author: acidus
I found it a little odd that the Awesome Gemini list on GitHub didn't seem to exist at all in Geminispace, so I spent way more time than I expected to using wget, sed, and perl to fetch the Awesome List dynamically and convert it to gemtext. It syncs every time I build my capsule:
gemini://gemi.dev/awesome.gmi
Speaking of cool content, I've been porting Steven Weyhrich Magnum Opus on Apple II History to Markdown and Gemtext:
gemini://gemi.dev/apple-ii-history/
This is cool. A history of the original Project Gemini, as written by NASA in 1977. Its available as a whole book, but because its a US govt work, its in the public domain:
https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4203/toc.htm
Where In The World? • Puzzle #135 • 2022-12-13
✅✅❌❌❌↖️
✅✅✅✅❌↖️
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
I built a new game on Gemini! MineSweeper. Find the 💣s, try not to 🪦
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/mines.cgi
Where In The World? • Puzzle #108 • 2022-11-16
✅✅❌❌❌↗️
✅✅✅✅🤏↘️
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
still going strong!
there is an interesting and serious security vulnerability in OpenSSL that may impact Gemini servers. basically a Malformed certificate can cause a crash to a program using OpenSSL to read it. Gemini uses client side certificates, so I can create a malformed client side and connect to random Gemini capsides and send it as part of the TLS handshake. this could crash the Gemini server.
to be clear I think TLS in Gemini is A Good Thing (tm). this is the biggest issue in 6 years which shows how far OpenSSL has come. but it does show how the security of a system is a union of the security of its parts
https://www.openssl.org/blog/blog/2022/11/01/email-address-overflows/
Where In The World? • Puzzle #83 • 2022-10-22
✅✅✅❌❌↙️
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
ok kind of a guess
Where In The World? • Puzzle #72 • 2022-10-11
❌❌❌❌❌⬅️
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✅✅✅✅🤏↙️
✅✅✅✅🤏↘️
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
oh wow. that first guess what about as wrong as it could possibly be!
Where In The World? • Puzzle #70 • 2022-10-09
✅✅✅✅❌↘️
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
pretty easy!
Where In The World? • Puzzle #60 • 2022-09-29
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
Where In The World? • Puzzle #56 • 2022-09-25
✅✅✅✅🤏↘️
✅✅✅✅🤏⬇️
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
oh snap CDG is cool. it’s like public shared bookmarks! I love this. I’ve got some cool stuff to add
this was a little lucky
Where In The World? • Puzzle #41 • 2022-09-10
✅✅❌❌❌⬅️
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
Where In The World? • Puzzle #39 • 2022-09-08
✅✅✅✅❌↘️
✅✅✅✅🤏↘️
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
Where In The World? • Puzzle #38 • 2022-09-07
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
oh yeah! getting back at it!
Where In The World? • Puzzle #34 • 2022-09-03
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
this one is super cool. read the Wikipedia article about it
Just kept guessing countries with "and" in the title 😂
Where In The World? • Puzzle #28 • 2022-08-28
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✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
With each guess, I get further away!
Where In The World? • Puzzle #25 • 2022-08-25
✅✅✅✅❌➡️
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✅❌❌❌❌⬅️
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
I had no idea! Look at those wild guesses
Where In The World? • Puzzle #24 • 2022-08-24
✅✅❌❌❌⬅️
✅✅❌❌❌➡️
✅✅✅✅🤏➡️
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gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
ok this was super tricky. as I got closer, I only got more confused. so I guessed the only thing that I knew was around there, between those 2 known places
Where In The World? • Puzzle #22 • 2022-08-22
✅❌❌❌❌⬅️
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✅✅✅✅🤏➡️
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
yea! this is what I’m talking about! can you guess it before your turns run out?
Where In The World? • Puzzle #21 • 2022-08-21
✅✅✅✅🤏↙️
✅✅✅✅🤏⬇️
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
OK, this is just unfair.
