gemini_crosspost – Page 4

Untitled

# Untitled
## Wed 18 Jan 2023 03:52:25 PM EST

I had a quick little epiphany a few moments ago; part of my problem is that I have too many computers.

Thing is, that’s exactly how I want it. I wants all teh pee-cees.

…but, yeah, no, I relized that part of my problems are that I have so many things available to me at the moment–and yet, not a lot, really–and I have no real idea of what I want to do with all of them, and in what order I should attack things.

Years ago, when I was more limited, it was easier to sort out what I wanted to accomplish, and what my boundaries were. Now, I’m working with more resources, and have fewer boundaries–especially considering a lot of the little things I want to play with and explore aren’t that resource heavy.

…guess I really need to stop and organize my thoughts.

blah.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

Untitled

# Untitled
## Sun 15 Jan 2023 06:48:35 PM EST

Just thought I’d pop in for a quick little post, since I’m wanting to try and take this seriously. I’ve got several ideas of things that I could try to write about, but I’m honestly not feeling the writing vibe at this moment–I’d rather toy around with a few more of my little pet projects instead. (The pet projects, oddly enough, are a few of the things I would like to write about when I’m actually feeling it)

I dunno. Until the writing bug bites me, I’ll think I’ll leave it at that for now.

Thanks for reading;

–J

=> ../ Go back to the main site

I was pretty hateful and ugly in my earlier adult years

# I was pretty hateful and ugly in my earlier adult years
Fri 13 Jan 2023 04:39:53 PM EST

…and I came to that conclusion after reviewing a few of my older posts. Wow. I won’t really take anything that I had said or done back–unless it is something I’ve already taken back, of course–but still… yikes.

Needless to say, I’ve already removed some of the more colorful and private posts from public view. For the most-part you would have to be in the know of my life at the time to understand them, anyway.

A point of self-reflection, I guess; and in that I think I’ve discovered that I have changed and grown slightly–primarily through the company I keep–and yet, I haven’t changed all that much. Honestly the latter strikes a bit of fear within me, as if I haven’t changed all that much, then I am still very capable of being the same person I had been–which is a hateful and ugly weakling.

Oh, well.

I’ll be moving on to try and do some more work on this journal or whatever you wanna call it.

–J

I just realized that its Friday the 13th

# I just realized that it’s Friday the 13th

…yep. Just came to that realization when I set to write this little post. Normally, I wouldn’t care about the date, but when trying to follow a dating scheme for writing a silly journal entry filename… blah. Anyway, lookout, Jason’s coming!

So, I’m back to tinkering around with gemini stuffs; not only that, but I think I figured out that my focus on it should just be my focus. No games, schemes, whatever B.S. I was tring to think of doing. I mean, sure, documenting a bunch of crap about things I’m playing around with is a good idea, but trying to figure out how to possibly make a buck with it or create a following instead of just letting it come naturally? That’s my problem. I try to overthink things and try to find a way to make things becaome greater than what they actually are or should be. This should just be about me having fun and tring to find ways of expressing myself to myself and for myself without a whole lot of outer influence–or outer influence that I’m trying to machine.

Any of that make sense? No?

Okay, so here’s the deal. I’d thought once upon a time that maybe I could get on the youtuber bandwagon or maybe even create some sort of blog where I could earn a little extra income. I mean, there’s all these other people out there doing it, and presenting me with hours of informational entertainment doing what they love–doing things I love!–and GETTING PAID for it! Hell, why can’t I do that sort of thing?

…well. I can’t. Or at least I shouldn’t. Not yet, anyway. I need to be me first. So, no trying to figure out how to brand and market myself. Let’s just go back to figuring out how to be myself.

So, as part of this journey, I’ve decided to bring a bit of my older (younger?) self with me for the ride, and have imported some old WordPress and LiveJournal entries (the old LJ stuff is buried within the WP stuff, as I imported those entries there.) Hell, there’s even some MySpace stuff tucked away in there somewhere. Point being, I’ve grabbed up about as much junk that I’ve written as I can and plan on diving into some of it, and welcome you to do the same–assuming that there is a “you” reading this somewhere. I also plan on actually making it a point to write more often. As you’ll notice in going through my archives of posts, I used to write quite a bit; sure most of it was nonsense, but it was something that I felt I needed to share with someone, if not just with myself.

I dunno, I feel as if I’m beginning to ramble as I really had no real thoughts as to what to write when I began to write any of this. <-- See, rambling. So, anyway, I think I'll leave it here for now. Thanks for stopping by; -J

Untitled

Sat 11 Jun 2022 09:03:33 PM EDT

…well, I’ve taken a few minutes to sit down and change the navigation for this little capsule, adding in a link to what may someday become a link for a separate, more personal journal. I’m not sure if I will take advantage of this, yet.

I still need to see if I can do a little tweaking to the script I have for gemtexter. When it comes to translating things to html it’s perfect as far as I can tell; however there is a glitch where whitespace is added when it creates the entry list in the gmi file. I’m guessing that I don’t see this issue in html as the parser ignores that extra whitespace that was inserted.

