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New experimental Gemini server - to complement HTTP and Gopher....

By David Norris - Sunday 17th September, 2023

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, then for every victory gained you will also

suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."

Sun Tzu, Chinese military strategist and philosopher

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WARNING: I am going to teach for a period at Yancheng Institute

of Technology in Yancheng, Jiangsu Province, China from around

November 25th to December 17th. Timetable for online students

to be released later.The most likely airport is Shanghai

Pudong International, PVG.

Please note: Students should continue to schedule classes

until further notice - please check back regarding travel

details and the contingency plan. Please note that whe whole of

China is in a single timezone; Beijing time is UTC+8. I

anticipate that there will be limited avaibability for English

language students in Europe, Asia and Africa during this period;

unfortunately, if you are in Latin America the only availability

during the period is likely to be limited and at weekends.

Whereas I will aim to minimise disruption for English language

students, some rescheduling and a limited schedule are

unavoidable. be aware that I am currently working on a plan to

go on to either Gambia or Nigeria thereafter; the respective

timezones are UTC/UTC+1. So - availability will return to nearer

normal. Please see here for details of my forthcoming visit to

China - and how it affects your scheduling!!!! Any questions or

issues - please contact me at the earliest oportunity.

***See here for contingency plan for online students - VIP***

[Can Gemini (or Gopher) display images? Yes, of course! But not inline. It saves bandwidth for those paying by the MB, a large part of why I use them! Click on the link to display.]

One thing I like about Gemini is that is simple and there is no need to render the file to another format, because it is just plain text and is easy to work with. I also like Gopher

for this reason - ***MUCH*** quicker and less error prone than writing HTML! Oh, and those not in the know can only dream about an online experience free of all the obnoxious

crap we are ***only too used to*** in the world of HTTP(S) - cookies (and being continually nagged to either accept them or change settings for every single site we visit!!!), pop-ups

getting in the way of work, incessant user tracking and invasions of our privacy, and being bombarded with autoplaying audio and video which draw the attention of colleagues (and

the boss!) or wake up everyone in the house late at night... the list goes on and on.

Why am I interested in using Gemini (and indeed Gopher) as part of my operations?

The "old web" still exists! It's just drowned in a sea of sites bloated for the purpose of tracking and advertising. What would be nice is a no-bloat search engine, which would only

index sites that don't require 25MB of JS and 425 requests to third-party domains to load.

This is what a typical website does today...

1) Get minimal html containing links to javascript package and styling.

2) Make request to get big javascript package.

3) Make request to get relatively small css styling.

4) Load and execute javascript package.

5) Javascript makes api calls to get page content.

6) Get content and populate page.

7) Page content contains links to images and tracking/advertisement scripts.

8) Make requests to get images and tracking/ad scripts.

9) Ad scripts make more requests to get images / gifs / movies, etc.

The majority of the slowness comes from steps 2,4,5,6,8,9. Blocking ads helps steps 8, 9. The fact that people are actually using a dedicated Raspberry PI computer for

the sole sake of ad blocking on their network bears testimony to how bad the nightmare has become. However, steps 2, 4, 5 and 6 are just in-fashion bad development practices.

Looking at the above, it is very clear that the whole process is a prodidgal waste of resources - bandwidth, CPU power, memory, and the battery of the device on which the content

is displayed! An application such as Pi-hole uses DNS filtering to selectively block ads and malicious domains across your entire home network. Cool! The advantages of this

approach are clear: you don’t have to install ad-blocking software on each and every device in your household. Moreover, it only needs to be set up once. The only drawback? Of

course, it only protects you within your own network, not when on mobile data, at work/school/university, hotels etc...

Both Gopher and Gemini both are MUCH more bandwidth efficient than the web for the above reasons. Great for clients in places or on limited contracts or where one pays by

the megabyte, as well as for those for whom privacy is important. Trouble is, the less well informed nowadays have a web browser and little else. There is PLENTY more to the

internet than just the mess which they call the web - for the er, less educated, the web is synonymous with the internet. It isn't! See port numbers and services below...

Gemini uses a markup language. I will experiment using the nano editor in the first instance. This service is under test, please be aware! I welcome any bug or error reports.

Users requiring NFS, AFP or (Only over VPN) Netbios access working with us in future must contact me.

***IMPORTANT NEWS UPDATE - PLEASE READ*** Available in English, French, Italian, Ukranian and Mandarin Chinese.

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