While building and testing Where In the World, I kept getting stupid hard puzzles like Diego Garcia, Bouvet Island, Palau, or Central African Republic. But once it's live for everyone, it's serviing up these easy, fairly distinctive countries. WTF random algorithm I created? Why do you hate me so?! 😂
Give us something weird like a French Island near Antarctica!
Where In The World? • Puzzle #20 • 2022-08-20
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
@martin the search feature of Station is really great. How do you implement it?
Where In The World? • Puzzle #15 • 2022-08-15
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✅✅✅✅🤏↘️
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
Success! I was able to restore much of Drew's capsule from older Kennedy crawl data. I'm hosting the mirror here:
gemini://gemi.dev/mirrors/drewdevault.com/
Where In The World? • Puzzle #13 • 2022-08-13
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
Oh yeah! got it in one!
Where In The World? • Puzzle #12 • 2022-08-12
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✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
I had no idea those islands were part of that country. Learn something new every day 🕵️
Where In The World? • Puzzle #10 • 2022-08-10
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
Where In The World? • Puzzle #9 • 2022-08-09
✅✅✅✅❌↘️
✅✅✅✅❌↖️
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
Where In The World? • Puzzle #8 • 2022-08-08
✅✅❌❌❌↖️
✅✅✅❌❌⬆️
✅✅✅✅❌⬆️
✅✅✅✅❌➡️
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
One of my favorite classes at university was a computer engineering class where we started with a RISC processor core, and added optimizations over the entire semester as we learned about the evolution of processor design. Things like pipelining, opcode and then data caching, out-of-order execution, etc.
I've been wanting to follow this style and write about taking a simple (web or gemini) crawler and evolving it to web scale since I first started building Kennedy. It's still a work on progress, but the best way to write is to write:
gemini://gemi.dev/crawlers/
Found an awesome tool for drawing ASCII art drawings.
https://asciiflow.com/legacy/
I actually like the legacy version a little better.
https://asciiflow.com/legacy/
So close! and when I saw what it was, it made total sense!
Where In The World? • Puzzle #7 • 2022-08-07
✅❌❌❌❌➡️
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✅✅✅✅❌⬇️
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
oh heck yeah! Got it in 1!
Where In The World? • Puzzle #5 • 2022-08-05
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
Wrote up a post about how I built Where In the World, including drawing countries with high enough resolution in just text art, maintaining state, and getting input from the user. Code snippets are included as well. This was a super fun project, and I hope people enjoy playing it. Should I make more games?
gemini://gemi.dev/gemlog/2022-08-04-where-in-the-world.gmi
Today wasn't a crazy island and is a country most people will know. This should be a more approachable challenge than the first day, when the answer was Aruba 😂
Where In The World? • Puzzle #4 • 2022-08-04
✅✅✅✅❌⬅️
✅✅✅✅❌↖️
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
Where In The World? • Puzzle #3 • 2022-08-03
❌❌❌❌❌⬅️
✅✅✅✅❌➡️
✅✅✅✅❌⬇️
✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
this one was tricky!
@martin, looks like you are stripping '>' (greater than) from a Station post when its shown in a list (the main station page, my archive ). But its visible when you view an individual post. Trying to stop an XSS attack? :-) This might be a feature of the input function you are using. Any way you can allow that character anywhere?
Where In The World? • Puzzle #2 • 2022-08-02
✅✅✅✅❌↖️
✅✅✅✅❌➡️
✅✅✅✅❌⬅️
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gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
So close! 3 of those guess were > 90%, but I just couldn't get there. How did anyone else do?
Where In The World? • Puzzle #1 • 2022-08-01
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✅✅✅✅✅🎉
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play
I create a Gemini game: Where in the World? A daily geography puzzle game where you have to guess the country from a picture
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi
Everyone gets the same puzzle. New puzzles generate every day. You can share a spolier-free summary of your game via Station. Can you guess correctly?
