Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 14

When I was first experimenting with the Gemini Protocol, Lagrange quickly became my favorite Gemini client on the desktop. It’s visually clean, it’s fast, it runs well (and stable) on Linux, macOS and Windows, and the UI works the way you’d expect it to coming from using a web browser, down to details like middle-clicking to open a link in a new background tab.

Lagrange registers itself on all three platforms as a handler for gemini: URLs and will send http: and https: URLs to the desktop’s default handler, so it’s possible to seamlessly follow links between Geminispace and the web, switching between Lagrange and Firefox/Vivaldi/etc.

You might still need an extra step to open links from Firefox.

The author has also been fast to implement useful conventions like the subscription scheme, conveniences like opening linked images inline and giving each capsule its own color scheme, and related small-internet (or “smol internet” if you prefer) protocols like Titan (used for uploading files, which was deliberately left out of Gemini itself), Spartan and Nex (even more minimalist!), and Misfin (for sending messages). And yes, it also works with older protocols like Finger and Gopher.

Off the Desktop

The mobile version is allegedly still in beta, but works surprisingly well on my Android phone! It has all the same features, except it’s a single screen instead of tabs and windows.

There’s also a terminal-based interface that looks as much as possible like the desktop app as you can get with text characters, colors and (optionally) emoji. I’ve only played with it a little bit since I couldn’t get the AppImage to run and kept putting off compiling it myself. I finally did and it feels a lot more natural to use than amfora (the classic monochrome terminal-based client). The key commands for following links seemed weird at first glance, but I got used to them in a matter of seconds, whereas I still get tripped up in amfora.

Notes

On Linux, the Flatpak has worked more consistently for me than the AppImage has. Fedora offers a package as well, but it tends to lag behind a bit.

Agate is a simple Gemini Protocol server. It’s a single binary, needs only minimal configuration, and sets up TLS certs for you. It only serves static files, but you can also enable multiple hostnames, directory listings and custom headers if you want to, so you can redirect pages that have moved or use it as a download server.

It’s fast. It’s stable. I’ve been running my Gemini capsule on it for three years* and I don’t think it’s ever crashed. Updates are a matter of downloading the latest release from GitHub, killing the old process, and launching the new one. No need to mess with Docker or anything like that unless you want to.

If you’re reading the Gemini version of this review, it’s serving the page right now!

Since I don’t have root on the VPS I’m running it on, I can’t set up a proper system service, but I can add cron jobs, so it’s easy enough to schedule one for @reboot pointing to my launch script.

Running a Gemini Server on a VPS Without Root

The Gemini Protocol as a whole does support dynamically-generated pages and simple interactions, and there are other servers that can handle both.

A perfect balance of powerful and lightweight, Notepad++ is far more capable than Notepad, but doesn’t complicate things like a full IDE.

This Windows text editor launches fast enough I don’t even bother using Notepad anymore. It works great for editing large files, using custom syntax highlighting, multifile / regex / multiline search and replace, sorting, dealing with duplicates, and all kinds of advanced things you might want to do on a text file or group of them. I’ve opened multi-megabyte CSV files, sorted or filtered, and re-saved in the time it would take Excel to parse them.

Free Software, in both senses of the word.

Notepad++ is my main text editor on Windows, just as BBEdit is on MacOS. As for Linux, Notepad++ works great on Wine. There’s a little more overhead though, so when I don’t need its advanced features I still use Featherpad for speed.

If I wanted to boil The Telling down to just one word, I’d choose “thoughtful.”

Reading it was a different experience from reading Le Guin’s other science fiction. Most of what I’d read up to this point was written in the 1960s and 1970s. This was published in 2000 – and the era it comments on is one I lived through.

The cover blurb makes it sound like a cautionary tale about our highly-tech-dependent world (even in the 1990s!), but it’s not the technology that’s the problem. It’s the homogenization of culture, and the insistence that there be one perspective, and only one perspective, that really matters.

Think of how we travel and find the same chain stores, chain restaurants, the ISO standard Irish Pub with its bric-a-brac decor, and how our TV and movies are full of endless reboots, spinoffs, sequels and formulaic feel-good Hallmark specials…

We see it first in Sutty’s* memories of Earth, controlled largely by a theocracy until contact with alien civilizations kicks their support out from under them. And then in the world she’s trying to understand, one that’s undergone a complete transformation in the time it took her to travel there at relativistic speed. She knows there were flourishing cultures here before she left Earth. She studied the few fragments that made it offworld during first contact. But she finds a world that has discarded its past and modeled itself on the technology of the one she left, as thoroughly and insistently as China transformed itself during and after the Cultural Revolution.**

She’s frustrated and depressed, and when she starts finding hints of the world banished in the name of modernity, she’s confused trying to piece together all the disparate and contradictory pieces.***

It’s largely a story of discovery: Sutty trying to figure out what the heck “The Telling” actually is and what it means, and the government agent shadowing her also discovering what it is he’s trying to suppress and why. A lot of it takes place in small villages, but there’s also a long trip through mountains that feels like counterpoint to the glacier expedition in The Left Hand of Darkness.

Well worth the read!

Notes

Snac reminds me of an old Web 1.0 guestbook (minus the garish backgrounds and colors) – except it’s actually talking with the Fediverse!

It’s an extremely bare-bones social networking server that you can still use to post text and images, and follow and interact with people on the same or other servers using ActivityPub such as Mastodon, PixelFed, GoToSocial and so on.

There’s a simple web view for public posts and a simple view for logged-in users. And it works without cookies or JavaScript. It’ll even run on Dillo (a comparably bare-bones browser). Current versions are also compatible with Mastodon apps like Tusky or Elk.

It’s not ideal if you follow a lot of other people. In fact a lot of the design choices and missing features are to discourage you from spending too much time on social media. But it’s good if you want to take a deliberate, focused approach to networking.

Hosting Notes

It’s a single process, uses files instead of a database, and takes all of 10 seconds to compile from source. Updating is generally a matter of pulling the latest code and running make clean; make; sudo make install.

Last I looked, Mastodon required three Docker containers just to run. And updating? Major admin tax, there! (It’s even the prime example!) Even GoToSocial, which is quite capable of running well on a low-end machine and a heck of a lot simpler to manage, is bulky by comparison.

Snac? I once saw someone remark that they’d put it on a server that was doing something else, and the resource usage was “a rounding error.” And that’s part of why I’ve kept my test server running. You can see Snac in action at @KelsonTalksTech@snac24.keysmash.xyz.

GoToSocial and Snac are both designed for sites with a smallish number of local users who can talk to each other and the broader Fediverse. I ran test instances of both for several months before settling on GoToSocial for my particular use case, which involved longer threads and faster timelines than Snac is built for.

Finally, I’d like to give a shout-out to the author, Grunfink, who comes off as snarky in the documentation, but has been friendly and helpful whenever I’ve reported a bug or suggested a change.