer @ew0k was really good spirited about it,
I laughed out loud when I saw it :D
But also later added,
Anyway, I've decided that I only want gemini links on Antenna. For now there's no functionality for ensuring this in the Antenna software, and there are other things I think are more important to add. I'll just settle with blocking additional schemes as and when they show up.
So… It has been a year (tomorrow). Do I submit a finger post? 😉
Can you submit phlogs to Antenna?
Good plan?
Ok earlier I talked about using netcat to fetch information over finger and gave an example like this
echo oslo | nc graph.no 79
Such a trick worked well for a number of finger services (finger.farm, flounder.online, plan.cat, etc.) but interestingly did not work on happynetbox.com, which simply returned,
Nobody lives here. Try finger […]
Initially I assumed this was a bug in the finger server implementation on Ben's server. And then, when perusing the finger RFCs (742, 1288) again today, I spotted it. It is not Ben's server that is wrong it is (arguably) everyone elses.
[…] Send a single "command line", ending with <CRLF>. […]
[…] Any data transferred MUST be in ASCII format, with no parity, and with lines ending in CRLF […]
So I reconstructed that netcat example like so:
printf 'benbrown\r\n' | nc happynetbox.com 79
Sure, enough. I got the intended result! 😉
I used Ben Brown's awesome finger service, Happy Net Box to make the information from my two Fediverse browser versioning bots (@vivaldiversiontracker@vivaldi.net and @browserversiontracker@vivaldi.net) available over the finger protocol.
How does that work? Open a terminal and type the following for Vivaldi versions:
finger vivaldiversion@happynetbox.com
or for (desktop) stable versions of various browsers:
finger browserversion@happynetbox.com
Happy Net Box [finger hosting]
Vivaldi Version Tracker [Fedi]
Browser Version Tracker [Fedi]
Hmm… you can also use curl's Gopher support to get finger information with a bit of manipulation and it is even easier than the telnet:// hack I did before (§ 2023-01-19 20:54 +0100)
curl gopher://plan.cat:79/0ruari
I never went cycling, in part because I felt so tired today and yet instead of going to bed here I am sitting in front of my computer clicking around and wasting time.
It is 9:74 (decimal). That is it, I am going to bed!
The finger protocol support really is universal.
On Windows and macOS the finger command is already installed by default. Just fire up a terminal and you are good to go. It is also present on many (most?) Linux distros in the default setup and even when that isn't true, it's typically a simple install command away. But actually, you may not even need to install it, since it is such a basic protocol it is easily simulated with other common networking tools. So you could for example just use netcat like so
$ echo ruari | nc plan.cat 79
Or telnet
$ (echo ruari; cat -) | telnet plan.cat 79
In addition, despite the fact that I said just the other day that curl does not support the finger protocol (§ 2023-01-10 20:22 +0100), that does not mean you can't actually use it to get information over finger! 😉
Just use it's telnet support as a workaround, like so
$ echo ruari | curl telnet://plan.cat:79
Finally, if you happen to have the command line browser Lynx installed, this can also handle the finger protocol, either like so
$ lynx finger://ruari@plan.cat
Or if you prefer
$ lynx finger://plan.cat/ruari
And what about mobile, you might ask? Ok, perhaps that one is more tricky but you could always install Lagrange! 😉
Lagrange (also Gemini and Gopher)
P.S. Let me know if I missed anything!
I am in two minds about going out for a ride.
Pluses
Minuses
Feeling much better now for those who asked. 😉
Urggh… not feeling great today. I have a stomach ache and cannot focus. If this does not resolve itself soon I will likely achieve nothing useful today.
Slowly seeing some light at the end of the tunnel with my decimal watch experiment, in that I am very gradually recalling more of my key times throughout the day in their decimal equivalents. Not all but slowly more.
On the other hand when measuring between times I can't help but think in terms of normal minutes and translating decimal minutes back. It is really impressive how engrained our concept of time is. I totally get why decimal time never caught on.
In addition, for its flaws our current time system is "good enough" and was already universal across all of Europe and beyond at the point when the French tried to introduce decimal time. For the other metric measurements, you had a system that was not good enough e.g. even in France there were multiple measurements just for liquids alone, so that you measured wine differently from milk, and these measurements were not universal across regions and countries. Litres would therefore be a truly massive improvement. The fact that measurements are also related to each other, so that 1 litre is 1 kilogram is makes it even better still.
Another factor I speculate may have played a role is the invested cost in the measurement device. Getting people to replace expensive clocks to support a new system would surely have been a lot harder than getting a new bucket with different markings.
So here is a little experiment. I mainly write these journal entries for myself. Just a way to jot down thoughts and to give me something to copy elsewhere or reference later. When I want to interact with people or get feedback I am more likely to use of my Mastodon accounts.
