Recent content in Jason F. McBrayer on An Inhabitant of Carcosa
No ROOPHLOCH, and my October Gothic Just a general status update. I didn’t manage to do ROOPHLOCH this year. Partly, I was busy, but a bigger part is maybe just that I didn’t have anything new to do. Post from my phone, post from a modern but obsolete computer tethered to my phone, post in a park, post in a nature reserve. It just feels like I’ve done the easy levels, but the…
Weather and things I am, as usual for me and ROOPHLOCH, sneaking things in at the end of the month. One reason has been that it has been too damn hot here! It doesn’t normally start cooling down for autumn here until October, but this year it has been especially bad. Temperatures in the mid 80s F, with heat indices in the 90s. We’ve finally started to have cool evenings and mornings as…
This list is necessarily incomplete, partly due to the complexity of
modern HTTP and HTML, but it hits the high points. If you think
there is something critical missing, please contact me by email.
Today’s the last day to submit entries to ROOPHLOCH, the outdoor, off-grid Gopher logging event. I’ve submitted one the last two years, but I’m going to skip it this year. My main reason is that I want to move my Gopher hole to mirror my Gemini capsule rather than my website, but I haven’t got around to making that conversion. If I were going to post ROOPHLOCH this year,…
I’d like to announce a new website I’ve created, called Gemini Quickstart!. It’s a guide to getting started on Gemini for non-technical users with no experience with Gemini, Gopher, or other alternative internet protocols. It walks you through installing a Gemini client, finding things you’re interested in to read, and creating your own space in the Geminiverse.
If…
As is the tradition, I am writing this blog outdoors, for Solderpunk’s ROOPHLOCH 2020 challenge. I’m in a picnic shelter at Dreher Island State Park, where my family has been camping for the last two days. As an offline exercise, this is not especially successful, because there is WiFi in the campground. In fact, that’s why we’re camping.
With COVID-19 distancing…
After I decided to give KOReader another try, I knew that I needed some way of getting news articles onto my Kobo. The methods that KOReader supports are RSS feeds, Send2Ebook, and Wallabag. I investigated each of these methods at least briefly.
I ruled out Send2Ebook because it involves the client app sending your documents to an FTP server, and I’m not willing to run an FTP server in…
Protein pancakes are kind of a trend now, and you can buy pre-made mixes. It makes sense, because pancakes are a comforting breakfast food, but people want to have more protein in their diet, and fewer carbohydrates. This is my own recipe for making them from scratch. It is not low carb, but it should be a complete protein, since it includes a legume and a grain. The secret ingredient is chickpea…
Gray Area responded to my Kobo post, pointing out, among other things, that you can actually save settings application-wide in KOReader, and not only for a particular book. That motivated me to give it another try, mainly for the sake of better font rendering, and hypenation (the lack of hyphenation in Nickel drives me batty).
So far, so good. I’ve got the defaults the way I want them…
This is a recipe that’s actually 100% my own, though there’s nothing very original or creative about it. This is a soup that is optimized for being easy and fast to make, while still being filling and having a reasonable amount of protein.
Ingredients 2 Tbs vegetable oil 1 large sweet onion, diced 2 carrots, quartered lengthwise and diced 8 cups vegetable stock (I use…
Finished upgrading all of the computers in my home from Fedora 30 to Fedora 31 over the long weekend. It was pretty uneventful!
My own laptop went smoothly, though slowly, because it has a mechanical hard drive. All of the packaged software upgraded correctly and with no intervention, including the stuff installed from RPMFusion. I had quite a bit of self-compiled stuff, mostly relating to…
This little note is both a continuation of my ROOPHLOCH post, and a response to a pair of phlog entries: Ode to my Ebook Reader from Lambda Lab, and Bubbles and Baubles from Gray Area. Note: these are both on gopher; if your web browser does not support gopher, install the Overbite extension (Firefox or Chrome) or go to the Floodgap Gopher proxy and paste the URLs.
