author: smokey
Today I toured a local brewery up near Hershey PA (yes the town where the hershey chocolate company is located )
Watching a spider gently float through the air by using its webs as a glider is both mystical and terrifying. Im both freaked out and intrigued?
https://www.zazzle.com/sam_le_cat_dragon_sticker-217329096213401260 Watching game of thrones with my cats inspired me to look up "Cat dragon" Was not dissapointed
anyone doing something for the 4th of july?
Going to the local farm for food is so much cheaper and fresh than the grocery store especially now that the prices of everything spiked so heavily for processed goods. store bought rootbeer in a bottle doesn't hold a candle to the real shit the amish sell,
Mentally ill neighbor just installed a security camera in their shed and pointed it right at my back patio. Can't sit out at night anymore without noticing the red blinking light reminding me im being watched. Yet another reason my first home is going to be a cabin or cob hut built on land bought in the middle of bumfuck-nowhere appalachian mountains. My question is why though.
Today was awesome I had an interview at a winery that also happens to share the same space as a renisaunce faire grounds which it supplies. I think I nailed the interview more or less but well see if they extend the offer. It was for an electricians helper by the way. Can't remember the last time I was actually excited at the prospect of a job position.
Spent all day learning about CGI and bash scripts to make this little thing. gemini://tilde.team/~smokey/cgi-bin/ddg-input.gmi
A limitation of the duckling proxy is actually trying to do web searches through a gemini client. So today I worked on a little bash script to input user queries and output those queries in a search engine url format. Might make a full gemini post about it but for now you can view the script source here:
tilde.team/~smokey/cgi-bin/source-ddg-duckling-search.gmi
tilde.team/~smokey/cgi-bin/source-multiple-choice-search.gmi
The ultimate goal is to create a CGI service that processes a users query and redirects you to the corrisponding search engine url.
Last night a baby praying mantis hopped up on my smoking table out back. Took a little while to trust me but once it did it couldn't stop exploring my hands and arms lol. Sure was a cute little green thing. Eventually once the sun set I walked it out to some greenery on the side of the house and let it continue its wierd little praying mantis life.
Calling out to the fellow video game players, have you partaken in the Steam Summer Sale yet and if so what have you gotten?
Happy I decided to challenge myself with a log a day. Easily the most productive week of my capsules life thusfar. Will be continuing to do so into this week!
Why do you think there was a huge dip in URIs between april and now? gemini://botond.online/en/stats/uris.png
New log, Its a long and personal one. gemini://tilde.team/~smokey/logs/06-16-22-newblog.gmi
Seems drewdevault finally pulled the plug on their capsule. Sad to see it go
very wierd idea: a tabletop map drawing game inspired by DELVE played with a special gemini protocol exploration webring. Space themed, drawing a space chart tile by tile. run across natual resources to build different parts of your capsule, encounter enemy fleets to fight and fend against, different space enviroments and alien structures, and notably a special "wormhole" structure which points you to use the webring to visit a real spaceship themed gemini capsule and you draw it.
Apple bought my parents favorite weather service two years ago. First year they killed the android app, okay np just shortcut the website. Now, theyre killing the website, API, and IOS app in order to assimilate it into their own weather app. My parents have been using it for years and love the service so much because of the graphs and long range forcast. What apple is pulling is some monopolistic anti-competition bullshit and they just keep getting away with it. Thankfully there are still open weather APIs and the apps which run off them.
Today I learned that yeast is actually a kind of fungi, I had always assumed it was a kind of bacteria. The more you know!
