author: skyjake
Hello fellow capsuleers! I have a new Gemini project that may interest you:
💬 Bubble
It is a Gemini-based bulletin board system that combines elements from Station, Reddit, WordPress, and Git-adjacent issue trackers like on Gitea and GitHub.
It has some cool features like email notifications and a draft composer for making longer posts. Here's the announcement:
gemini://geminispace.org/u/skyjake/1
A smarter CAPCOM is on the way, with support for regular Gemini feeds:
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/news/2023_04_16.gmi
This is great news and should improve the liveliness of the feed quite a bit.
My New Year's resolution is 5120 x 2880.
CW: ChatGPT
I asked the OpenAI GPT-3 chat bot about Gemini:
I'm sorry, but I'm not aware of any protocols or technologies called "smol net" or "Gemini" that have nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.
Looks like the Eye of Sauron still averts us…
I then proceeded to ask about my other project, the Doomsday Engine (a Doom port), and it promptly gave a brief description and named me as the author, using my real name. 😱
Of course, as a long-term project it must have been picked up into the training set from some wiki, but still feels weird to be part of the AI’s data model.
skyjake.fi is currently offline due to my office/server setup being physically rearranged.
I wasn’t intending to disconnect the server but apparently a network cable must’ve been knocked loose. Oh well, everything should be up and running within 24h.
Question for everyone: what do you use as your Gemini homepage / daily starting point?
For me it was usually Antenna but now I've switched to Cosmos, after adding the "Show posts newer than this" feature.
Also, would you be interested in a more dynamic home "dashboard" feature in Lagrange that combines and caches information from multiple pages into one home view? It would be a special type of subscription in practice. This might be nice if you regularly check up on multiple capsules, e.g., Astrobotany, Antenna, etc.
I'm not fully convinced such a feature is worth implementing, though, given the added complexity vs. value gained.
🤧 Been having a cold this week, so dayjob productivity has been nil... On the other hand, this has given me the opportunity to design a bunch of (extended) ASCII Emojis for the Lagrange TUI. Check it out:
°u° Alien ^;= Duck _:_ Folded Hands
v1.13.5 has a few of these in the new Simple Characters mode.
Testing Lagrange 1.13.4 TUI in a Linux virtual terminal.Looking quite messy still, compared to a GUI terminal emulator! The biggest problem is the Unicode symbols, which are missing and drawn with incorrect widths. The VGA color mode is passable but needs more distinction between UI backgrounds and the page.
Lagrange 1.13 has been released:
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2022-05_lagrange-1.13.gmi
Curses TUI (source build), improved keyboard UI navigation, support for @mozz's Spartan protocol, Unicode 14 Emoji included, bookmarking indicator, viewing pages as plain/styled text, reopening tabs, and ability to embed trusted root CA certificates. I'll use the last one especially in the upcoming mobile builds so they can check CA-generated server certificates.
Please treat the TUI version as a beta for now. It's missing a few settings and has a few rough edges.
Testing testing. First time posting from Lagrange in the terminal, running in text mode! https://skyjake.fi/@jk/108109462522530795
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2022-03_android-beta1.gmi
The next phase begins in the Lagrange for Android prerelease builds. 🚀
Thanks for the Alpha feedback everyone! The work continues but now I’m happy to start calling this a “proper” Android app and not just a platform-agnostic mobile build.
@gnuserland Check it out: 🙂
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2022-03_android-alpha7.gmi
This is also a preview of Lagrange v1.12, with Roboto as the default font, paragraph justification option, bottom URL/tab bars, new "Oceanic" color theme, and improvements for the other themes.
I did notice an occasional problem with the lookup results popup remaining open even after unfocusing the URL bar. Let me know if you find a reliable way to reproduce that.
@gnuserland There seems to be a problem with your Atom timestamps in the gemini://gnuser.land/gemlog/atom.xml feed. The "updated" time of a few entries is missing a date:
<updated>T12:00:00-0500</updated>
This causes CAPCOM to think the item is dated for the current day. (The circumlunar CAPCOM is also not filtering future dates, it seems... 🙂)
[POLL 🐶🐱?] Dogs are the best boys/girls | Cats are cool | Rodents are adorable | Horse! | I'm a fish
The speed increase on Station is really noticeable. Good job @martin !
What the...? Is this really "Buy Instagram Followers" spam on Midnight Pub, in Persian? 😄
gemini://midnight.pub/posts/793
If you have missing glyphs (Emoji in particular) in #Lagrange, this may help:
https://git.skyjake.fi/gemini/font-library/src/branch/main/build/get_symbola.sh
It's a shell/Python script that downloads Symbola from UFAS and converts it to TrueType (using "fonttools"). You can then drag-and-drop the .ttf on the Lagrange window to install it.