Like both phloggers, I have…
I’m writing this blog outdoors, in accordance with the rules of Solderpunk’s ROOPHLOCH challenge. I’m also offline… there’s no Wifi here, and I have tethering turned off for my phone; I’ll turn it on for a minute when I’m done writing in order to publish it.
I’m sitting in a park or greenway that may or may not be closed to the public. This sign…
Some terminal-focused links I’ve been working in Cool-Retro-Term again, and craving a real green-screen glass tty, so here are some terminal-related links.
jwz: export TERM=aaa-60 jwz tells a story about an interesting terminal and its even more interesting termcap file. The pictures and video in this article are what gave me terminal envy again this time.
WiFi232 - An Internet Hayes…
Haven’t linkblogged for months, and the little blogging I’ve done has mostly been about and on Gemini. Very busy summer. Here are a few recent links in no particular order, without much commentary.
How Many Books does Richland SC Library Recycle, and Where Do They Go? I love my library, and you have to get rid of some books somehow in order as new books come in. But it’s…
Minor germinal update: link syntax So, the Gemini link syntax was finalized:
Link Syntax Finalized
The one place this affects Germinal is in the generation of directory indexes. Germinal’s directory indexing code has been updated accordingly.
I have also updated the links on my Gemini site.
Unless there are changes coming to the response header line format, this is probably…
Where next for brutaldon? Over the last couple of evenings and lunch breaks, I added basic polling support to brutaldon. You can view polls and vote in them, without needing JavaScript, though some support for the HTML5 <progress> element is helpful. If you have JavaScript, it’s progressively enhanced with Intercooler.JS, the way a lot of things in brutaldon are.
Composing polls I have…
Is the gemini map format intended to be reflowed? One question that hasn’t been addressed in the Gemini speculative specification is whether the Gemini map file format text/gemini is intended to be reflowed. By reflowed, I mean mainly that the line-length of the file itself is not intended to be mapped exactly to the output device, which should instead lay out the text with appropriate line…
Germinal is a server for the Gemini Protocol that I’ve been writing in Common Lisp during my lunches and some evenings.
It is named after the early 20th century Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper Germinal. I wanted to name it after an anarchist publication to convey the idea of people sharing information and ideas with each other, in contrast to the way the web is used to push…
Good netizen solderpunk has been writing about the design of a protocol that is slightly more complex than gopher, but significantly simpler than http; while at the same time being significantly more powerful than gopher. I have thoughts about this, as I’ve posted about before, and I’m interested in contributing to this project and the conversation around it. These are the main…
This is a recipe I got from somewhere online, but I’ve adapted it to my own preferences and general lack of willingness to measure ingredients, so now it’s mine. I make it a bit less than once a week, whenever we have black bean burritos. This is a very simple, minimalist guacamole, I think. If you’re quick at chopping vegetables, it only takes about 5-10 minutes to…
Since I’ve started reading gopher logs, I’ve noticed that a lot of people write very personal journals on their phlogs, where they are perhaps pseudonymous. I really want to write that kind of thing, but it wouldn’t work for me to have it on my blog or phlog. For one thing, my main online identities, like this blog, are tied to my public identity. And for another, I am a very…
If you don’t have a gopher client handy, you can browse the gopherverse using the Floodgap Gopher-HTTP Gateway. It will proxy gopher pages to you over https, so you can read them in a browser that doesn’t support gopher. The OverbiteWX extension for Firefox uses it to handle gopher URLs.
This is a very useful service, but the design is not very appealing to me. Gopher is supposed…
Got quite a grab-bag of stuff this time. Been busy enough with life that what should be a simple evening habit one night a week has gone for…three weeks? I guess that’s not so bad. It’s long enough, though, that I can’t clearly remember all of the articles in my backlog. And there are too many topics to make a coherent theme. Let’s work through them, then.
Music…
As part of the ongoing revitalization of gopher, there has been quite a bit of discussion about what, exactly, is good about gopher, and whether you can separate that from what’s bad about the world wide web. From another angle: are there good things about the web that we can import to alleviate gopher’s shortcomings?