Oh hot damn! Last week @freezr posted about trying to get Drew DeVault's capsule back online. I went looking at data from old Kennedy crawls and found I had visited 124 URLs on his capsule in mid June. Back then I only cached text content, which returned a status of 20. So I have 104 gemtext pages from Drew's Capsule. I need to write some code to export that (maybe make it a gempub as well) and then I'll post it back on line!
Saving full bodies, FTW!
Facebook had their first year-over-year decline of revenue in their history. good, they have monetized the emotional manipulation of their users with no regard to the damage that is doing to society and our institutions. they are morally bankrupt and anyone who chooses to work there is complicit.
despite all this, astonishingly FB received over 20% of all online advertising spend. that is… mind booglingly large and sadly means they aren’t going anywhere soon 💀
The way you take away a bullys power is ignore them
from the BBC via 🧇NewsWaffle
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/article?https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fbusiness-62322862
I added image search to Kennedy, my Gemini search engine. Now you can search over 18,000 images across all of Gemini space with text queries.
gemini://gemi.dev/gemlog/2022-07-26-kennedy-image-search.gmi
Searching for "cats" brings up a cute picture of @smokey's cat
gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/image-search?cats
Here is an example of finding images of Lagrange.
gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/image-search?lagrange
I really like that because it's finding images on non-English capsules too.
This made my day @marginalia!
https://status.marginalia.nu
"The database has been moved to a new partition, and rebuilt. Next the search engine index needs to reconstructed. This looks like it take about 80 hours."
I love your posts about astrolobe. Would you consider sharing some stories about how you handle the operations side of things?
hey @martin, you like Esperanto... so check this out:
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/wp.cgi/view/eo?Esperanto
I updated Gemipedia to work with other languages. Like.... all of them. Even the dead ones. For example, Wikipedia, in Latin:
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/wp.cgi/view/la?Roma
If Wikipedia exists for that language, you can use it. So now you can Esperanto all you want and never leave Gemini!
You can swap the language here:
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/wp.cgi/lang
Just keep that between you, and me, and I guess all of Station. At least until this weekend when I can write a proper gemlog post 🙈🤣
what do people use to generate ASCII art for their capsules? I’m looking for something that handles edges well
While I love the simplicity of gemtext, the inconsistency of the line rules is iratating Specifically whitespace between the start-of-line identifier, and the rest of the line. Headings? Optional. Lists? Not optional. Turns out whitepsace between the "=>" and the URL of a link line is optional. I fixed a bug in Kennedy's crawler, where I was only pars out link lines that had whitespace after the "=>". That one character bug fix led to the crawler discovering 15% more URLs!!! Kennedy is now indexing ~315K URLs
I moved Kennedy from an old mac mini running MacOS, to an old mac mini running Ubuntu. Let me know if you hit any problems
gemlog.blue is a great idea, but its become a wasteland of spam, thanks to account creation and posting via a insecure web interface, with no captcha or verification. So stuff like this happens:
gemini://gemlog.blue/users/Jasonneorp/1656260599.gmi
gemini://gemlog.blue/users/2tpuqZCI/1646694574.gmi
gemini://gemlog.blue/users/GQD2qjzO/1640806567.gmi
the vast majority of users/pages is spam from web bots
gemini://gemlog.blue/users/
Does anyone have contact info for who runs this? Would like to help try and clean this up. Otherwise I'm going to delist it from Kennedy
🤔 so... crazy idea. Kennedy's crawler allows me I can see all pages in gemini space. Which means I can detect all the atom feeds and gemtext pages with URLs that comply with "Subscribe to gemtext page" standard. Which means I have a list of URLs I can check for posts/updates. Which means I could build a "super" Antenna, which aggregates all updates across all of Gemini, daily... an "orbitial antenna" if you will... 🤔
I made an emoji test page since some emoji haven’t been displaying when I use Buran on Android on a Kindle Fire.
gemini://gemi.dev/tests/emoji.gmi
also, how on earth do I get Lagrange to display emoji as solid, colorful emoji instead of the Noto style outlines? I think I installed the GNU emoji font @Skyjake suggested but no dice
check out my new project: 🧇 NewsWaffle: Read any news website, all via Gemini.