@ruari@velocipederider.com (cycling)
@ruario@vivaldi.net (work/tech)
@ruario@oulipo.social (fun with language)
However, on the other hand, it is possible for others to read this journal and indeed I now publish it in multiple places, over gemini, gopher, the web, an atom feed, the finger protocol and using ActivityPub (so it is part of the Fediverse). This leads me to wonder, perhaps someone besides me IS reading this?
If you are reading this, do me a favour and contact me just to satisfy my curiosity. If you can't be bothered or just don't want to don't worry, it will not stop me updating it. Since as I said, I am really the only intended target anyway, despite also being the author. 😆
Cycling to work today was hard. I am currently using my 26 inch wheeled unicycle with a 3 inch tyre and longer cranks. As mentioned previously I have the tyre at 15 PSI (1 bar), which is pretty low for me and for this tyre (it is actually the manufacturer's lowest recommended pressure). This is to help with the current situation on the roads. A lower pressure tyre grips better and rides over bumps more easily, and with snow and ice about, that is pretty nice. I certainly feel the differences. Not quite like a true fat tyre (which are typically considered to be 4+ inches) but certainly some of that advantage.
But on the flip side running at lower pressures vastly increases rolling resistance, which is already lowered by the less than ideal conditions. In addition, at certain pressures, handling can get quite annoying with the unicycle wanting to turn when it should not or not turn when it should. Camber (the cross-sectional curvature of the road to help with drainage) can also be more annoying with wide tyres running at lower pressure, causing you to constantly have to lean hard on one side to accomodate the turning effect. On a bike you would hardly notice this, on a unicycle it can drain a lot of the fun.
Despite all this, it is probably the right call. There is potentially a lot of snow today and while tiring this setup will handle it better than the other unicycle I have been using this winter (a highly studded, 29 inch wheeled unicycle with a narrower tyre and shorter cranks more suited to ice). In any case, at least it is a good work out! 😉
I cycled up Grefsenkollen this evening. It is an 11km round trip with 257m of elevation gain. With that, snow on the ground and my tyre at 15 PSI (1 bar) it was a lot of work. I did it because it's been a long time and also, to take me back to the top of the leaderboard on my Nordic unicyclists group on Strava. 😉
Enhjulssykkel (enhjuling, ethjulet cykel) Skandinavia [Strava]
Ok, after thinking some more I decided to move my finger hosting to plan.cat. This has a couple of benefits
To see the latest entry of this journal you can now issue
finger ruari@plan.cat
Alternatively you can subscribe on the fediverse via https://plan.cat/~ruari or @ruari@plan.cat
Still taking longer than expected to get used to this decimal watch. More often than not, rather than getting a feel for the new times I am still just translating back to normal time to work out where I am in the day.
Ok, I just ordered six copies of James Hoffman's book "How to make the best coffee at home". Why… well… I wanted one for myself, then thought of a colleague who might want one, then thought of another colleague who might want one… then thought of another colleague who might want one… and so on.
So I ordered six but if I am honest, I am now thinking I should have ordered seven! 😆
Today on my way to work I realised that my phone was out of battery as I left for the office. As I have recently started to log all my rides on Strava again (§ 2023-01-05 12:39 +0100) this was slightly annoying, since I normally use my phone as a GPS tracking device. Previously on occasions such as this I simply note the time and log the entry manually.
Manually creating a Strava entry
Doing that requires a watch of course and while I always wear one, the one I am using right now is 1. decimal and 2. non very precise! 😉
Nonetheless, I noted the time as best I could at the start (3:77) and end (3:95). I calculate that to be around 26 (normal) minutes, which honestly feels about right given the conditions (very icy) and based on previous rides of this route. I doubt it was entirely correct but since I am unlikely to break any records in this weather… good enough. 😆
Hi to @matias@oslo.town and whoever out in the wider world is actually reading this! 😆
@ruari@velocipederider.com Ohh, nice 😁 I'll add checking this to my morning routine.
Just doing my thing and helping people discover the power of `finger @graph.no` on the fediverse. 😉
Post about checking the weather
I stayed awake until almost 1AM and then struggled to fall asleep. Then my youngest woke in the middle of the night and I had to try again to fall asleep. Today is going to be seriously tiring.
Might be able to use `-o Apt::Get::Assume-Yes=true` with apt install to avoid questions.
Just some notes for myself really as I have to write a help page later explaining how to install Vivaldi for Linux from the command line. I figured I would write them here so I can easily find them again.