The discourse A recent thread of that conversation has been an…
Retro web, simple web, and alternatives to the web A simple gopher client for Gnome, written in Vala This is in early stages, but it works fine for most gopher sites. I would like to find time to help out with it.
Shizaru, an opinionated web server This is a web server written in golang that attempts to “serve no evil” by imposing strong opinions on pages that it serves. The…
I had way too many links to share this week, and I had to cut it down a lot to be able to handle all of it. That said, here’s what’s left.
Social Media We Built a Broken Internet. Now We Need To Burn It To The Ground The author argues that the state of social media, especially of Twitter, where harassment is baked into the platform, are a result of white cis men building a platform…
Technology and adjacent politics Gadgets, Power, and the New Modes of Political Consciousness This article is a good antidote to the standard kind of moral panic article over mobile devices. It takes a Marxist perspective on devices, and how the dominant narrative about them treats people (device users) as isolated economic units.
Memex(browser) This is the main page for the Memex browser, a…
Going to try to do this whole link blog entry from emacs. Normally I have a workflow that involves dragging links from Firefox into emacs, where, by a bit of emacs magic, they are automatically converted into Markdown links. But I’m trying to live in the terminal (with Cool Retro Term) this week, so I’m using pinboard-list.el to give me my list of links to share. Hopefully I’ll…
Web A JavaScript-Free Frontend This has some neat tricks that I hadn’t thought of for doing “live” front-end without JavaScript. The checkbox/label trick is really cool, though it’s a little over-complicated for my taste, and besides, doesn’t degrade well in browsers that don’t support CSS. The fact that you can use it to build a modal dialog is crash,…
This blog is produced with hugo, a static site generator, and the articles are written in Markdown, a plain text markup format. Since the articles are fundamentally plain text, for some time I’ve been wanting to make them available over gopher, a simple protocol that was created around the same time as the first versions of the World Wide Web. I used gopher before I used the WWW in Lynx and…
Mercifully short today.
A feminist’s guide to raising boys A lot of this rings true. The article mentions that little boys are different from little girls because even parents treat them differently, even when they don’t mean to. One thing it doesn’t mention is what they pick up from peers, even as toddlers and preschoolers.
Medical benefits of dental floss unproven I…
I didn’t accumulate as many links this week, because while I was sick with the flu, I felt too bad to read as much as usual.
AI won’t relieve the misery of Facebook’s human moderators - The Verge It might allow Facebook to pay less for moderators, though…
The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It’s Sending People to Therapy - VICE There will be no new normal.
What…
Strap in, it’s a little depressing this time.
Why US cities are becoming more dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians Mostly the answer is a good thing — more people are biking and walking. Unfortunately, that brings more people into danger, given that our cities are designed for cars, and not for people.
Pee, not chlorine, causes red eyes from swimming pools: CDC | CBC News The…
Architecture Over the last five years or so, maybe a little bit more, downtown Columbia has been sprouting these student apartments everywhere there’s space for them and a lot of places there isn’t (displacing existing local businesses). One thing about them is that they all look alike – basically they’re long boxes, four or five stories tall, with various superficial…
A properly short linkblog today!
Web development Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS - Signal v. Noise One of a couple of recent articles that talks about how web design has turned into front-end development, which has turned into JavaScript development. The conclusion is good:
Designing for the modern web in a way that pleases users with great, fast designs needn’t be…
Got behind again, and have to drop a lot of things I was going to note here. Fewer is better.
Web topics The Web is Made of Edge Cases by Taylor Hunt on CodePen Designers and front-end developers tend to treat web rendering as a pixel-perfect graphics runtime; it’s not.
How to design website layouts for screen readers – freeCodeCamp.org Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies…
Introduction A year and a half ago, I wrote about what a federated replacement for Facebook would look like. Part of that was differences from Facebook, and another part was differences from Mastodon, the leading federated social network software. Since then, I’ve used Mastodon a lot more, Mastodon has added and changed features, and my thinking has evolved, so I feel like it’s time to…
US Politics It’s Bernie, Bitch | Amber A’Lee Frost Amber from Chapo Trap House explains why Bernie is the only viable candidate for 2020, even if he dies on the campaign trail and his corpse has to be operated like a Muppet.
