💾 Archived View for ruario.flounder.online › journal-2022-09.gmi captured on 2023-04-19 at 22:55:01. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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The following is a 'stream of consciousness' (micro *log style).
MAAMA Monopolies
Where magma stands for: Meta-Apple-Google-Microsoft-Amazon.
Fun… but if you are going to use Facebook's parent company name (Meta), surely you should do the same for Google (Alphabet) and thus it becomes: maama
ℹ or any other combination you like that includes three 'a's and two 'm's.
Re: mktemp Isn’t POSIX
Ok, today I learned something. Thanks dj-chase, I have made this mistake numerous times it seems. I shall now sneak off and go and update a bunch of scripts! 😉
@freezr You messed up your catgirl - IRC client link (§ 2022-09-14 - Morning). It currently reads
=> https://git.causal.agency/catgirl/about/https://git.causal.agency/catgirl/about/ catgirl - IRC client
but should read
=> https://git.causal.agency/catgirl/about/ catgirl - IRC client
ROOPHLOCH - Grefsenkollen 20220914 09:44
Alternatively if you want to view the original and not the transcribed version.
ROOPHLOCH - Grefsenkollen 20220914 09:44 [Image]
I wrote up a little post that covers the speed thing in a bit more detail.
Using a unicycle to do a bicycle's job
Faster today, 18.2km/h (11.3mph). 😉
Morning commute to work (Strava)
Today I used the 26 inch wheel unicycle for my commute to the office. Since I joined Strava a couple of years back, my stats tell me this has been my most popular 'cycle.
This year I have used it far less, perhaps only a handful of times. Nonetheless, given my familiarity with it I am pretty fast, despite its relatively diminutive size and single speed gearing at a one to one ratio (with no coasting on the downhills). My average speed in to work was 17.6km/h (10.9mph) over roughly 5km (3.1 miles). A fair bit off my best times but pretty satisfying given relatively little effort.
Penny 'splaining
Among my collection of unusual cycles I have a penny farthing. I bought it after spending a few years thinking about the idea and talking to those around me about potentially buying one (to my wife's horror). During that time I obviously read all I could about them. How they came to be, the advantages and disadvantages. Eventually I decided I would buy one, despite the significant expense and after the person who made it being very clear in potential draw backs (he should get an award for truth in advertising). I have now owned and ridden it for more than two years on a very regular basis (I frequently use it for commuting).
Today I got a rely from an old posting I made on the Fediverse. That post links to an article from a local newspaper that wrote about the fact that I regularly ride a penny around Oslo, along with other 'weird' cycles. There is also a picture of me riding the penny. The reply I received read as follows,
@ruari Penny Farthings are really dangerous, if you power break and go over head.
How this gentlemen thought I might not have discovered the potential dangers of penny farthings, during my years or reading about them, discussing with concerned friends and family, plus my time actually riding them, I don't know. 🤷🏼
My fediverse post with pictures
@nytpu great price but I am not sure I could find a good use case
nytpu’s flight log [§ 2022-09-09 12:11 — 6.283185.xyz]
It seems that @freezr got their P.E.B.C.A.K. journal up and running. Rather fittingly however (given the subject matter) the announcement linked to the wrong URL. 🤪
Anyway, good to see @freezr. I will follow it using Lagrange's "Subscribe to page" feature that monitors for new headings.
Announcement of the P.E.B.C.A.K. journal On Station
P.E.B.C.A.K. journal: correct link 😉
Lagrange is a desktop GUI client
ℹ Previous comments to @freezr here on this journal § 2022-09-06 (@21:42 +0200, @23:24 +0200)
The Queen is dead, eh? Hmm…
The passport renewal process for Ireland is so much better than Norway. For Ireland I can do everything online from home and submit a photo taken with a smartphone (or any decent digital camera). It is 2022. This is how it should be!
Finally picked up the cargo bike after it being out of action for a few weeks (unexplained noises meant that I felt it should be serviced). We had some issues finding a time to get it looked at because of work (abroad), holidays and the bike shop we used being booked up, so we only got it in for servicing the other day.
Once again, the unicycle was the perfect way to pick it up. Cycle the unicycle to the bike shop, put the unicycle inside the cargo bike, cycle back. 👍
Hmm… reading the rules again, I spot another issue
[…] make a phlog post between September 1st and September 30th (inclusive, in your local time zone), while being outside of any permanent man-made shelter and without plugging a computing device into a wall for power or internet […]
I was inside a building. Maybe this attempt was destined for failure 😉 Oh well, I have a new, better plan which should comply with the rules properly.