So, continuing the "things fellow capsuleers sometimes do which slightly grind my gears" saga, is spamming every. single. page with some variant of "this page is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 copyright". I can get down with authors clearly laying out how they want their intellectual work used by others. But why would you copy and paste this to every single page instead of just one blanket sweep statement at the bottom of your capsules homepage and specifying otherwise for particular pages you dont want published under that liscence. Its a pointless and IMO somewhat narcissistic use of ~50 bytes of data per page which can be better spent elsewhere. Just to remind people "hey I own this, dont infringe bitch"
Just looked at the price of BTC for first time in a month, last I saw it was hanging around 29k. Its at 22k now. Theres something really unnatural about how harshly its fallen, the chart is almost a perfect slope instead of the random fluxuation you expect out of markets. Me thinks that the FED and Friends have gone from trying to silently and slowly assasinating crypto from afar to straight up murdering crypto in broad daylight
Kinda annoying when I like someones glog enough to try and contact them only to be expected to jump through hoops including the info not being on their capsule only through their website which you have to guess exist, No email you must only use alternative com protocols and pgp encryption both of which I don't know how to properly use. At some point it just kills all motivation. My philosophy is that you should make it as easy as possible for people of all techical skill levels to communicate with you with whatever means they know and are familiar with.
A new kitten I've never seen before just strolled on in through the cat door and now acts like they live here. 🙄 That brings the count up to 7
Ever since I saw the AI art debate on antenna a couple days ago it got some creative connective juices flowing. A couple months I wrote an article on the library of babel and the random generation of all possible combinations of words given infinite time. Well, replace a typewriter with an art brush and suddenly you get an infinite art gallery filled with all possible combination of art piece on every sized canvas generated by random distributions of colored pigments. Artist having an existential issue with AI are just now going through what authors already dealt with the library of babel. "join the club, kid." Uhg now I might make it a full article.
I guess IIch.space is down for good at this point. I personally really liked the image sharing section with automatic dithering, was a cool idea. Hopefully a similar kind of public photo sharing capsule will emerge. Thank you @sk for your efforts, hope to see your stuff come back up in the future.
Rain is pooring on the sunsetter that just barely shields me. Listening to the hazelwood trialouge, and I am smoking some good stuff. I am relaxed and life Is okay at the moment.
Theres some new ASCII art over at my capsule home page and the contact-me page :-)
[POLL Do you have pets?] Cat | Dog | Other | None |
Does anyone else get a wierd feeling when they stumble upon someones personal site where they share their whole resume/CV including real life addresses and phone numbers. I get that the internet was a lot different 20-30 years ago and people didn't worry much about spam bots or doxxing but in 2022 that just kinda seems very risky without much benefit. Then again, people old enough to remember a time when sharing RL info like that you're too old to give a shit about being doxxed
I really like revisiting these graphs of gemini's statistics every couple months. From jan 2021 to jan 2022 gemini grew by 1500 capsules. From jan 2022 to now its already grown another 500
gemini://botond.online/en/stats/
Something unbelievably surreal happened a few minutes ago. I was out on patio listening to music when I hear a distressed squeaking. Look over and my cat is playing with a shrew. Get in between cat and shrew and shrew first hid behind my foot looking out for the cat before climbing pant leg about a foot. After scare cat off akward waddle over beyond patio to grass and shake shrew off. It stays for a moment and looks at me. I get a sense of appreciation and friendliness. I then proceed to kneel down to shrew and lightly pet its back with my finger a few times. (take note to wash hands after) It accepts my gesture! I sit on steps and watch it a moment more before it goes. Tonight was wierd
It would be cool to know how many people visit my site on a daily basis, but also I know im a person that gets too caught up with numbers and statistics to the point I would obsess over it or somehow view it like a 'score' in a game.
Scribbles down "Own a Drive-in movie theatre" into potential independent buisness idea book
Apparently a critical security vulnerability was recently discovered in firefox and TOR browser. Suprise suprise, the root cause is our old 'friend' javascript at it again.
Every day my distain for the centralized web grows as does my Love the small-net. I think gemini's unprecidented growth in the past year or so is proof that its more than just a fad or a nieche ideological group project. On a side note, does anyone know what geminicon 2022 was? Apparently it was a convention for gemini users but I literally havent heard a single mention of it until now, after the fact. Was it a mastadon thing or what?