I’ve written myself a quick little script that creates a blank post ready for editing, if you can’t tell from the lazyness of the past few posts. The blank file that’s created is given a filename of [–datestring–]-Untitled-[–timestring–].gmi and then filled with the above hash-headers, [INSERT TEXT HERE] for the body and then the “Thanks for reading” signature below. If I’m super lazy, I can just leave the post Untitled and roll with it. If I want to change it, of course I can go rename the file after I’ve saved. I foresee a lot of “Untitled” posts, ass I’m pretty lazy.

…sometime soon I hope to figure out a better way of having syncronization with WordPress.

Oh, well.

Thanks for reading;

–J

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Untitled

Sat 11 Jun 2022 02:02:15 PM EDT

Been a little bit since I’ve written anything. Just wanted to pop in and say that I’m still committed to exploring and writing about my adventures in (re-) discovering old tech and games–I’ve just been a little busy focusing my time elsewhere. I’ll have more content coming soon.

Thanks for reading;

–J

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Untitled

Thu 26 May 2022 07:25:50 AM EDT

…another quick little post on something I’m doing–and just like the last post, this is only a quick mention and not a deep dive into any of it.

I’ve been messing around with trying to IM in the terminal console, and have been having a blast doing so. As of right now I’ve been using Bitlbee on the backend to connect to a few different services, and then Weechat as my client. I’m loving this!

…in other news, I’m thinking about expanding the concept of using gemini for just plain ol’ personal blogging, too. All this time I’m trying to spend in the console, anyway–plus I seem to be slightly more inspired to write within this space–I dunno; I think I’ll be trying to figure out a better directory structure for things and how I can have my more personal stuff and the stuff I really want to publicize live symiotically and separately simultaneously…

I dunno… Anyway…

Thanks for reading;

–J

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Untitled

Tue 24 May 2022 09:24:38 AM EDT

I’ve been continuing to tinker with the CLI in Linux, and learning how to try and do as much as possible via remote connections, so that I’m not stuck in the one room of the house; it’s been a pretty fun little journey!

I really don’t have any thoughts organized at this moment to be able to write more than that simple sentence above…

…just thought I’d drop that quick little line, though. Maybe I’ll get some time to write more in the near future.

Thanks for reading;

–J

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Curling Weather and Simulated Time

Tue 10 May 2022 09:31:01 AM EDT

Two neat little things I want to share before I end up fogetting about them; both available running online, and both having source available for runnning at home.

wttr.in

I can’t really remember how I discovered this site, though I can guarantee it while while I went on a simple little search for terminal/console based things to do. wttr.in does several neat little tricks for displaying short term weather forecasts, with a character-based display being the common thread amongst all the outputs. What caught my attention about it was that I could pull the weather via curl–sure, maybe not the most exciting thing to some, but this side of computing–doing “big” things via command-line–is still new to me. Being in an SSH seesion with my tablet, thinking “I wonder what today’s high will be,” and typing in

curl http://wttr.in/Lexington?u

just fascinates me. To check out wttr.in, head on over to the site and check out the source at github.

https://wttr.in/
https://github.com/chubin/wttr.in

WWV Simulator

Several weeks ago I started talking to my wife about shortwave radio. Okay, maybe I didn’t do so much talking as I did introducing the concept and then showing a youtube video or two on the subject; but while I was watching the videos with her, I mentioned one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid and had access to my Dad’s receiver was tune in to WWV and listen to the station announce the time. (This also helped explain why I would occasionally look at a clock and if I was in the right mood say “at the tone, one hour, forty-six minutes,”)

In order to try and give her an example of the experience I did a quick little search to see if anyone was silly enough to record a portion of the broadcast and post it somewhere online–I mean, if we have weather radio sirens and EAS headers online, surely someone has recorded that… Well, I found something even better.

The WWV simulator uses your system clock and a bit of javascript to play out recorded samples from WWV or WWVH in your browser. Pretty neat, eh? I found it awesomely fascinating, and through it had my first experience hearing Hawaii.

You can check out the simulator and source at the links below:

https://wwv.mcodes.org/
https://github.com/kalafut/wwv

Thanks for reading;

–J

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Commencing Countdown, Engines On

Sun 08 May 2022 12:44:56 PM EDT

In the last post I scraped the surface on getting myself introduced to gemini. Now, I think I’d kind of like to document what I’ve done to try and set up this little capsule and server. WARNING: this post may end up being a bit erratic–more like a scratchpad with a terrible brainstorming map scrawled on it. Apologies if that make things uninteresting or difficult to follow, but I can already feel that I’m not very focused–plus I’m attempting to lead you down a path of discovery that wasn’t very focused to begin with…

So, there I was, sitting at my desk and staring at that peculiarity on my screen:

http://homelinux.nsupdate.info:8081/x/gemini.ctrl-c.club/~nristen/gemlog/20210602.gmi

…what was this gemini protocol from which this “gemlog” entry originated?