(Requires python3 and pip3.)
Symbola is quite a nice Unicode 13 compatible font, but available only for personal use so I can't put it in the Font Library.
Small Cosmos tweak: publications like smolZINE are always sorted to the top of their day and can only be the root of a thread. @kelbot
As zines are not regular log posts they may link to many things and if one or more of the links happen to be feed posts, it’s not appropriate for the zine to become a thread reply to one of them.
gemini://gemini.cyberbot.space/smolzine/smolzine-issue-18.gmi
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2022-01_cosmos.gmi
Occasionally people reply or refer to others' posts in Geminispace, but these threads of discussion are not really visible anywhere. I wanted to make something to help with this, so I wrote a new aggregator that tracks links between posts.
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-12_android-alpha.gmi
A new frontier for Lagrange! The first ALPHA build of Lagrange for Android is available for trying out, if you have a 32-bit ARM device.
It is pretty certain to crash on you somewhere along the way. Hopefully the next build with a newer SDL is more stable.
I updated the Gemini server certificates on skyjake.fi and git.skyjake.fi.
skyjake.fi kept its public key, so your client may automatically trust it. The expiration date is much further in the future.
git.skyjake.fi now uses the same certificate, via SAN. I'm also redirecting from git.skyjake.fi:1965 (served by Agate) to git.skyjake.fi:1968 (served by GmGitView).
Whew, my first 100% score in SpellBinding. 😅
77 of 77 points
Testing the new Lagrange for iOS native text input!
My custom input widgets weren’t really cutting it on mobile. There’s a vast number of little things that iOS does to make text entry smooth and effortless, so anything I could implement myself would be but a pale imitation.
It remains to be seen what can be done on other mobile platforms. The custom widget has to stick around as a fallback, but I’ll likely keep it as bare-bones as possible.
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-11_lagrange-1.9.gmi
The Lagrange November release is out! It'll be interesting to see if the automatic updates actually work. 😅
I liked this post by rlamacraft:
gemini://gemini.rlamacraft.uk/replies/reframingThePhilosophyOfGemini.gmi
Have to disagree with Drew here. Gemini is decidedly not a read-only distribution protocol. (As evidenced by what we're doing right here.) There is a little more nuance to it: I would call it a balance of 80/20 in favor of reading. Writing is possible, and even secure thanks to client certificates, but not as convenient as reading.
So this means, if in doubt, focus on the read direction, but completely ignoring the write direction unnecessarily excludes a lot of cool potential.
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-10_lagrange-1.8.gmi
Lagrange v1.8 is released just in time for Halloween. Spooky! 👻
@mntn The Noto fonts have both Egyptian and Anatolian hieroglyphs...
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-10_mark-it-down.gmi
I'm curious if folks here have thoughts regarding Markdown in Geminispace?
Obviously we don't want sites doing browser-specific content, but on the other hand, the Gemini protocol is media-type-agnostic. It's the community that has to decide which content types are appropriate, and while Gemtext has many great qualities, it's also a bit of straightjacket.
Lagrange v1.7.0 about to go live...
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/images/v1.7_folders-and-popup.jpg
Just need to run some dependency upgrades on my little build farm.
Writing a gemlog post entirely on my phone. It's still a bit crude, but at least nothing has crashed so far.
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-09_hello-from-ios.gmi
Hello from a Raspi 400.
Running GUI apps in a console takes me back to the 90s, to the good (bad) old days of MS-DOS. It's cool that it's still a thing that's possible to do, 30 years later!
Lagrange could use a few tweaks for this environment, though:
- no way to change the screen resolution except via editing prefs.cfg
- mouse cursor is not always redrawn when it's moved (SDL bug?); keyboard navigation for the whole UI would be nice
- can't switch VTs as SDL catches all the keys (maybe unfixable?)
- needs some sort of file picker UI since drag-and-drop is unavailable
skyjake.fi is up and running again.
Turns out the problem was not as dire as I feared. There was a loose power cable blocking the CPU fan from turning, which was causing the CPU to overheat. The cable must've been near the fan already since it's been rattling, but the hard knock pushed it in fully.
Hopefully nothing got damaged while it was running at max temp for a few hours without a fan...
⚠️My server skyjake.fi suffered a hardware malfunction (fan) and I had to shut it down for now. This means my capsule and the Mastodon instance will be offline for a while, until
I relocate the services or fix the broken fan.
Lagrange continues to be available via Codeberg and GitHub in the meantime.