After downloading a suitable package for your distro, you can use the following commands to install a Vivaldi Linux package directly from the terminal (where 'vivaldi*' equals the name of the Vivaldi install package)
Ubuntu/Debian based distros:
sudo apt install ./vivaldi*.deb
Fedora based distros:
sudo dnf --nogpgcheck -y install ./vivaldi*.rpm
openSUSE based distros:
sudo zypper --no-gpg-checks --non-interactive install ./vivaldi*.rpm
[The '--no-gpg-checks' command is only needed for the initial install, after which Vivaldi will add its public gpg keys and configure an appropriate repository for updates automatically]
The worst thing I ever did was providing a help page to manually configure the Vivaldi linux deb/rpm repositories. Our packages will setup the repositories for you, correctly. You just install the package and the repository is automatically setup.
So many people who do it by hand have issues latter down the line and it is a pain to constantly fix it when they have chosen to do things the hard way.
The minor update for Vivaldi desktop browser is out and most important of all is that I beat my colleague who is managing the Android release. 😜
Minor update (4) for Vivaldi Desktop Browser 5.6
Ok… kids sorted for the evening, now… umm… back to work. 😔
Testing is basically done for the platforms I have but still waiting for a couple more builds. I think I will have to put this out this evening. 🤷
Ok, I am already killing that. It is a cool service and I can imagine it would work nicely for some people but it is not what I personally want/need.
Testing out plan.cat while I await some Vivaldi test builds. Curious about this ActivityPub integration. For the time being I will mirror the latest entries over on
finger ruario@plan.cat
Really having one of those days where everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. But come hell or high water, we will get this security update out… somehow! 😉
Urgghh… internal server issues. We'll get them fixed but it is going to be a long day. I can feel it!
Ok, a security update for Chromium came out yesterday so it will be a minor update for Vivaldi stable today.
Damn… I should really be sleeping!
Some other interesting finger related discoveries today.
Additional finger hosting providers (see also Happy Net, mentioned @11:57 +0100 below)
Browsers that support finger
Lagrange (also Gemini and Gopher)
Kristall (also Gemini and Gopher)
A cool finger related service is graph.no, which will tell you the weather. For a list of options issue:
finger @graph.no
But perhaps my biggest surprise thus far is that `curl` does not support finger! WTF!? 😆
On the one hand it is funny that people liked my fediverse post on this and even boosted it but on the other hand… maybe it is not so silly after all! 😆
Fediverse post annoucing that this journal is now also available over finger
I knocked up a quick script to extract the most recent day's worth of entries from this journal and convert them to a format suitable for `finger`. So it should now be possible to get this post over finger like so:
finger ruario@flounder.online
Why? Well I heard finger is making a comeback. 😉
We're bringin' finger back! (solderpunk)
Another nice bonus is because it is an old, simple protocol, Windows, macOS and Linux all have terminal `finger` clients built in or readily available. Just fire up a terminal and try it!
Oh and if you don't want to setup a finger server but want finger hosting, there are basic services like
Or of course you could use Flounder 🐟 who I use for hosting my gemini space.
I've started to recall more of the decimal times I need to remember throughout the day. Nonetheless, not all of them. To give myself a little assistance, I wrote out many (all?) of my key times throughout the day in decimal format and stuck a note on the fridge. I didn't really expect to need to do this and figured it would happen organically (and perhaps it would have done) but why not speed up the process?
I was also struck by how many it was. I thought I only cared about 5-6 times throughout the day but once I added key times from all the days of the week it came to 15, and no doubt I am missing some. That was so much more to remember than I expected. However, if I managed to recall these in traditional time from memory, no doubt I learn them again in decimal. 😉
Cool, Alex fixed finger!
I have pinged Alex about it directly:
Mastodon message to @aw@merveilles.town about the finger issue mentioned below
Anyone else having problems using finger on flounder accounts?
I simply get the following:
$ finger ruario@flounder.online [flounder.online] finger: connect: Connection refused
It should work according to Flounder's "Tips and Tricks"
Where it states,
Flounder supports the finger protocol. Edit the plaintext file called ".plan" and it will be served at (yourname@flounder.online)
I do have a .plan file as you can see here, over Gemini:
I was looking at Evenfire's posts and stumbled over these:
Living without a clock - day 3
I wonder if this is where I will eventually end up with my various watch experiments. 😉
One interesting thing did happen today related to using the decimal watch. I was out with one of my kids while my wife was with the other. I knew that they would be going swimming at 6:45 (decimal) or 15:30 (3:30PM). At some point while out I looked at my watch and saw by chance that it was 6:45. To double check that I had recalled the correct time I checked the clock on my phone and it stated 14:50 (2:50PM), which threw me. I looked at the decimal watch again and after a bit of rough mental arithmetic I was certain that there was no way it could be showing a time that was equivalent to 14:50. I worried the watch was running fast but it seemed incredibly unlikely it could be running that fast when it was accurate earlier in the day, so I asked my other kid (the one with me) what the time was and they confirmed that it was 15:30. This meant of course that my phone was running VERY slow, which has never happened before and therefore also seemed unlikely. Nonetheless I rebooted the phone and sure enough, it then displayed the correct time. So it seems my watch was actually the more accurate. 🤷🏼
Just an update on the decimal watch and my little decimal time experiment. A few of the times are slowly starting to make sense to me and I can actually recall them, specially those for waking, lunch, end of working day and bed. The others I just find myself forgetting and have to frequently remind myself what they are.