So I attempted ROOPHLOCH and failed. Basically I was sitting at a public swimming pool, waiting for my youngest to finish their course and it occurred to me that perhaps I could do the challenge then and there. After all I was carrying a basic feature phone, which on the one hand provided some way for me to type up a post and on the other hand was offline from the perspective of providing a generalised internet connection. So I formulated a plan of doing the post as multiple SMS messaged and sending them to text to email service I use. That would provide a way to get the text I typed off the device. Sure, I would have to manually copy and paste it into an editor from there and upload as normal but I figured that was still within the spirit of the concept, seeing as I would have composed my text offline in an unusual location. Plus it would give me a way to use my remaining time, while I waited from my little one. I didn't bring a book.
As plans go, not too bad so far. Sure the typing was slow but part of the experience is to try something different and this was by far the most text I had attempted to enter via a numeric keyboard in one go (at least since I was a lot younger). I have predictive text on this device but still, it is not quick. Interestingly, I also caught one of the other dads watching me (looking up from his smartphone), perhaps wondering what all the clicking was about.
So I basically I did write something and while it was no great work of art… it was… umm… something! 😉 But then, technical problems. Rather than send the texts to myself in one go, I wrote as much as I could, drafted and then wrote more. I was using a Nokia 225 4G (2020). This phone will allow you to compose 6 SMS entries worth of writing in one go (presumably 960 characters or there about) and then refuse to allow you to input more unless you either send or draft. I choose draft. That was a mistake. While you can seemingly compose and send 6 in one go, you can only draft (save) 3. This is not obvious when you do it and you only find this out when you go back to look again, and then discover half your text is missing. 😔 This is likely a bug/oversight that few people encounter as who really types this much on such a phone these days. Nonetheless it is data loss and I guess I will try and see if I can log a bug with Nokia.
After this failure I did still considered if I could still somehow use the bits of it I had but in the end I decided it just didn't really make sense. So… well… I gave up for now. I might however try again with a new idea before the month is out.
@slondr What time machine? 😜
Your post is today's date. What did you expect?
For others reading this who want context:
slondrlog: The Antenna Time Machine
§ 2022-09-05 @08:13 +0200—Re: The Antenna Time Machine…
@freezr Here is an example, basic shell script to create a suitable Antenna feed.gmi (like @ew0k suggests) when using the microlog formatting I have here. Adjust as you see fit or if your formatting is very different.
![ROOPHLOCH - Grefsenkollen 20220914 09:44 [Image]](gopher://sdf.org/I/users/r0/images/IMG_0689.jpg){kind=link}
#!/bin/sh -eu
JNAME="ruario"
JFILE="journal.gmi"
JFEED="feed.gmi"
JSTART="$(grep -m1 '^## ' "$JFILE" | cut -d' ' -f2)"
JTIME="$(grep -m1 '^### ' "$JFILE" | cut -d' ' -f2-)"
JTITLE="$(grep -m1 -A2 '^### ' "$JFILE" | grep -Em1 '^[[:alnum:]\>=@\'\"~]' | sed -E 's/^=>[[:blank:]]*[^[:blank:]]+[[:blank:]]+//' | cut -c 1-49 | sed 's/$/…/')"
cat <<EOF> "$JFEED"
# $JNAME
=> $JFILE $JSTART @${JTIME}—$JTITLE
EOF
echo "Created: $JFEED"
Re: how can I pass a micro-log style to Antenna?
I checked out Cosmos a little while ago and happened noticed a link to this very page. 😉
@freezr writes,
Hi Geminauts, how can I pass a micro-log style to Antenna?
I'd like to do something like him:
gemini://ruario.flounder.online/journal.gmi
But I will write about PEBCAK... 😅
Well… @freezr to answer your question. You will notice at the top of this page is an Atom feed. It is this that I am submitting to Antenna. As for how I have an Atom feed, I am generating it using a little shell script I wrote. The script is not particularly beautiful or fancy but I am willing to share it. I should also note that it is also very tied to the format I am using here, so you might need to adapt it to your usage if you intend to format things slightly differently.
Alternatively, I first got this idea when I stumbled over @nytpu's flight log. They have something very similar and I basically copied the concept and tweaked it to suit my usage. My Atom feed is a little more complete that @nytpu's, in that it has the entire contents of each of my posts here in the feed (rather than just a title). I do it like this because my host (🐟 flounder!) is also accessible via https. Thus you can actually follow this page with a normal RSS/Atom client. This in turn means that friends of mine who are not on Gemini, could potentially follow what I say here. Well… if they cared (which is unlikely 🤪).
If you do not need that or you find the script ugly, excessive or difficult to adapt to your usage, take a note of what @nytpu says about their feed.
