Category: Tech

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One of the recurring questions when people familiar with HTML discover the Gemini protocol is: Why? Why not just write really simple HTML?

I came to see the appeal back in 2021, but taking a fresh look at Gopher this month, and actually building a basic Gopher site, helped me crystalize something:

It makes the most sense to look at Gemini and Gemtext in terms of the Gopher revival it came out of. It’s less “what do we want to throw out from the web?” and more “what bits of the web do we really miss when building with Gopher?”

So it ditches Gopher’s arcane menu syntax and strict menu/document hierarchy in favor of basic hypertext links that can be used anywhere. It adds word wrap, since we’re all using different-sized screens now, but makes it possible to keep ascii art/tables when needed. It welcomes global writing systems. Then it adds TLS for protection against eavesdropping.

The result is something that’s almost as minimalist as Gopher, but a lot more flexible. That makes it easier to get into than Gopher or hand-crafting your own website, plus it’s still usable on low-spec hardware or networks.

As a minimalist web, it seems lacking. As a web-enhanced response to Gopher, the goals are clearer.

See also: Project Gemini FAQ

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I finally went in for a sleep study. These days they start with a night of at-home monitoring. Not only is it simpler, but you’re sleeping somewhere familiar, so the results are going to be more representative. This place at least uses a medical-grade monitoring ring and a phone app to collect and report the data.

Easy, right?

Well, first let’s say I’m glad I keep a micro-USB cable for charging the Kobo and my power brick.

Seeking Compatibility

Second, there was the problem of pairing the device.

The app installed happily on my FairPhone 4, but no matter what I did, it just wouldn’t pair with the ring. I don’t know if there was some extra permission I missed, or if the app relies on Google services in a way that microG can’t handle.

Last week I got the Pixel 5 back from the repair shop that replaced the fire-hazard battery. I thought, well, I’ll try that. But the first thing I did when I got the phone home was install /e/OS on it (since mainstream Android is no longer supported on it, but /e/OS is). So that didn’t work either.

OK, how about I dig out my tablet that’s running stock Android? Nope, too old. The app wouldn’t even install. Same with Katie’s phone.

If it had been earlier in the day, I would have considered reinstalling stock Android on the Pixel 5.

In the end, I borrowed our son’s iPad. The app installed, and it paired immediately. I wore the ring overnight, kept waking up with my hand numb because I’d pinched a nerve or slept on it funny, and in the morning I hit Stop and uploaded the results.

Our Own Devices

The system is simple…if you have a up-to-date, mainstream mobile device to pair it with. We’ve been hanging onto older devices on the “If it ain’t broke, don’t replace it” principle.

I guess in a way they are “broken,” and so is the nonstandard replacement, under some circumstances. At least we can buy newer hardware. Not everyone’s in that position. I just don’t want to have to.

I’m beginning to think I should put stock Android back on the Pixel, until Android 14 becomes too old to run things, just to keep it on hand for situations like this. Like keeping a Windows partition on your Linux box. Except it has to be an extra physical device.

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I have very few memories of Gopher when it was current. It was already on its way out when I started college. The course catalogs and a few other things were available, but not much else, and if they ever offered student gopher space, I don’t remember it. I don’t even remember for sure if the student web space was available my first year or if they added that the second year.

So I missed Gopher’s heyday (such as it was). And I was fully enmeshed in the blogosphere when the gopher revival started. I hadn’t even heard of a “phlog” until I discovered the Gemini Protocol in 2021, and read about how in a way it was a reaction to that Gopher revival, trying to build something that was almost as simple, but with a few key features backported from the web. (Hyperlinks, some very minimal formatting, TLS to prevent eavesdropping, and general user input.)

I got out of Gemini for a while as I focused on my website again, then came back to it (but not as thoroughly). A blog post by Brennan Kenneth Brown, Gemini, Gophers and Fingers, Oh My! got me thinking about Gopher again.

And then I got stopped by the most trivial stumbling block ever: Naming. I felt like I needed to set up a Gopher presence before really diving in. And I wanted to just use my domain name like I do with my website and Gemini capsule…but Gopher listens on a protected port. That means I can’t run a server in the userspace on my webhost. I have to run it on something I have root access to (or else let someone else manage the software, which I probably should’ve started with). And the idea of typing this:

	gopher gopher://gopher.kvibber.com

just seemed absurd.

(Then again, maybe it’s not that trivial. There’s a reason for the classic phrase about the only really hard problems in computing being naming things and cache invalidation. And off-by-one errors.)

Eventually I got around to asking on the Fediverse, a place with a large population of Old Internet People like myself (and older): What naming conventions did people use for Gopher sites back then?

The consensus was that most sites just used a gopher prefix.

Though I did contemplate some sort of pun like pocket or botta (as in Botta’s Pocket Gopher, the most common one I see here in the Los Angeles area according to the rare photo I catch and post to iNaturalist).

Anyway, a follow-up to Brown’s post the other day prompted me to just build something.

I pointed gopher.kvibber.com to one of my VPSes, picked a reasonably current (by Gopher standards) piece of server software (Gophernicus, latest release 2020), and promptly discovered that not only is Gophernicus not available directly in Alpine Linux, but it relies on a system network listener (inetd, xinetd, systemd), and Alpine doesn’t install any of those by default. So
I figured out how to get inetd running on Alpine, built Gophernicus and started it up.

I’ve pulled in a few pages from my Gemini capsule to start with. And now that I have that place to start, I feel like going exploring.

Originally posted on gopher.kvibber.com.