Added some cool new stuff to the capsule. First, it now mirrors the comic series Gramfel to gemini
//tilde.team/~smokey/pictures/Gramfel/
Second, I spent quite some time touching up and reformatting a 30 year old dinosaur of a text file I found on a usenet archive. It now has new lease on life as part of my Fractal Compendium project.
tilde.team/~smokey/fractal_compendium/fractal-faq.gmi
quick guide to setting up duckling proxy: gemini://tilde.team/~smokey/logs/2022-05-24-duckling-guide.gmi
Are there any public ducking proxies or in depth guides to setting one up locally?
I actually like the idea of my capsule actually being on Spartan. most spartan sites are simple little "hey, isn't this cool? anyways here's my actual site on gemini" It would be cool to be one of the first spartan-exclusive capsules. For what I need out of a capsule TLS is overkill
My capsule has a new home!
gemini://tilde.team/~smokey/
It underwent a decent sized re-structuring to simplify the directory tree and cut out the fat of unused files.
A new "Personal Ramblings" section has been added. It houses some of my less-structured and more out-there ponderings about philosophical subjects, the nature of reality, and the limits of human truth. All that good hippy shit. All of the articles in there are a work in progress.
A new "Unfinished Articles" section now houses some half-baked writings that were sitting on my hard drive for a very long time
Heres a musician I really like whom you've never heard of and never will again. If youre an acoustic guitar enjoyer give them a shot. https://soundcloud.com/jarrad-wright-282731353
Approximately half of my would be post on station are second-thought deleted. Ill write up something passionate, look it over, think "hey that might be mildly controversial or too political or too topically different for station, I want to keep things light-hearted and not social-media lite" ... goodbye post. Theres probably a healthy balance when it comes to self-censorship but Im definitely not meeting it. Anyone else like this?
@acidus Hey I saw your post about the chilly update. With the concerns about moon phases cluttering the UI, I would like to suggest a 'full view' option equivalent to wttr.in's experemental 'data-rich output format' with a link to the full view at the bottom of the page.
https://camo.githubusercontent.com/425e659037667b40e0e7f5d5c48b0acca3bcd302337c0428cdd2fa854281d18a/68747470733a2f2f777474722e696e2f66696c65732f6578616d706c652d777474722d76322e706e67
the best way to back up your code is to inscribe its binary into a clay tablet, fire it, and seal it in a cave
TIL apparently ASCII global map viewer is a thing. Cant believe this is possible in a terminal. Try it out with this command
telnet mapscii.me
I used to really like the idea of having entire discographies of my favorite artist on my mp3 player. A sad reality im not coming around to is that most artist have like 10% absolute banger tracks and 90% meh/unremarkable filler tracks. Theres only a handful of artist where I like ALLL of their songs. Its nice to have the complete collection sure, but its time to be realistic and start just going after the greatest hits albums.
I wonder what the actual retention is for Gemini users over a 6 month period? I've been noticing a trend while browsing capsules that there's a LOT of them with a few entries spanning 1-3months then dead silence forevermore. What's the deal man? Even the youtubers that introduced me to gemini like DistroTube killed their capsule.
Yo, IT people. Do me a favor. When you're discussing your job online bragging about how you do jack-shit for work yet get paid 6 figures to play on the internet all day, actually specify the title instead of the old "I do IT" schtick. Its like calling everyone who remotely works with rocks a stoner. Miner? Stoner. Construction worker? Stoner. Mason? Stoner! Details, people! Details. Also for any IT oldheads reading, is it still worth getting into? I imagine theres a ton of competition now that computers are so popular and learning to program is a free skill.