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/
Read about it here:
gemini://gemi.dev/gemlog/2022-07-10-newswaffle.gmi
I really really wish more Gemini clients URL encoded a space as + instead of %20. my posts to Station could be so much longer 😂😂
inspired by @smokey asking about a public Duckling proxy, I set one up. put this in your Lagrange proxy settings for HTTP:
stargate.gemi.dev:1994
this lets you access HTTP resources from Gemini and converts to gemtext on the fly:
http://www.example.com
WARNING: this is a public proxy. I can see your web traffic. dont be a jerk and access illegal/explicit stuff
I’m experimenting with a more generic Gemini->HTTP gateway and running Duckling is good experience of how well current proxies handle modern websites
a gemlog on crypto crashing: “millions of people who lost their whole life savings” “thousands of people who committed suicide”
ok. first of all, if you want to make wild claims about thousands of people dying, you’re gonna have to cite a source. have a September 11th’s-worth people really killed themselves?
ditto for the claim that “millions have lost their whole life savings“. who puts their life’s work into a single coin of crypto? if they exist, that’s negligence, not investing
comatoast, Being so hyperbolic makes it hard to take you seriously, which is a shame because your content is usually awesome
calling all spartan capsules!
do you have a spartan capsule? please reply with a link. I’m looking to play around with Spartan crawling and indexing and need some example capsules. who knows, maybe Kennedy will be the first search engine for spartan 😂
about a month ago I posed here about building a Gemini interface to Wikipedia. after a month of bug fixes and new features (tables with row and column spans!) I announced it on my gemlog and Antenna. check it out
gemini://gemi.dev/gemlog/2022-05-10-launching-gemipedia.gmi
FYI: I updated the certificate for Kennedy (Kennedy.gemi.dev). it’s now an EC certificate with wildcard support. i’ve got some exciting things I wanna do with it.
Security issues in Elaho: HTML tags rendered in plaintext and JavaScript execution. I mentioned these a few weeks back and tried to email the author multiple times in the last 3 weeks with no response so I filed public bugs:
https://github.com/pitr/gemini-ios/issues/41
https://github.com/pitr/gemini-ios/issues/42
Hello all, I’m looking for some people to beta test a gemini front-end to Wikipedia I’ve been building. Specifically I”m looking for feedback on the interface, and any articles that aren’t rendering well. There is a “report a problem” link on the bottom of every page. While some big items remain (no support for tables yet) others have been solved (math formulas work). Only the English WP is supported for now. I’ll need a little help from people who know other languages to get the international versions working. Reach out if you use WP in other languages 🙌
Thanks for your help! you can try it below:
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/wp.cgi/
question for everyone: do you use any of the Wikipedia proxies in Gemini space? if not, why not? if so, what would you change about it or add. for me, it not handling redirects is a big one (search for any fighter jet and you can’t read the article) and not having links to any other Wikipedia articles
oh shit. I just found JavaScript code execution in a Gemini browser 😬😬. I’m literally looking at an Alert dialog. (goes looking for developer contact info…)
I just launched Chilly Weather:a new Gemini weather service. feedback is welcome!
gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/chilly.cgi
this story describing a Startup “disturbing” static file hosting is both hilarious and rings a little too true. feels like an episode of Silicon Valley where you know it is satire but also you could swear you have seen it in real life too. well worth your time!
gemini://marginalia.nu/log/51-the-file-startup.gmi
A Ukrainian soldier on a tiny island in the Black Sea didn't hold back when threatened with bombing by a Russian warship as Moscow continued its assault on Ukrainian territory.
The Russian officer says: "This is a military warship. This is a Russian military warship. I suggest you lay down your weapons and surrender to avoid bloodshed and needless casualties. Otherwise, you will be bombed."
A Ukrainian soldier responds: "Russian warship, go f*** yourself."
Those were the final known words heard from the island
https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_071a90a9516ca180d1cafb3b751fa81f