November 2021 Status update

Servers

I added "XMPP server" to the list of things I now maintain. Reason being is due to some SMS messages getting filtered (read censored 🤦). XMPP provides messaging buzzwords such as decentralization, federation, and encryption. If you regularly send me SMS messages, get in contact to get my XMPP info to use instead.

In other reliability news, this month featured a small dose of Hard drive failure (This post will lack a paragraph about SD card failure, as that should be more expected).

If you've been visiting this capsule in the last year with a TOFU-respecting browser, you'll notice I'm using a new certificate. As noted by my previous post, I needed to get new certificates. When my server crashed, I accelerated the process. I had a raspberry pi zero sitting around (with impressive uptime), so I cloned this capsule's sources onto that, and allowed gmnisrv to get a new certificate (rather than copying the one from the recovered hard drive).

Yeah, I did eventually recover files from the (>10 y/o) hard-drive, but decided to give that machine rest (and a new SSD). It's now connected to my TV as an offline gaming device. (I'm not much of a gamer: So far, I've played Towerfall, eventually want to install Stepmania on it as well).

Gemini-service changes

wiki.zachdecook.com is no longer up. It was my personal wiki in gemini space (editable by email). At 8 updates, it never grew past the original three pages. I briefly considered doing something with titan instead, but I still think email is a great protocol for editing arbitrary gemini pages. Does reliability matter?

In some routine maintenance, I discovered that some of my gemini bookmarks were deadlinks! To preserve history, I created a (shell oneline) script which downloads gemini pages out of my bookmarks.gmi file. I also modified my bookmarks.sh script to check for client certs. As it turns out, Grande (my stagnant fork of the now-deceased Ariane android app) has support for client-certs (which I never tested until now). I might add a script to autogenerate client certs for others who are interested.

PinePhone Developments

Gerbil

I made some contributions to Gerbil, a gemini client for mobile linux written in python.

Notably, I added the "up" button, or '[parent]', which Mozz originally envisioned back in January.

Shoutouts to Armen138 for being a great maintainer to work with.

On the topic of client-certs, Gerbil seems to do it the same way Grande does, that is, having a single client-cert used on every site. While it's great for simplicity and usability, it sacrifices privacy: servers could implement cross-site tracking per device (rather than per-ip).

SXMO/SWMO-related

I revised my App Store script quite a bit. This allows SXMO users to add or remove recommended software packages. I think ideally, it would use appstream data, but I hope the current version is good enough to get some real use before making the next jump.

Looking back at my last post, it seems there are a few things working better which might be ready to push upstream. I've been using one emoji-menu, and it works quite well. Also, some changes to make vte-2.91 work as sxmo_terminal.sh should be upstreamed.

Keyboard

Currently, I'm thinking about how to best deliver my keyboard concept. While unix philosophy is great for development, I'm leaning toward creating (and branding) the swiping keyboard separately. Reason-being is that development will be faster without having to worry about internationalization. While power-users could take the same software and tune it to their language, I think supporting 1 language would be the easiest thing for me to do by myself. Don't expect to hear anything about this until there's a release.

Other Software

After many months of stagnation, aerc (a terminal email client) finally has a maintainer. Hopefully it will become more reliable. I'll probably resubmit some of my patches to this, as the backlog may never be cleared.

Stuff and things

Does anyone read this? Should I be sharing my links on mastodon/station/(some XMPP-based social network)? Next week, we observe Thanksgiving here in the US, so I'll say now that I'm thankful for working computers and the US Dollar.

-Zach