-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to dfdn.info:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini;lang=en-US
Welcome to David Norris Central Data Service Gopher Site
(since the DFDN/ directory has no gophermap, it's simply listed)
The classes are on a Tuesday and Wednesday starting at 22:00 UTC,
which is 14:00 PST or 17:00 EST. New for 2023!
You are not alone.
Another example of why starting a new family in the UK is out of th
question - as if government incompetance and the CMS aren't enough.
PS: A young idiot refered to me as 'old guy Dave' in a group interv
last October. I asked if, I gave him a visit in office, he would sa
same to me in person - oh, and I worked in security...
Update: I plan to include a letter to my local member of
parlienment (Jeremy Corbyn) after I leave the UK over conduct of
the CMS! Details to be announced.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<BREAKING NEWS!!!>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
MY VISA IS IN TRANSIT FINALLY!!!
SHIPMENT STATUS: IN TRANSIT
Shipment Information
Origin:
Burkina Faso
Package:
BOXED
Status:
In Transit
Destination:
United Kingdom
Carrier:
USPS
Type of Shipment:
Air Freight
Product:
Visa Documents ( CONFIDENTIAL )
Expected Delivery Date:
2023-03-15
Departure Time:
11:00 am
Pick-up Date:
2023-02-22
Pick-up Time:
10:00 am
PLEASE COMPLY WITH THE SHIPPING PROCESS AND PROCEDURES TO
FACILITATE DELIVERY
Packages
Metric Weight : 0.02kg.Total Volume : 0.00012cu. m.Total
Actual Weight : 5.00kg.Shipment History
Note: Please check back for further updates as some
rescheduling is highly likely around the time of my relocation;
I will have to travel, quarentine and install fibreoptic internet
service; I will keep my students in the loop. I sure hope that
quarentine facility has Wi-Fi!!! This site will eventually
appear on a .bf domain, which I can only register when I arrive
in the country.
Students should continue to schedule classes until further
notice - I will update regarding travel details and the
contingency plan. This will aim to minimise disruption.
I will feel young again soon when I leave here!
Please lord, may my visa arrive ASAP so I can vacate
this hell - before I lose my sanity?!
Sadly, much of the UK's electricity generation (not to mention
heating) comes from gas. For an explanation of the lack of storage
facillities (due to this incompetent government's lack of strategic
planning skill), see below. Note that environmental campaign groups
have said for decades now, 'well if you had listened to us, we
wouldn't be in this mess now, would we?
The following is not word wrapped - download to view:
Domestic abuse, father's alienation and how UK family law colludes,
aids and abets this vile behaviour: and why I plan to campagin
against it - I have my book entitled "when the nightmare came", an
accompanying video entitled "The UK Child Maintainance Service
exposed" and I also plan to write to the local member of
parlienment after leaving the UK...
(Use options: 'Retain existing paragraphs' and 'Keep blanks'.
Line length needs to be 67 charactors as per the standard.
Amid the laughing stock of the UK's goverment fiasco...
These are jokes about those whose parents would get a visit before
they were conceived, and given contraceptive advice - if only I
owned a time machine..
Blagues de la Chambre des horreurs:
Ce sont des blagues sur ceux dont les parents recevraient une
visite avant leur conception et recevraient des conseils sur la
contraception - si seulement je possédais une machine à voyager
dans le temps.
Анекдоти з кімнати жахів:
Це жарти про тих, чиї батьки відвідали б ще до того, як вони були зачаті, і дали б поради щодо контрацепції - якби у мене була
машина часу.
Connection and security issues for users:
Some early radio scanner sheets by Nigel Ballard - from 1990, but
informative nonetheless:
Again very informative: early copy protection - still as relevant
today as it was back then!
The following are good reading practice....
Doom was the (more or less) groundbreaking action shooter game,
although Wolfenstein 3D was almost as advanced. Here is the
origional Doom FAQ from 1993. Another trip down memory lane.
This gopher site is being tested as a website alternative as many
people in Africa pay for data by the megabyte. It has very low
overheads and will use less data. For your information, gopher was
a forerunner of the world wide web and, although largely plaintext,
it uses less data and only fetches the files requested by the user.
Besides, it has a nice aspect sadly lacking on the web! As Tim
Gihring, one of the origional developers of the gopher protocol at
the university of Minnesota puts it:
“It’s actually rather nice to have a small ecosystem because no
one’s running annoying ads in Gopherspace or trying to track your
browsing habits,” he says. “The protocol makes the former hard and
the latter almost impossible.”
As the Web has become synonymous with the internet, and we conduct
more of our lives online, we’ve learned to abide the misinformation
solicitations, and scams that thrive in its chaos — though it has
changed us and society in ways we are only beginning to understand.
If Gopher had won out, who knows how things would be different.
The only downside is that, like all protocols of its time, it does
not encrypt data over the network, so it is not suitable for
business transactions! All traffic is plaintext.