A list of free fractal documentaries and related bonus stuff
gemini://sdf.org/smokey/logs/2022/fractal-documentaries.gmi
An 'official' quick update on my capsule to let people know im still working on stuff //sdf.org/smokey/logs/2022/2022-03-25-a-quick-post.gmi
How do you easily acess emojis in desktop? I search for them online and copy/paste it in but surely theres a faster way
You ever see a word so many times that it starts to feel wierd? So many sentences start with 'I' that sometimes I intentionally rework it to not include it but its so hard to avoid the most common words like 'I' 'the' 'you' 'and' because they are like the bubblegum and ductape which holds the sentence together
while browsing gemini I found an old archived text originating from a long extinct usenet group based around fractals. gemini://gemini.spam.works/mirrors/textfiles/internet/FAQ/fractal.faq
Its kind of funny how text are timeless, in a way. I never would have known it was written in 1993 if the date had not been there. the MIT ftp servers mentioned are unsuprisingly dead. The author/maintainer is credited as "Ken Shirriff" (In retrospect its wierd how people used to use their real names unworried with privacy concerns) And doing a quick search I found the guys website. Its all about retro-computing and tech project so figured some of you guys would be interested https://www.righto.com/p/about-ken-shirriff.html
Lagrange users, what is your favorite font pack to use?
Just discovered the tv show Dexter this week even though its been out since 2007, crazy how good shows can just slip under your radar for a decade only to just stumble on them by chance
Been playing around with YACY more lately since the DDG fiasco last week. True P2P decentralized search engine. Its far from perfect but a nice change of pace from what we consider a typical "search engine". Similar to Marginalia's engine it doesnt care about SEO and instead is indexes in an entirely different way . You as a user actually host a peer instance on your own hardware and can add new pages to the search engine through your own peers web-crawler. Each user can influence the search engines top results by manually marking sites that are relevant to the search query. Again its not perfect but a pretty good example of what a true decentralized engine looks like. Im happy to have it as an option.
[POLL What is the purpose of our universe?] The universe has no purpose besides what human beings subjectively impart on it | A conciousness generator with the purpose of creating intelligent beings that can observe and experience | The universe obeys God(s) will and its true purpose is incomprehensible to mortal minds | The universe has no functional purpose and exist for entertainment/artistic sake | None of the above
Roger Penrose and the three worlds theory: https://astudentforever.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/roger-penroses-three-worlds-and-three-deep-mysteries-theory/ give it a read if you have some time
Trailer Park Boys is one of my favorite shows of all time, humor is on point for me. Im going on yet ANOTHER binge today. If you have Netflix go check them out, its worth a try.
Is there a security reason people will write their email as some variation of example AT emailservice.com instead of example@emailservice.com? Is this just a preference or is it something like protection against email botcrawlers?
The article I wrote yesterday is back up finally: gemini://sdf.org/smokey/logs/2022/privacy-advice.gmi
My capsule has yet again gone down along with the entire cluster array of SDF servers, basically as soon as I had published a new article on aggregators. How embaressing. Maybe this is the push I need to host my own server like ive been planning. Ive hosted public MC servers before where people could enter in my computers public IPv4 open port number to connect. I think I can handle getting the service up and porting forward geminis port. Its getting a domain name set up that i've never done before. Any website maintainers have suggestions with name providers or just in general?
Looks like gemini.circumlunar.space/ is back up! Guess some of us got concerned over nothing. On the upside, some people who are really concerned over the documentation might make some more mirrors and local copies for preservation sake.
Someone once said "No website should be bigger in size than the original DOOM" Makes me wonder what the MOST bloated website of all time is. How many DOOM's is it worth? Heck maybe DOOM should be a unit of measurement for SEO evaluation. "Sorry, your article contains 5 DOOMs worth of data even though it only contains two paragraphs of actual content"
Speaking of solderpunk, im curious as to whether their site being down is intentional or not. Did they finally have enough of the project and abandon the gemini community full stop?
Can someone help me understand how to change my station profile picture to another one? What needs to be done to properly make an ascii profile pic and upload it?