The Border Patrol Has Been a Cult of Brutality Since 1924 Even among law enforcement agencies, the Border Patrol has always been notably racist.
How Alexandria…
Facebook Facebook rolls out AI to detect suicidal posts before they’re reported | TechCrunch This could actually increase deaths as armed police are dispatched to “check in” on reportedly suicidal people. And that’s not counting the opportunities for algorithmic cruelty, like notifying someone’s domestic abuser that they’re suicidal.
Goodbye Facebook This was the…
It has come to my attention that some people I interact with do not know how to cook grits. This is a matter of the greatest seriousness, which must be remedied immediately.
This is a recipe, or more just guidelines or instructions on how to properly cook grits. It will assume you are lacto-ovo-vegetarian, but will offer vegan substitutions where possible. If you do not like grits, it is…
Brutaldon is a brutalist web client for Mastodon and Pleroma. It supports text-mode browsers such as Lynx and w3m, as well as older graphical browsers. Newer graphical browsers such as Firefox are supported with progressive enhancement.
At this point, it is largely complete — the features it does not have are also not planned. It is possible to use it as your primary interface for…
Computing, emacs dengste/org-caldav: Caldav sync for Emacs orgmode I’ve started to use this, to go along with my resolution to start using calendars more, and to-do lists less.
More emacs configuration tweaks (multiple-cursor on click, minimap, code folding, ensime eval overlays) There were some useful hints in here for me. I tend not to use multiple-cursor-mode, because I have trouble…
Why Calendars are More Effective Than To Do Lists - Srinivas Rao - Pocket Thinking about the link on org-mode use I posted a little while ago that suggested giving every TODO headline a SCHEDULED property.
Pleroma, LitePub, ActivityPub and JSON-LD — kaniini’s blog! Gets at one of the reasons that ActivityPub is problematic — the LinkedData aspect is useful for Big Social…
A little while ago, I wrote a thread on glitch.social about ephemerality of posting on social media as compared to Usenet. It got a little bit of traction, and one person asked if I could post more about Usenet clients. I haven’t gotten to it until today, and I thought I would post on my blog instead of on glitch. The original thread wasn’t really about Usenet clients; it was mainly…
Merry Christmas Edition
Free Software and Adjacent Topics What does a private communicator look like? – Aral Balkan There’s a pretty wide potential space, both hardware and software, for what a personal communicator could look like.
Free software and the revolt against transactionality John Ohno (Modernist Microfiche Minotaur on the fediverse) writes (on Medium, unfortunately) an…
Facebook imploding What Happens When Facebook Goes the Way of Myspace? - The New York Times Even after no one is really using Facebook, everyone’s residual data will still be valuable (and dangerous).
As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants - The New York Times Summary: Facebook gave complete access to its customer data, including “private”…
Newsy/politicky The Snowden Legacy, part one: What’s changed, really? | Ars Technica Article gives maybe too much credit to Snowden’s opponents, but does give a good overview of what the impacts have been.
Finally, some good news: the ERG has been aggressively made love to by an ass | Marina Hyde | Opinion | The Guardian Apparently, Brexit has gotten bad enough that mainstream newspaper…
I aten’t dead.
Stuff that I saw actually this month microformats2-experimental-properties · Microformats Wiki How to use microformats to tag your pronouns in your blog’s metadata
Web Design is 95% Typography: How to Use Type on the Web This is why my hate for JavaScript and the modern web does not extend, as some people’s does, to CSS. CSS is what lets us have reasonably…
I’m very behind on link blogging (over a month! And the last one was very minimal!), so I’m just going to dump some things.
Politics Threat Modeling For Activists: Tips For Secure Organizing & Activism An intro to protecting what you need to protect.
Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence - The New York Times Another case where the cruelty is the only…