A cool thing I managed to do this week was to install OpenBSD on an external drive and run it on real hardware. Quite a bit nicer experience than running inside a choppy VM.
This was my first time running a real BSD on my PC. I found and fixed a few bugs for Lagrange v1.6.4 with this setup.
The only problem was that—of course—my RTX 2080 and 5K monitor were not detected correctly, so I was stuck on a squished 1280x1024. It was striking how quickly your eye's adapt to the aspect ratio... When looking at normal 1:1 text afterwards, everything looked extremely narrow and stretched in the opposite direction.
A quick gemlog post about why there are some rough edges with text input in v1.6. @gnuserland
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-08_complexity-of-input.gmi
(I think my Gemlog Booster is working as intended; it's super convenient to make posts via Lagrange.)
Lagrange v1.6 release party! 🎉
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-07_lagrange-1.6.gmi
Already found a bug... Copy-pasting in the text editor seems to paste too much text. 😄
A few weeks ago I bought a Kobo ebook reader, thinking that I would use it to write some custom apps for an e-ink display. Instead, I've been rediscovering the joy of reading books on a non-LCD/OLED screen. The combination of a purpose-built, distraction-free device and a paper-like display is really working for me. (Amazon-free is also a major bonus.)
Currently reading scifi. I really liked Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary", and now I'm continuing with the Expanse series. I read Expanse book 1 a few years ago but for reason didn't continue to book 2 although I quite liked the first one.
An idea for Station @martin
Add a page that shows a particular user's logs in the tinylog format. Then we could use tools like gtl to follow fellow capsuleers.
https://codeberg.org/bacardi55/gemini-tinylog-rfc
New Lagrange iOS TestFlight build!
I'm quite happy with how the new swipe navigation is turning out. Trying to browse a larger set of feed entries was quite cumbersome, but now you can just swipe back to return to the Feeds list (i.e., it re-opens the sidebar). Some more details in the gemlog post.
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-06_testflight.gmi
The Identities sidebar is destined to be moved to Settings, with some kind of new UI for selecting the active identity.
Installed the iPadOS 15 developer beta 1 on my iPad. Apart from a few glitches it seems to work pretty nicely.
I'm typing this message from Lagrange on the iPad with an external keyboard. Was surprised to see that all the keyboard shortcuts just work! Thanks to SDL for that. 👏
Oops, after switching to (iPadOS) split view mode with Safari on the side the input widget lost the ability to insert new characters. Gotta debug a bit to see what's up with that. The TestFlight build is getting a bit old so I'll need to update it anyway.
Enjoying (?) a trip to the summer cabin!
Pros: Lakeside grilling in the pleasant warm evening.
Cons: 2-yo son projectile vomiting on the sofa.
At least the dog is still mostly behaving.
Lagrange v1.5 has been released. 🚀
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-05_lagrange-1.5.gmi
Hoping to release Lagrange v1.5 this weekend! Check out the ~final release notes: https://git.skyjake.fi/gemini/lagrange/raw/commit/341e2b56d3fa04ea0a7c9ecf6bd059289a02754c/res/about/version.gmi
If anyone wants to test multiline text input on iOS, there's a new TestFlight build available: 1.4 (7).
The iOS keyboard is so fiddly that I've set the sw keyboard "return" key to insert a line break by default instead of sending the request. This may still change if I figure out how to modify the keyboard.
Other updates include an improved Settings view and of course split view (for iPad).
Oh dear, I've had 3x my normal amount of coffee today. This will definitely not help with reaching my sleep goal tonight, but on the other hand, I'll probably end up redesigning some view transitions in Lagrange for iPhone.
Augh, I was baffled why the Station notifications page wouldn't open (just redirected me to "/"), but turns out I had accidentally selected another cert for the notifications URL. Lagrange's UI wasn't communicating this in any way... Have to invest some time into making it clear which certs are used on the current domain. PS. This multi-line text editor is quite luxurious. 😊
Testing Multi-Line Input I'm working on an improved text editor for Lagrange v1.5. It expands as you write text, and newlines can be inserted, too. Let's see if these newlines are preserved. Testing 1 2 3 Another line and a third one.
On a scale of Monday to Friday, I’ll rate today as “pure concentrated Monday”. Productivity: 0.
Lagrange v1.4.0 is going out now
I wonder if Station notifications could be listed as a gmisub page (maybe at a separate URL), so clients could subscribe to see them? At least Lagrange supports client certs when checking feeds.
Writing documentation is challenging after sleeping only 5 hours. 🥱
@martin Great job creating this site! The new split modes in Lagrange v1.4 will be very useful for navigating here. 😉
I spent entirely too much time trying to set up a nice profile image.