[POLL What is the average age range of gemini?] 55 and over | 40 - 54 | 30 - 39 | 19 - 30 | 18 and under
Looking through some stuff for the pubnix hosting my capsule and came across their flyer templates. Then an idea popped up in my mind: what if gemini had flyers? I would definitely be down with putting some physical advertisements around telephone poles and campuses like the olde days. your thoughts? https://sdf.lonestar.org/sdf_flyer.pdf
Today is the first time i've heard about YaCy, It appears to be a truly decentralized P2P search engine. Wanted to share it here in case any of you are into that kind of thing. https://yacy.net/
Ive fallen down the rabbit hole deep enough that tiling window managers and CLI programs are becoming more appealing by the day. How much longer before I start compiling everything from source? What have I become? WHAT HAVE I BECOME?!?!
New Article: Immortal Typerwriting Monkeys, Infinite Card Shuffles, and All-Knowing Libraries
gemini://sdf.org/smokey/gemlog/2022-01-02-originality.gmi
Happy new years!
While watching ghost story stuff I noticed my my fan spinning very slowly for about 10 seconds. In my mind i said "alright, now stop" and it stopped. This is the first time its ever spun like that, went to check dimmer switch and it was fully off/ down. All these years of wanting something spooky to happen so i can confirm something paranormal from my own experience (im a skeptic but my family believes) and this is the best I get after all this time? A slightly spinning fan for a few seconds? Laaaame as heck dude. Next time bring it your A game, fan-ghost.
Today I learned that i can host Images. I knew it was possible to do so as I've downloaded and displayed images with a graphical client before. But whenever I tried to host them in my capsule it caused an error.
As it turns out, the max image size limit allowed by my hosting provider SDF is a whopping grand total of 27 kilobytes. There was no documentation mentioning this anywhere.
Today was a productive day for my capsule. Got all my writing articles formated properly so people can start subscibing to my gemlog feed, and touched up the rest of the capsule while at it. Im starting to get used to it.
Believe it or not, ive never looked into gemini games before until recently. Im suprised at the interactivity of what ive found so far. limitation breeds creativity i suppose ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I spent a few hours writing this article today. I wanted to further expand on my e-reader experience, and my personal journey of getting capsules saved as epubs. If you have some time, please check it out! gemini://sdf.org/smokey/ereader.gmi
A big thank you to @kelbot who is mentioned heavily in it, for their work on the subject at hand. You're awesome!
I recently got my first E-ink Ebook reader. Im loving it very much! It feels great to finally have a dedicated, distraction free way to read my e-books. Its alot nicer on the eyes too. Also I started to save webpages as epubs for offline viewing which ive been see alot of people in the gem community have already done with PDAs. Still need to find a easy way to turn gemini capsules to epub, but atleast i know it can be done since others already did it.
I am thinking alot about places to live, and what kind of life i want to carve out for myself. If you dont mind, tell me about what you currently do for a living, as well as what goals you've set for yourself in life. Where do you want to selttle down at, if you had an oppurtunity to, and why?
I really like cats. Not that i dont like dog, i love em as well as most animals. But for whatever reason fate has decided that ive been destined to have many kitties to love and feed. Even the outdoor stray ones (ugh). Are you a pet person? What kind do you have to deal with?
Im not really a movie or tv person for whatever reason. I do however like unfiction and ARG projects, creative artsy type projects made by individuals. some of my favorite spooky ones for this time of year:
NOC 10 https://yewtu.be/channel/UCGNXc9SMSSdOyfmZMSeLQ5w
local58: https://yewtu.be/channel/UCuoMasRkMhlj1VNVAOJdw5w
POSTContent: https://yewtu.be/channel/UCH0VeQ9x2cUI4FDUT8xhaKw
Abstractions: https://yewtu.be/channel/UCWzjTcV73LEvKA3Oy0r6D3Q
Marble Hornets https://www.youtube.com/user/MarbleHornets
(all time classic, you probably already know this one)
Unedited footage of a bear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gMjJNGg9Z8
This House Has People In It: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-pj8OtyO2I
gemini capsule owners familiar with scripting, in your opinion what is the best scripting language to learn for making an interactive gemini capsule? Ive heard that GO is a good one but what kinds of languages do you use?
