💾 Archived View for wireheadmechanist.com › blog › 24week39.gmi captured on 2024-09-29 at 00:19:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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This is where we pick up. Yeah, I know it's been a while. A lot has happened, and I've worked on a lot since last I updated.
I started with the whole BrainBox thing because I needed a place to put a good bit of my technical information for myself and my workmates. I have nice Ghost instance started, but what really held my fancy was another Gemini capsule. Let's face it. This is all becoming dual purpose, and I have grave concerns about our future and the ability to freely create and share information. That is a good part of why I am proceeding with this stuff that won't make so much money for me at the moment. Nobody gets rich from a BBS, and as it stands, I have two of them to develop now.
You find some really cool shit poking around here in the under layers. I found out that there was a whole radio station from SDF that I somehow had not known existed, as well as an open radio in my backyard, KNON. Here are those links for your perusal:
There is certainly more to the story at my pay job. I lost the manager that I had, and frankly that was bliss. I had not been a fan for years. They put me under an awesome person, and I could feel the winds in my sails once again. But this company punishes any good and noble efforts, so they fired her. They claimed it was a "reorganization" thing.
Now the inmates are tasked with running the asylum to an extent. I just keep myself busy trying to do good and useful things and wait for the beatings to resume.
As far as the world goes, it is now clear that we don't have a useful media anymore, and this is going to become problematic in the forseeable future. I remember as a kid making jokes about Pravda in the Soviet Union, and now all of the bullshit propaganda is here, in our country, and we are doing all of this pain to ourselves. When the wannabe President, current Vice President says that she intends to shut down information sources that are not approved and in keeping with the government directives and oversight (yes, that knothead literally said this) then it's time to gear up for mass civil disobedience.
Fucking hell, I'll get all of Thoreau's work and get it stored on here. It should be mandatory reading. I'm pretty sure it's on Gutenberg.
I'm Welsh, so I have a divine appointment to be an utter asshole when it comes to authority that goes awry and doesn't leave people the hell alone or tell them the truth. We could do with a vast reduction in the Alphabet Boys.
With that, I leave you a noble hymn in its entirety without apology.
Down here on the farm the weather gets messy
Laying around with nothin' to do
When you went away, you took my cow Bessie
I miss her darling, more than I miss you
You took off your leg, your wig and your eye glass
And you shoud've seen the look on my face
I wanted to kiss, I wanted to hug you
But you were scattered all over the place
Where, where, are you tonight?
Why did you leave me here all alone?
I searched the world over,
And thought I found true love.
You met another and
Phht! you were gone.
I know that you loved me, here's my way of knowing
The proofs hanging out right there on the line
When I see the snow and feel the wind blowing
Your nighties hugging them long johns of mine
The noises you made at our supper table
Your habits, my dear, were surely absurd
But how many times do I have to tell you
Soup is a dish to be seen and not heard
Where, oh where, are you tonight?
Why did you leave me here all alone?
I searched the world over,
And thought I found true love.
You met another and
Phht! you were gone.
Remember you phoned me a-sobbin' and cryin'
The dog bit your maw, and drug her around
You said she looked pale and thought she was dying
I said "Don't worry, I'll buy a new hound."
I had six kids and you had eleven
And we had a boy, and they grew like flowers
I wish you'd come back, without you ain't heaven
'Cause your kids and my kids are beatin' up ours
Where, oh where, are you tonight?
Why did you leave me here all alone?
I searched the world over,
And thought I found true love.
You met another and
Phht! you were gone
I searched the world over,
And thought I found true love.
You met another and
Phht! you were gone...
Amen.
If you know the song, then you know. If you don't, research it for some quality entertainment.
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I can come back and whinge because it isn't the next day yet. I still have a Gopher hole to get live, and the primary reason I wasn't thinking about that just yet was that I didn't really know what I would put in it. The BrainBox BBS is working at its most basic stage, and it needs the whole setup and then the ANSI art screens. I have to also sort out Aleph BBS and figure out why that isn't connecting.
Haven't sorted out the website. I have Nginx set up at the moment. I tried to relay through to the other original server and failed. I'm also not entirely sure I want Nginx, either. I'm wondering if my issue is going 80 to 80 from server to server. I still haven't sorted it out, and it's slowing me down. At least the capsule works like a charm. I could just install Ghost on the BrainBox server itself, but I am trying hard to not have a database on it or anything that requires the normal big city protocols like PHP and such. This is a low-tek venture here.
No FTP, although at one time I had considered that, and perhaps it's still not off the table, but I figure I may use the BBS for that since I can limit access by user level.
I've spent a good amount of time wondering why in the hell I'm even bothering with this in the first place, and honestly it comes down to bandwidth and the fact that everything else on the Internet is not user-friendly anymore. It's all collected and used against the people who create it. This is an effort to go back to the philosophies that got us here in their purest forms.
At first, we were about the information. The thought processes and the ability to share all of that with folks who weren't the same as us and could derive use from it. Now it has become a narcissistic circle jerk, and the usefulness is overshadowed by the ability of the powers that be to use it as a cudgel.
Today began with the weekly server move. I work in UTC, even though I'm in Texas, and my shift starts in the early morning that way. Somehow I got addicted to trying to make things roll smooth. I don't actually do any of the moving, that is done a few thousand miles away from me. I just make sure everything is up and configured correctly once they move. And I don't do it alone, but I harvest a lot of data from it that I provide to our System Engineers, and then they do whatever they want with it. Those kinds of things are fun for me. They help distract me from the wages, let's say.
That went well as it could, and now I am taking some time to learn and create more BrainBox content, and try to enhance those services, since I do use some of them at the pay job, so it's all in all related.
The tasks I currently have on the table are to get the gopherhole working, and configure the BBS a bit more.
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It took a good bit to get the gopherhole up and running, like an hour and a half. I ended up ripping out the Debian package and compiling from source. Here's a good link for that:
Dio9sys had it right. The best way to set up a Gopherhole.
One of the things about having a large chunk of my life in UTC is that it causes a few complications in other areas. Nothing major, but sometimes confusing. For instance, it is already after midnight, and thus the next day in UTC, but in my time zone, I'm not even at work yet.
I've been looking at the way SkyJake does his finger, cuz I'd like to have that on this site, to be honest. I found this set of instructions that I'll come back to soon.
Yeah. So I sincerely want to break shit. I got the finger to work, but it worked too well, and gave too much information out. Then I managed to break that because it's BSD and not GNU, I ended up with efingerd, and hours later I just want to break everything.
Nobody has wanted to document a fucking thing on this, and if they have, Google and DDG don't care to know about it.
I have been filled with hate, piss, and vinegar over this, but there may be light at the end of the tunnel. I moved to cfingerd, which is equally a pain in the ass. But after much tears, bitching, and scraping, I found a configuration document:
We are about to see what can be done here.
I was able to get cfingerd to work in at least a sense. It hands out a full on rejection notice now, which I found at /etc/cfingerd/rejected_banner.txt and edited to read Old King Cole just to prove that it worked. I'll probably go back and edit it further later today and see if I can get normal functionality.
With that, I also got an account again at SDF. I managed to regain my wirehead account, and once I get out of their beginner hell over there, I may use that for more of a pointer site and a phlog. We'll see what happens. I paid the money. I seem to recall doing this about ten years ago and getting little to nowhere with it.