I think there are two reasons for this:
Nonetheless I do look at the watch often and see my progression through the day and feel it tells me something. However an interesting observation is that I tend to compare where I am to the nearest quarter of the day (06:00 [6AM], 12:00 [12PM], 18:00 [6PM], 24:00 [12AM]) perhaps in part as these map easily to times (and locations on the clock face) in decimal (2:50 [half past two], 5, 7:50 [half past seven], 10).
I also still find myself doing rough conversions to and from those locations as outlined previously (§ 2023-01-02 @19:03 +0100), to translate the current decimal time into the traditional equivalent.
This is going to take a lot longer than I initially expected!
Re: Gemini mentions
Ok, I will not spend a lot of time on this. I just want to say I agree with Sandra. The Gemini mentions proposal just feels like another stepping stone to something overly complex and the whole beauty of Gemini was simplicity. 🤷🏼
In which I slag on the Gemini mentions proposal for half an hour
I reposted "Using a unicycle to do a bicycle's job" on Strava and Mastodon. Unsurprisingly it got a lot more "engagement" on Strava than here or Mastodon. I guess in hindsight that was obvious given the topic. Nonetheless I sometimes struggle to understand how I should divide my personality and what I should post where.
Using a unicycle to do a bicycle's job
I was looking at my old posts and realised that this wasn't the first time I let myself get a bit burnt out with Strava.
Chatted with one of my favourite colleagues a short while ago. She is going through some difficult stuff of late. I am not a praying man (I am an atheist) but if I did pray, I would pray for her. A wonderful and impressive young woman and she does not deserve the shit she has had to deal with of late.
For a while now I have been absent from Strava. I do like Strava but sometimes it can be a little all consuming. Like all social media you can feel pressure to do things based on the activity of others in your feed to get "kudos" (similar to likes). On Strava this is both good and bad. Obviously more exercise is healthy and it is great to get out there and be active. On the other hand it is easy (for me) to get carried away and there are other things that are also important in life.
An additional hassle (for me) when using Strava is that I do not carry a smartphone or smart watch (for privacy and other reasons [e.g. distractions]). I do have a KaiOS feature phone with a health app that can record GPS information and sync to Strava but the phone is buggy, slow and annoying (all KaiOS devices are actually), so I sort of hate having to use it. Indeed I pretty much only use this phone because it can do syncing. Additionally after I upload an activity I usually have to do a lot of manual work to tweak the meta data of my activities, e.g. any photos I took would need to be manually edited/tweaked and uploaded. I also customise all the titles to show what cycle I used 90%+ of my activities are unsupported by Strava directly (e.g. I do a lot of unicycling and this is not a valid activity type).
Anyway, for a while it all got a bit much and I stopped uploading activities. I was still active but I just did not upload anything.
Recently however (perhaps because of the New Year) I have decided to start uploading again and try and find a new/healthier balance.
Let's see how this pans out. 😉
It is a little slow going getting used to this decimal watch—granted it is still early in my usage of this. I keep tripping myself up on expectations from traditional time keeping, e.g. I often interpret the half hour markers as 30, rather than 50 or when it is 10 mins to the hour I assume 50, rather than 90.
I also find myself doing quite a lot of quick (rough) calculations back to traditional time, since I still lack the frame of reference for decimal time. An example of quick calculations being that 1 decime (10 decimal minutes) is pretty close to 15 traditional minutes (actually 14.4). Thus you can do things like see two decime markers as roughly half a (traditional) hour or four as one (traditional) hour.
I would sometimes prefer not do this and to instead just accept and get a feel for decimal time directly but on the other hand I am largely ok with it. I guess you cannot totally get around this. I am always going to need to do some calculations to work with this in a world run on another system of time. Similarly I realise I will slowly have to memorise many equivalents to common times throughout my day, e.g. in Norway it is common to have lunch at 11:30 which would round to roughly 4:80 in decimal time. Fun fact, the end of the working day in Norway is traditionally 16:00 (4PM), which maps to 6:66. Or thought of another way, when the day is over, you get to be evil. 😆
On the plus side, part of the joy of this is to make me think. Learning to tell and work with time is something most people do once and then it becomes second nature.
One of the reasons I enjoyed my binary watches was because they forced me to think differently about numbers and time and learn and notice new patterns. This is similar in some aspects. Indeed, I sort of suspect that thinking about time in new ways gives you a better understanding all around, much like learning a new language gives you insight into your mother tongue.
My earlier post about buying and using a decimal watch
⁂