Is it strange to feel empathy for plants and insects? Ive always been an animal lover, but only in the past few years have come to feel kindness to all life big and small. I no longer act as judge, jury, and executioner with bugs that freak me out. Yesterday i had to trim a tree that had branches hanging too low and thought "im sorry tree, i hope this isnt painful for you" knowing full well plants dont have pain receptors like we do. Still, it is a great arrogance to assume the state of conciousness or potential of emotions which other living beings posess. Who is to say that a tree cannot experience happiness on a bright beautiful day, or pain when injured through some unknown process?
Writers who intentionally make their sentences overly complicated and bloated with super obscure adjectives which requires the reader to pull out a thesaurus just to translate really irritate me for some reason. It just comes across as pretentious bloat to make it *sound* like theyre saying something smart when in reality nothing of value is actually being said. Its fine in poetry and creative writings where alliteration and such are desireable, but daily life blogs? No that just screams "i have a complex and need to over-compensate through big words" The whole point of language in general (IMO) is to convey the most amount of meaning with the least amount of effort on both the speaker and listeners part.
I am now a member of team XMPP! Still learning about it and figuring out stuff, but so far it looks very promising!
Hey @sk Would you mind telling me how you do photo dithering over at your image board?
I did many hours of work today on my new gempage, the first entry piece to my Fractal Compendium on the Sierpinski Triangle and its many bizarre apperances all over math and science. If you like ascii art or geometry then i highly advise you give it a browse!
gemini://sdf.org/smokey/fractal/triangle.gmi
I still use MP3 Players, Its nice to have a dedicated thing to load up with music especially when you have many thousands and thousands of songs collected over the years. Anyone else still a part of the MP3 Player team?
I Finally got my first gemini capsule running today!!! And made a guide to everything i did for get started. Feeling tired from all the typing but its very rewarding to see my efforts come to life. If you have the time please check it out gemini://sdf.org/smokey/index.gmi
Its technically autumn where i am so its time to start celebrating one of my favorite times of the year, earlyish halloween and autumn stuff in general. Horror movies and books are a treat for me that i dont enjoy much outside of the timeframe. The book "House of Leaves" is sitting in front of me, intimidatingly. got a recommendation from a horror review content creator i like and saw it had glowing reviews. Im more of a illustrated horror kind of person, Junji Ito's stuff are personal favorites of mine. Also heard the way things presented are wierd but i dont mind experementing with new concepts. its been a while since ive read a real tride and true hardcover book. do you have fall traditions?
Recently found out about sdf.org through a post on here. checked it out and joined their unix thingy. apparently they allow members to create gemini capsules so ive been trying to get that going. Think i need to become a verified member first if i understand right since i need FTP access and whatnot. ill figure it out one step at a time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Honestly im happy just to have a new set of things to play with on the terminal. Gave me a good reason to sit down and learn aliases in linux so i didnt have to type in the long form ssh command every time i wanted to connect.
Did some experementation to find lightest way to stream YT videos for the sake of battery life on my laptop. I use invidious instances whenever possible so also worked that into it. Tested native website streaming through firefox, an electron app called FreeTube which i like using, and SMTube+SMPlayer. The SMTube+Player combo was the winner by a long shot. After trying out several invidious instances i finally found one that was compatable to be set as the default site to use. all that was left was creating an account on that particular instance and uploading my exported subscriptions feed file. Awesome!
Spent the morning sitting outside with coffee and some good smoke. went inside as soon as it started getting hot, and now im probably going to play modded minecraft with my friends on a public server. Might post some links to screenshots maybe
Hello world! Haha okay seriously, hi everyone. this is my first post on martinrue. I just found this website and i hope to find some cool people to talk to, maybe also get my thoughts written down somewhere. I was thinking of setting up a gemini capsule of my own on a pi, but thats abit of work for me right now as i have bigger fish to fry in my life. I Havent done any blogging before, but maybe this is the time to start.