Another protocol under evaluation is gemini; a very new protocol
which operates on port 1965 TCP and transport layer security is an
integral part of the standard. As Project Gemini FAQ states:
"Gemini is a new application-level internet protocol for the
distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration
for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linkin
between files. You may think of Gemini as "the web, stripped right
back to its essence" or as "Gopher, souped up and modernised just a
little", depending upon your perspective (the latter view is probab
more accurate). Gemini may be of interest to people who are...
Opposed to the web's ubiquitous tracking of users
Tired of nagging pop-ups, obnoxious adverts, autoplaying videos and
other misfeatures of the modern web
Interested in low-power computing and/or low-speed networks, either
by choice or necessity
Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as
possible. Instead, the design strives to maximise its "power to wei
ratio", while keeping its weight within acceptable limits. Gemini i
also intended to be very privacy conscious, to be difficult to exte
in the future (so that it will *stay* simple and privacy conscious)
and to be compatible with a "do it yourself" computing ethos.
If you have a gemini browser instaled, here is the link:
Now I intend to test gemini protocol also in addition to the
HTTP server and gopher. It is not a replacement for either, but
will be suplementry to both. The web is most frequently used,
gopher offers simpicity and as previously descriped VERY low
overheads, but has no capability of transport layer security and
is not flexibie by todays standards. Incidentally, gopher is
making a slight resurgence but most browsers cannot support it
without extra plugins, if indeed they are available.
Gemini on the other hand is only about 4 years old at time of
writing and it looks set to have a bright future, albeit little
known in 2022. I intend to experiment with it once I have found
a server which will execute on the OS I have - Agate has been
tried but so far, it compiles but will not xecute on my
operating system it would seem even though it will compile.
So far I am using Lagrange client on Windows 11 and Deedum on
my Android device; other clients are available for both Apple
& Android devices too and there are clients available for Linux,
Unix and Macintosh also - I have not tried these however.
Incidently, HTTP operates on port 80, HTTPS on port 443, gopher
on port 70 and genini on port 1965. All use TCP please note.
Returning to gopher, Take a look at how to structure your own
gopher pages.
The tab separates the display string and the selector (path). If
you don't use a full path, then it is relative to this one.
The item type tells the gopher client what that menu item is. It is
always the first character in a line with tabs. These item types
here were 1 (a menu), 0 (a text file), g (a GIF image) and 9 (a
generic downloadable binary).
Other item types include I = generic image or JPEG.
Item types
In a Gopher menu's source code, a one-character code indicates
what kind of content the client should expect. This code may
either be a digit or a letter of the alphabet; letters are
case-sensitive. The technical specification for Gopher, RFC 1436,
defines 14 item types. The later gopher+ specification defined an
additional 3 types.[23] A one-character code indicates what kind
of content the client should expect. Item type 3 is an error code
for exception handling. Gopher client authors improvised item
types h (HTML), i (informational message), and s (sound file)
after the publication of RFC 1436. Browsers like Netscape
Navigator and early versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer would
prepend the item type code to the selector as described in
RFC 4266, so that the type of the gopher item could be determined
by the url itself. Most gopher browsers still available, use these
prefixes in their urls.
Canonical types
0 Text file
1 Gopher submenu
2 CCSO Nameserver
3 Error code returned by a Gopher server to indicate failure
4 BinHex-encoded file (primarily for Macintosh computers)
5 DOS file
6 uuencoded file
7 Gopher full-text search
8 Telnet
9 Binary file
+ Mirror or alternate server (for load balancing or in case
of primary server downtime)
g GIF file
I Image file
T Telnet 3270
gopher+ types
; Movie file
< Sound file
Non-canonical types
d Doc. Seen used alongside PDF's and .DOC's
h HTML file
i Informational message, widely used.
document rtf file "rich text Format")
/ document rtf file "rich text Format") server 70
document pdf file "Portable Document Format")
/ document pdf file "Portable Document Format") server 70
X document xml file "eXtensive Markup Language" )
<- 67 chars ------------------------------------------------------>
If you just use a display string and a selector, then your host nam
and port are filled in. If you add a host and port, then it becomes
an external link like these:
Add a search engine link! This is external. Item type 7 means a
server you can send a request to.
Add links to other gopherspaces! Use item type 1 for a gopher menu
otherwise.
Add links to web pages! Use item type h and a URL: (a "hURL").
Don't use a host and port; that's part of the URL already.
<- 67 chars ------------------------------------------------------>
<- 67 chars ------------------------------------------------------>
Send comments and suggestions on this tutorial to
davidn@dfdn.org.bf - once I arrive in Burkina Faso I intend to
register this domain; unfortunately it is not cheap and it also
requires you to have a physical presense in the country - which I
soon will god willing!
___________________________________________________________________
Gophered by Gophernicus/3.1.1 on Raspbian/11 armv7l
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-- Page fetched on Sun May 12 13:32:26 2024