[…] and to all those that claim this is somehow impossible, i maintain this atom feed by hand
Indeed a basic/minimal feed like @nytpu's is pretty easy to write. Run the following to view their raw feed and see the format:
echo gemini://nytpu.com/flightlog/atom.xml |\ openssl s_client -crlf -quiet -connect nytpu.com:1965 -servername nytpu.com 2>/dev/null |\ tail -n+2
Or if both my and @nytpu's solutions seem too complex, I have another for you, provided by @ew0k (Antenna's author and maintainer). Head over to the Antenna about page and scroll down to § FAQ, where it states:
Well, let's say you have a page /microblog.gmi then make another (let's say /feed.gmi) with something like this content:
# Your Name
=> microblog.gmi YYYY-MM-DD Microblog
Update the timestamp when you've added something to /microblog.gmi and submit the URL to /feed.gmi to Antenna.
There you go, nice and simple. I hoped one of these helped! 😉
[✍ 22:04 +0200] Bonus info (that you never asked for): I have another script that takes a copy of this journal, reformats it to be more appropriate for Gopher and mirrors it on my Gopher hole on SDF.
[✍ 22:54 +0200] Oh and I also have another script that allows me to extract the current entry from this page into its own .gmi file, along with making a feed.gmi. This means I could potentially submit to Antenna without worry about adding more entries to my journal and burying the post.
Script to extract the latest entry of my Gemini journal
This page extracted with the above script (very meta!)
Feeling much, much better today.
P.S. Tarquin, if you are still reading this. Thanks for the fix! 👍😉
I feel sick as a dog today. I constantly feel like I am on the verge of vomiting.
Ok, this is just a little test post as a friend is helping me debug something and I need more content.
Hello Tarquin. 😉
Re: The Antenna Time Machine
I'm sitting here, 7:13pm on Sunday, September 4th, looking at a link on Antenna dated to September 5th.
We have a time traveler! I have so many questions.
Update: Wow, I tried posting this for September 7th, and Antenna let me! TIL.
@slondr Antenna has always allowed this. You occasionally see stuff posted that is "from the future", presumably by mistake. Sometimes if it is way in advance and hanging around @ew0k seemingly corrects or removes them [✍ 2022-09-07 07:32 +0200: or perhaps the author does as you can resubmit with a corrected date] but sure, Antenna could be fixed, so that it is not possible. Or maybe it just does not happen enough that we need to worry about it.
To be clear though anything that seems to be 'one day in advance', might not actually be and could indeed be the correct date from the poster's perspective (given local timezones).
[✍ 08:24 +0200] It is funny (to me) that you did this on purpose though. It sort of reminds me of when I did the following. 😆
Can you submit phlogs to Antenna?
Hmm… tempted to take part in ROOPHLOCH (Remote Outdoor Off-grid Phlogging Challenge) because I have a vague idea of how I might do it.
God damn, the Google Play Store is so frustrating at times. The other day I wrote about how fast our (Vivaldi browser's) turn around was for getting out a new build with a critical security fix from upstream. Well to be clear we have a build out for desktop but not Android. Why? … because our build, which was ready at the same time as desktop, is stuck in "review" in the Play Store and hence cannot be made live. This is despite the fact that it has a single fix (for the security issue). A fix I might add that was written by a Google dev and is included in Chrome, which they immediately updated.
If we were not reliant on Google's store we could have had this fix out on Friday night/Sunday morning. Oh and for what it is worth, the last minor update we submitted to Google, took two and a half days to clear "review". What the fuck Google!?
[✍ 16:19 +0200] Finally, the PlayStore review went through and we got the build out.
Minor update(3) for Vivaldi Android Browser 5.4
I did a bit more clean up around here, fixing broken links and stuff. It is amazing how fast stuff degrades or gets out of date.
While I am here I decided to update my 'About' and 'Contact' pages to mention my Mastodon account and also highlight the fact that I now sometimes commute via Halfbike. 😉
Part of the reason for the lack of updates around here is that I started to use Mastodon, following increasing disillusionment with Twitter¹. I think my focus on reading, following new people (plus some I already new) and occasionally even writing a post or two, distracted me from my journal and phlog/gemlog.
Anyway, I am going to try and get back into the swing of things with short posts here on my journal, and hopefully also, longer ones on my phlog and gemlog.
@ruari@velocipederider.com (on the Fediverse)
¹ I still retain both my Twitter accounts but I have removed all my posts, have given up posting and also locked both of them from gaining new followers. I have then now purely to stop someone taking on my nicks and pretending to be me, and also so that I can DM a handful of friends I still have there.
Ok, it has been a while so perhaps I will start updating this again with my thoughts. First step is to remind myself how all of these scripts I wrote to manage everything work again! 😆
⁂