As stated previously, a quick google search led me to find a few answers–as well as lead me to discovering that there was even more odd stuff happening on the Internet. A retro-renaissance of sorts, I guess? A revolution? I don’t quite know how to describe it, really–perhaps because I don’t really understand it, and perhaps because I was not fully a part of the birth and growth of things to begin with–prior to this particular wave of Internet communications and presence. Anyway, with regard to to gemini I discovered that someone came up with the idea of establishing a new protocol not too disimilar from an older one–gopher. (That’s something else I never really played with much, outside of a few times in school while doing research–I was just too ill-informed to realize what I was using.) Since this was something new and relatively close to an older way of doing things, I figured I’d give it a shot–as it is something that somewhat goes along with my interests and walks very closely to this silly project of mine that will likely go nowhere.

So, how do I get into the geminispace? This was a bit more confusing than I thought it should be–I mean, I saw different links around for multiple browsing clients, but which one should I choose? Okay, pause for a second to acknowledge that I did try to explore a little bit via a couple of proxies. That experience was cool, I guess, and did encourage me to press forward with finding a dedicated client. But again, which client should I choose? Is there any particular client that is better than another, with regard to usuability and feature-set? And features? Really? I mean what features am I really looking for when it comes to browsing a network of text? In the end, I figured that I was just trying to overcomplicate things and apply the logic of the current world-wide-web to a network that is a hell of a lot simpler. Simplicity; that should be the focus. So, no graphical UI; let’s go with something that is character based. After looking at a couple of options, I chose Amfora.

https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora
gemini://makeworld.space/amfora-wiki

Awesome. I have a client. Let’s get to browsing. But–heh, heh, there’s that one question again–where to start? There is no Google here, no CNN, no funky ISP splash page… so, where do I begin? Well, first I began with loading Amfora’s help page so that I could try to commit to memory a few basic key commands; knowing how to use the program is always a good idea, right? After that, I chose to simply go back to the Project Gemini page–this time natively!–and then simply follow a few links from there.

After a bit of wandering around and scraping the surface of what all is out there–and it would seem that there is liekly more out there than we actually know about–I decided it was time to set up my own little capsule.

Remember that bit just a few lines ago where I said that deciding upon a browsing client was a bit confusing and complicated for me? Well, a little more of the same happened here…

There are several hosts out there for you to create your own little capsule on–a surprising number, in my opinion. All are free at the moment, from what I see. Some are exclusive, in a sense, in that they’re running on a “club-membership” server–if you’re a member of some sort of computing club, chances are decent that you’ve got the ability to set up a capsule there; of course, chances are you already have, and are sitting there thinking I’m a blathering idiot. Anyway, I poked around looking at hosts for a very brief moment, and then realized I could simply run my own server software and not have to worry about finding shared space to occupy–and furthermore not worry about potentially upsetting someone in the future and getting kicked from there server! (I’ve never experienced anything like that, but it’s always been a constant fear of mine… but that’s definietely another story.) So, the hunt for server software…

After reading a few different reviews–which there didn’t seem to be that many in my searches–and finding a couple of personal experiences written online, I settled on Agate:

https://github.com/mbrubeck/agate

Setup and installation of Agate was pretty easy; I don’t recall having any major hoops to jump through or really any tweaks that I needed to make in order to get things up and running. Overall, I’d say that portion of things was relatively painless, once I reminded myself once again to try and keep from looking for ways to complicate things. Complicating things, however, seems to be what I do best, and leads us into the next step of what I wanted to try and achieve; I wanted to figure out a way to mirror things–just like the page that led me down this rabbit hole to begin with.

I really don’t remember the paths and searches I took next in order to get where I landed–and my browsing history is a mess on top of things, so I really have no way of trying to reconstruct the chain of events that led me there. I can, however, tell you that I did finally settle upon a little package of scripts called Gemtexter:

https://foo.zone/gemfeed/2021-06-05-gemtexter-one-bash-script-to-rule-it-all.html
gemini://foo.zone/gemfeed/2021-06-05-gemtexter-one-bash-script-to-rule-it-all.gmi
https://codeberg.org/snonux/gemtexter

…and, of course, with this, I decided to try and complicate things more. I did make a few little tweaks to the scripts in order to have it fit the way I wanted things organized… I changed the file locations and the directories referenced, as well as added in the ability to put a date stamp on pages for when it’s run. All of that probably would have went a lot better if I knew what I was doing–see, I’m very much still the novice when it comes to Linux and scripting–or coding and programming anything in any language, for that matter. After hours of struggling and discovery–again, because I don’t know what I’m doing–I got it to work the way I wanted. YAY!!!

…but can I get it to also convert and push things to a WordPress install? (There I go, trying to complicate things, again.) As of this moment, I’m going to have to say the answer is no, at least not that I’ve managed to figure out. It looks like one of the file formats that Gemtexter outputs–MarkDown–could be used very easily for ultra simplicity, and that one additional hooked script could push it into WP via the wp-cli with a few git hooks tied into the WP installation as well… but I’m not that knowledgeable. So I opted instead to create a totally different, separate script that I can run after Gemtexter to push the most recent HTML encoded entry into my WP install via the cli.

So, I don’t know… I guess that my story for now. I hope to come back soon with something other than stories surrounding trying to explore geminispace, and get a little further into what I’m really wanting to try and accomplish, here. Until then…

Thanks for reading;

–J

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