💾 Archived View for carcosa.net › journal › commonplace-book › 2020 › 09.gmi captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:40:00. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

⬅️ Previous capture (2020-10-31)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Archived entries for September, 2020

2020-09-24

Stylesheet for text.npr.org

I wrote a little stylesheet in Stylus for text.npr.org. It is mostly just a basic typography reset.

body
{
    max-width: 40em;
    text-align: justify;
    margin: auto;
    color: black;
    background-color: #EFEFEF;
}
body > p:nth-child(4) {
    font-size: 1.4em;
    font-weight: bold;
}

Stylus

text.npr.org

2020-09-20

Gemini over dialup?

I wonder how Gemini does over a 56k dialup modem. Not, like, dialed into a Unix box with a fast internet connection and serving as a terminal (that would be fast), but with a 56k SLIP/PPP connection. Anyone have a reasonable setup for trying this?

(I'm also interested in 14.4k, because it doesn't require as good a telephone circuit...)

(And also in what the minimum CPU to handle the TLS is. Could a 486 do it, if you ported a recent-enough SSL library to it?)

2020-09-18

Interesting behavior from my local newspaper website

Here's some interesting behavior from my local newspaper website. I'm used to, by now, websites that are hot garbage in a text-mode browser, or worse, that don't include any content on them except the JavaScript needed to load text from their storage API (an egregious re-invention of the web browser). But my local newspaper is doing something even more hostile. When I try to connect to it with Lynx or w3m, *it never sends a response*. It works fine in Firefox both on desktop and mobile. In NetSurf on my wee eeePC which isn't comfortable running Firefox with any other programs, it loads a brutalist version of the front page, but articles hang forever without loading.

Some day when I have more sporks, I need to look into this with openssl s_client.

Reading

Reading a book that was recommended to me about lesbian necromancers in space. I'm quite enjoying it.

Writing thought

One thought I had when writing this year's ROOPHLOCH entry was that I'm not really writing in my blog anymore. I did the ROOPHLOCH entry in my blog only because it and my gopher log are generated from the same sources, and it's the first thing I had published there in a while. I'm writing mainly for my Gemini capsule. About as often as I was writing for my blog, maybe a bit more if you consider this commonplace book.

Maybe I should go back and see if anything I've published here meets the criteria for my blog – not too personal, general interest.

This year's ROOPHLOCH entry

XFCE terminal theme

This is the theme I'm using in XFCE terminal under i3 on my eeePC as a full-screen terminal.

[Configuration]
FontName=DEC Terminal Modern 12
[...]
CellHeightScale=1.200000
ColorPalette=rgb(3,64,0);rgb(11,136,0);rgb(11,136,0);rgb(11,136,0);rgb(11,136,0);rgb(11,136,0);rgb(11,136,0);rgb(11,136,0);rgb(11,255,0);rgb(11,255,0);rgb(11,255,0);rgb(11,255,0);rgb(11,255,0);rgb(11,255,0);rgb(11,255,0);rgb(11,255,0)
ColorCursor=#0BFF00
ScrollingBar=TERMINAL_SCROLLBAR_NONE
ColorCursorUseDefault=FALSE
TextBlinkMode=TERMINAL_TEXT_BLINK_MODE_FOCUSED
ColorForeground=#0BFF00
ColorBackground=#022B00

It's pretty nice. TERM environment is set to xterm-color (not xterm-256color), so the different colors get mapped to two shades of green, plus bold/regular. If everything is done right, and tmux doesn't decide to mess with the TERM settings, pretty much every console application that expects to use colors works correctly in monochrome, and it looks like a classic monochrome CRT terminal.

2020-09-11

Too much mousing.

The nature of $DAYJOB has me using the mouse a lot over the last couple of weeks, and the expected result, that I have RSI, has come to pass. I need someone to buy me a TEX Electronics Shinobi keyboard so I can do non-Unix work without a mouse.

Shinobi Keyboard

Re: Missing the mountains (acdw)

gemini://gemlog.blue/users/acdw/1599694957.gmi

I've got to say, I know what you mean. I'm from East Tennessee, and grew up camping and hiking there and in western NC and eastern KY, but I've been living in the Deep South since 1995. There's beauty here, but I miss rhododendron hells. I miss rock formations and hemlock rainforest. I miss the deciduous trees changing color; I miss seasons, really. I don't love the outdoors as much as I used to, and I wonder how much of that is living here...

2020-09-03

Oops, meh.

I usually bring the eeePC with me to wait while my eldest swims. Today I plugged it in an hour before swimming, which is good, because little did I know, but the battery had run down completely while sleeping unused the last few days. I meant to fix a very small bug in Germinal — if it is given a URL containing a hostname but no path (e.g. gemini://carcosa.net), it returns a 51 Not Found, rather than a redirect to /. Unfortunately, that hour of charging was not enough to get the netbook booted, running Emacs, running SLIME, and doing more than a few minutes of debugging. I could have pushed it, but decided not to.

So now I'm updating my gemlog on my phone, and wondering what time CAPCOM updates.

Herpetology

The gecko has been joined by a garter snake. Not in the same terrarium; the gek is smol enough for the snek to eat.