Weekend Nerdery

As always on the weekend, most of my effort went into family care, but I did have a little bit of nerd time last night and today.

Gemini Mentions spec work

I’m working on an idea I’ve had thoughts about before, which is simplifying and adapting the Webmention standard for use with Gemini. I’ve got about a page of notes on it that look practical, but I want to have working code for both sender and receiver before I put those notes up for discussion. On the Gemini mailing list, we get too much discussion of ideas that aren't backed by working code.

The upshot is that you’d be able to notify the owner of a page that you've linked back to them from one of your pages. Their software might add a link to the replies section of the page, or email the author, or something else useful.

I have a Usenet feed again

I’ve been meaning for a while to set up an account on news.eternal-september.org, a Usenet server that carries all the main hierarchies, but no binaries groups. I finally got around to doing it today. Enjoyed re-subscribing to some of the groups I was subscribed to back in the day, but it remains to be seen if any of them are meaningfully active.

Eternal September (WWW)

Thinking about getting back into OS/2

One of the groups I subscribed to was comp.os.os2.misc, and I was reminded that there’s a company making a version of OS/2 that runs on modern hardware and VMs. I kind of want to install it in a VM, or on bare metal on my little eeePC netbook, and build a Gemini client for it. It’s $130, though, which is a little steep for a hobby purchase.

ArcaOS 5 Personal Edition (www)

Window shopping for a DEC VT420

I really, really want a vintage DEC terminal. I just really can’t justify buying one. I could *maybe* swing the price, but I don’t have anywhere to put it! Literally no surface where a non-portable computer would be home, except in the server closet, which is already taken.

I still really want one, though. I’m not sure how much is nostalgia, and how much is “a more elegant weapon, from a more civilized time”.

Building a lightly-modified Android app

I hate Android Studio with the fire of a thousand suns. It's effectively the only way to build Android apps, but it brings every computer I install it on completely to its knees, even just installing updates to its plugins. The emulator is the worst, though. In the past, I've often just given up waiting for it to start. A full Windows 10 install in Gnome Boxes starts up faster than the Android x86 image.

I somehow got inspired to try it again today, and make a change to an app I wanted to tweak. With the new SSD on my laptop, it wasn't as bad as I remembered, but I think I’ll stay clear of the emulator. Anyway, I modified Gelli, a nice native music client for the Jellyfin media server, to support bitrates down to 32kbps, for mobile use. I got it build and working – on the client side – with very little trouble.

As it turns out, though, there’s a bug in Jellyfin where it doesn't actually transcode to the bitrate you request; if the bitrate you request is lower than the track’s native bitrate, it transcodes to 128kbps, regardless of what you asked for. This is not entirely useful, and it makes my work on Gelli wasted. But oh, well. It’s not a huge loss.

Gelli on F-Droid (www)