+++ New +++
Saturday, October 06, 2018
Hello gentle reader! Note I've moved this phlog over to
republic.circumlunar.space [0].
[0] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/1/~slugmax
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+++ Gophernicus is Back +++
Sunday, September 30, 2018
I see tomasino posted a bboard request [0] to revert gopher.club
back to gophernicus, and also to upgrade it, and it appears that is
done now. Very nice!
[0] gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20180929-sdf-gopher-servers
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+++ SDF Nuked Gophernicus Again +++
Friday, September 28, 2018
Sigh. It seems gopher.club has changed its gopherd to Bucktooth...
again, and with no warning... again... breaking all gopher moles
(CGIs)... again. Sdf.org still uses gophernicus, however, which is
kind of confusing, especially if you read the gopher tutorial and
setup a CGI like it describes there, only to have it fail when your
phlog gets listed on gopher.club.
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+++ Books vs. E-books +++
Sunday, September 16, 2018
My wife and I had a discussion about books the other day. She is
reading a large hardcover, a book she got from English section of
the local library. She mentioned how much better she likes reading
actual books. I agreed, but it got me to thinking why I actually
feel this way. E-readers do have advantages, but something is
missing that makes reading from an e-reader seem less than
appealing. I think it is that e-books are sterile, they don't
provide the same sensory experience as real books. With a real book
you have the feel of the pages as you turn them. The visible
feedback as to just how much of the book you have read, as measured
by the thickness of the pages remaining. The smell of the book
itself. The ease with which you can hold it while reclining on your
couch. Flipping back a few pages to remember a character's name or
plot point while keeping your current position secure with a
finger. All combine to make a complete experience that e-readers
cannot match.
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+++ Reading List: Ken Follett +++
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
I just finished reading a very good book, 'Eye of the Needle' by Ke
Follett. It's a thriller set in WWII England, about the hunt for a
German spy. Very compelling reading, Follett is a great
writer. Mostly character-driven, but somehow he keeps you wanting
to turn the page. If you like historical fiction in particular
you'll enjoy it. I read another of his books recently, 'Pillars of
the Earth', which was equally engrossing, set in the early
middle-ages. There is a sequel to that latter one which is on my
"to-read" list.
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+++ Positive Changes at SDF +++
Saturday, August 18, 2018
I've been away from SDF for a bit, but I caught up on bboard today
and notice signs of increased responsiveness from the 'membership'
account. It seems to be replying to each and every requests thread,
and a lot of the helpdesk ones as well. I see more frequent emails
on new features, some like ssh-over-https that were requested by
users with a fairly quick turnaround time in implementation. I'm no
sure if this is smj or a group of admins (more likely the latter),
but the attention is welcome and long overdue. Thanks SDF!
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+++ Home Ownership +++
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
We've been looking into buying a house recently, two years after we
sold our house in the US. We've been renting a house in Canada ever
since, and I kind of like it.
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+++ Reply to Tfurrows on Canada +++
Friday, July 27, 2018
Tfurrows ruminates on Canadian citizenship for himself and his kids
[0]. This is exactly the situation I was in - born prior to 2009, t
a Canadian father outside of Canada. I was easily able to reclaim m
Canadian citizenship.
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+++ Congrats to Tomasino +++
Thursday, July 26, 2018
Congrats to Tomasino on getting his Italian citizenship [0], and
welcome to the US expat club [1]! I have never been to Iceland, but
have always wanted to visit, I think it would be a wonderful place
to settle. Moving to another country is quite an ordeal, but well
worth it. I hope it all works out for you!
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+++ I'm not Surprised +++
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
I'm not surprised [0], the web has been a mess for some time, but
it's really, painfully bad as of 2018. The wholesale move to
client-side, dynamic page generation is partly to blame. And for
what purpose? Client-side designs are harder to test, and more
brittle as far as dealing with odd browser dependencies. They are
also slower than generating content directly on the server-side,
when you consider that the content still has to come from the
server, except now it is coming from dozens of RPCs (add up the
network overhead of each request). Let's not forget all the
javascript loaded from third-party websites used for tracking and
ads, these slow down the sites even more.
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+++ CLI Translation Utility +++
Sunday, June 10, 2018
I came across a great command line translation utility 'translate
shell' [0]. It provides a script 'trans', which is written in pure
bash and gives an interface to the most popular online translation
sites (by default it will use Google translate). Here is an example
of it translating one of my recent French phosts [1]. The
translation is pretty accurate, at least enough to convey the
meaning. It has loads of options and I could see it being used to
facilitate a gopher-based translation site.
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+++ Finally Spring +++
Saturday, May 12, 2018
It appears spring has finally arrived in Québec, after a bout of
unseasonably cold weather. My walks are more pleasant now, with the
trees budding and things coming to life in general.
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+++ Android Gopher Client +++
Thursday, May 03, 2018
I came across a new Android gopher client called 'DiggieDog'
[0]. Nothing outstanding, but it works fine as a basic client and
even has bookmark support. It has the usual issues with garbled
display of ascii-art and line wrap, but I'm not sure it's possible
to fix those in all cases in the mobile format.
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+++ On Losing Weight +++
Monday, April 02, 2018
Txminth talks about his diet [0] - congrats on losing that weight!
I, too have been following the "hacker's diet" recently and countin
calories. My target is 1800 per day with a brisk walk most days
(five days a week). I've lost six pounds in two weeks. I have been
doing the walks for about two years, but my weight always held
steady until now. Counting calories really makes you aware of how
much you are eating.
