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● Gemini Links 15/05/2023: Ex Over Ed, Yak Shaving

Posted in News Roundup at 2:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

While the pub does not seem to attract fellow watchers of it, the – at least where I was born – unavoidable disaster called “Eurovision” was blasting through the televisions, laptops and tablets in the homes of millions of people. For some reason, it’s quite hilarious how this show is more corrupt and scandalous than your average World Cup game, and this contest is not even a truly global song competition!

While going for a slow walk down Writer’s Lane, on this fine Sunday, I suddenly remembered the first free verse poem I ever wrote, back in the mid 90s (later published as the leading poem in my first book of poetry, Ormmänniskan [Serpent Man], in 2015). My father had died the year before, in 1994, and I was utterly lost. He was my mentor, my introduction into the arts, into literature and specifically poetry (he was an aspiring poet back in the early 1940s, but got desillusioned [to say the least] by the war, stationed on the Swedish-Norwegian border all through-out his active service, and started drinking at an early age, found his “safe place”, his own steady pace in life – a periodic abuse of alcohol, a slowly progressing disease that eventually took his life at the age of 74). The overwhelming grief I felt was double-edged. I had been there myself, drank far too much in my early twenties, later went into a self-imposed exile in the U.S. and Mexico and fell into an addictive world of mescalin, DMT and psilocybin. I came out of it, in the early 90s, and never went back. My father stood by me. And my mother, of course. Without them, I wouldn’t be here. And that’s that. Illuminations. And anxiety, passion, fright, darkness, pain, sorrow, love and hope.

My homelab now runs TrueNAS. I have FreeBSD jails for my Gemini server and Mastodon instance, Transmission instance, and Borg backup repositories. Each jail has its own ZFS dataset within the main storage pool.

TrueNAS offers automatic snapshot scheduling and replication. With this, I’ve replaced three Borg backup tasks that were carried out over SSH and were rather slow. I have a separate jail and ZFS dataset that contains a Borg repository that my Fedora PC backs up to over SSH.

The mechanics can be awkward, but to me that kind of reply effort constitutes a genuine like.

It felt more appropriate to meditate on ed, the standard text editor, in a tty rather than in a GUI terminal. 90s memes aside, here’s what I learned about ed.

“Awesome!” I thought, “maybe I can download things to watch offline!” I had no account previously, so there I go create an account, add all my personal details[^0], and it even accepted my 30+ characters long randomly generated password[^1]!

ex(1) has several advantages over ed(1), notably the ability to run filters, and can switch over to vi(1) via the “:vi” command if you get in over your head. Switching to a visual editor might be cheating if the goal is to learn a line editor properly.

I was going to add a little thing to my server to receive messages from people. Not that anyone is likely to send me messages here, but it would have been fun to work on anyway, right?

I haven’t done it yet. That’s because I figured I should probably add support for client certificates, since that’s what Gemini uses for authentication and identity (very neat). Adding support for client certificates seemed like it would be easy. rustls supports it, so all I need to do is change ClientCertVerifier in the configuration object to be an instance of AllowAnyAnonymousOrAuthenticatedClient instead of an instance of NoClientAuth. Easy.

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● 05.15.23

● Gemini Links 15/05/2023: Ex Over Ed, Yak Shaving

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