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+++ Responses on Attention and Atheism +++
Monday, April 02, 2018
Solderpunk shared a link to an article on getting your attention
back [0], I agree it was not very insightful. But it made me think
of how digital books can sometimes impact attention negatively, at
least for me.
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+++ Skiing and a Gopher Mirror +++
Sunday, March 18, 2018
We're having a snowy and cold March here in Quebec, but the clouds
broke today and it was sunny and -8. It turned out to be a perfect
day for some cross-country skiing - my wife and I got in 8km this
afternoon. The conditions were phenomenal, with minimal wind, nice,
cold snow (the kind that makes that satisfying hard scrape as your
skis travel over it) and no ice to speak of.
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+++ Remembering Prepping +++
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Reading Melton's phlog [0] has made me miss my own experiments i
self-sufficiency and preparedness.
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+++ Resp. to Tomasino and Jynx +++
Sunday, March 11, 2018
Tomasino moved his gopher hole away from SDF [0], it's no
self-hosted on a RPi. He cites the recent stealth changes to SDF's
gopher implementation as his main reason for moving.
TEXT Continued...
+++ Emacs and Remote Editing +++
Thursday, March 08, 2018
I've been working from the Meta-array (MA) lately since I'm findin
it a bit more responsive as far as editing and savin
documents. That probably has to do with the heavy use of the cluste
and that fact that you're always working over an NFS mount (althoug
I must say it's better lately on NetBSD 8.0 beta).
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+++ Text Formatting and Emacs +++
Wednesday, March 07, 2018
There have been lots of interesting posts lately about tex
formatting tools [0][1][2][3][4] (I particularly like the artisti
bent of jynx's and cat's posts with the embedded ascii art). Sinc
I'm an Emacs guy I've used muse mode in the past - this is what
wrote the SDF Emacs tutorial and cheatsheet in. For that they wer
invaluable since I had one source document and could generate HTML
text, and epub [5]. Speaking of formatting, in Emacs there is
minor mode called refill-mode, it auto-fills paragraphs as you type
with whatever justification you set ('M-x set-justification-full' i
what I'm using for this post). You can also disable refill-mode an
just manually fill paragraphs with M-q every so often.
TEXT Continued...
+++ Response to Solderpunk +++
Thursday, February 22, 2018
Just a quick reply to solderpunk, I would indeed be interested in a
80s-themed hotel room [0]. Genius! Alas, I agree modern (wo-)man
would be intent on just taking selfies with console TVs and princes
phones.
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+++ Woodnotes Guides on Gopher +++
Monday, February 19, 2018
I love finding new gopher sites. I posted a link to the classic
'Woodnotes Guide to Mutt' [0] in bboard today. After perusing the
author's blog, I discovered he uses gopher [1], and his site is
mirrored there, including all his tech guides [2].
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+++ I Miss the 80s +++
Friday, February 16, 2018
With apologies to my younger readers.
TEXT Continued...
+++ Long Live Bongusta +++
Thursday, February 08, 2018
Just a quick note to thank Logout for Bongusta [0] and for keeping
it around [1]. I use it every day and I'm sure others do as well.
TEXT Continued...
+++ Thoughts on Finding Recently Updated SDF Gopherholes +++
Saturday, February 03, 2018
I and some others have noticed some issues recently with the SDF
phlogosphere display [0] and the sort order. So you know the
history, way back in 2009, smj posted this to the GOPHER bboard:
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+++ Long-Ass Gophermaps +++
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Regarding Solderpunk's gopher bboard reply, on overly long
gophermaps and how VF-1 does not handle them with a pager:
TEXT Continued...
+++ The VF-1 Gopher Client +++
Monday, January 22, 2018
So I took some time today to put solderpunk's new gopher client VF-
[0][1] through its paces. I'm using whatever version is currently
installed on SDF. First let me say that I love the interface design
despite it being quite different from lynx and gopher I got used to
it pretty quickly (as in a few minutes). I think anyone with REPL
experience will feel at home with it. The search facility and
veronica commands are very useful. I particularly like the
auto-generation of menus after each operation, whether that be a
search or link extraction (and that last is quite handy).
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+++ Pale Blue Dot +++
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
I've been keeping a low profile lately as post-holiday work has bee
a bear and I've not had the motivation to write. But I'm catching u
on things today and saw a phost by gunnarfrost that caught my eye
[0]. He mentions the view of earth from space and how this has
shaped our philosophical views of the meaning of life. This made me
think of Carl Sagan's the 'Pale Blue Dot' [1][2], which is about th
view of Earth from Voyager I, seen as a tiny speck from about six
million kilometers away. Here is the quote:
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+++ Thoughts on Pseudo-anonymity +++
Tuesday, January 02, 2018
Solderpunk talks about pseudonymity [0] and the issues surrounding
it. Thankfully I do not recall ever reading that bit of bad advice
by Eric Raymond.
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+++ Welcome 2018 +++
Monday, January 01, 2018
Welcome to the new year, fellow gopherites! I notice some phloggers
have archived their 2017 posts into a sub-folder, with an apology
for breaking links. I see the most impact to that will be in the
'reply' posts where we link to one another, although the naming
convention from here on out should prevent that (phlog/ ->
phlog/2017/, for example). When I thought about archiving my posts,
I realized this a good reason to use gophermaps for a phlog - that
one layer of abstraction above raw directory indexes allows one to
archive posts transparently. In my case, I only needed to copy the
2017 posts into an empty subfolder, with their gophermap:
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