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On the Blaugust Discord, UltrViolet suggested that bloggers link their post titles to the permalinks so that it’s easy to just right-click, “Copy Link as Markdown,” and get a formatted link with the correct title. (I’ve noticed Orion includes this in its context menu, and there are extensions for Firefox and Chrome that add it.)

I’ve been using the publication date in the post footer as the permalink on all the 11ty-generated parts of my site since I first converted the Les Mis blog back in 2021. But I can’t remember why I made that decision. I’m 99% certain every WordPress theme I’ve used has linked the title (even this one, which links from the timestamp too). It wasn’t an example in eleventy-base-blog either.

My best guess is that I was just implementing the Fediverse’s convention of linking the timestamp to the permalink. But that’s almost certainly because all the Twitterlike services don’t have titles.

But in looking up linking conventions, I went down an interesting rabbit hole about rel="bookmark".

Anyway, it’s an obvious change for better usability, and I’ll be updating my templates ASAP. (Edit: it’s done!)

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

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Sure, I like electronic gadgets. But I dislike planned obsolescence more.

It’s one thing when the newer model really is that much better. “All About the Pentiums” exaggerated it, but computer hardware in the 1990s really was improving by leaps and bounds. (And the software was devouring those performance gains, both in demanding more resources, and being less efficient as programmers were told to optimize for their own time, not for disk space or RAM.) That eventually settled out around the time smartphones and cloud computing started taking off, which is why I was able to run a 2012 model CPU all the way through 2024. A faster PC would have been nice, but I didn’t need one yet.

As I recall the tech industry freaked out when demand for new PCs dropped. There was probably a rash of “Millennials are killing computers!” articles.

But smartphones were going through the same kind of rapid improvement. You could easily justify buying a new phone after only two years: it was a lot faster, had a better display, had a better camera and more storage, and so on. And the carriers were happy to hand you a “free” new device to keep you on their service. Heck, if you really wanted (and could afford) to buy a new phone every year, you could make a case for it.

In that environment, you could kind of accept a company only offering 2-3 years of support for their phones.

Eventually that settled out too, and it takes longer for new phones to really be worth the upgrade. Of course the industry has tried to keep the pace going. If the hardware still works, and it’s still able to run the apps people want to use, there’s no good reason for the company to stop supporting it after only three. Especially with something whose main purpose is to be constantly connected to the Internet.

I have an Android phone from 2020 and a tablet from 2019. The tablet still works fine. (It’s great for digital comics, or PDFs that are pre-formatted for 8.5×11″ pages.) The phone worked until two days ago. (Technically it still does, but I don’t want to overload the already-swollen battery.) But they’re both unsupported. Not because the hardware has failed (up until Monday). Not, like the Poke3, because they can’t handle today’s apps. Simply because Google and Samsung don’t want to provide updates anymore. Not even bugfixes. Not even security fixes.

It’s maddening.

Especially with prices on new electronics skyrocketing due to the AI datacenter-driven RAMpocalypse.

There are many things I dislike about Microsoft, but I appreciate that they finally realized that a large chunk of their customer base can’t or won’t upgrade their hardware just to install Windows 11, no matter how they try to convince us, and has extended Windows 10 support twice with minimal hoops to jump through.

The Fairphone 4 (2021) that I pressed into service to replace the dying Pixel 5 (2020) is more or less comparable in terms of speed. I still need to experiment with the camera. But it’s still supported through 2028, meaning it’s safer to use online. Which, again, is what cell phones are for.

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

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I had a migraine this morning that really threw me for a loop. Then I spent the afternoon and evening dealing with a different kind of headache: getting my phone number transferred to a new(ish) phone.

We picked up a Fairphone 4 a few years ago as sort of a hedge in case the electronics industry and/or tariffs and/or international trade went bonkers and one of our phones died. (We weren’t expecting all three.) The teenager used it for a bit before we bought him a phone that was closer to what he actually wanted to use. So the Fairphone returned to the back bench, so to speak.

A cell phone held in a hand, showing the California DMV website. A bright magenta line is running vertically down the entire screen, including the status bar at the top and the onscreen buttons at the bottom.Today, a bright vertical magenta line appeared on my Pixel 5’s screen. I’d noticed it was running hot lately, and when I pulled it out of the case, sure enough it had started bulging.

I know it’s old. I’ve been trying to get as much use out of it as I can, which, well, I guess I have.

(Edit: added photo)

I do not like spicy pillows, Sam I Am.

So I reset the Fairphone and started setting up the most important apps: authenticator, password manager, stuff like that. And I set about unlocking the SIM protection on my phone number and got ready to call customer service.

I knew from experience that the Fairphone 4 works fine on T-Mobile’s US network, but their apps don’t know how to activate the e-sim. So I was prepared to talk someone through.

But because we’d been swapping back and forth between phones, the sim was still registered as attached to the teen’s number, even though the number is actually pointing to his current phone. It took over two hours (at least 45 minutes of that on hold) and three levels of escalation to first figure out that’s what the problem was, and then find someone with the access to fix it.

They did finally get it all sorted out, but it was not the way I wanted to spend my afternoon.

(And when I let the old phone cool off, the screen went back to normal, though it’s still bulging.)

Edge-on view of the phone showing that the glass screen is splitting away from the plastic case.

And to top it off, Nextcloud’s photo uploading has stopped working reliably, so I have to go through the last couple months of photos and make sure I have everything copied over. I went through some of them tonight, and need to get the rest…soon.

For now, I’ve turned the old phone off completely overnight.

Once I’ve got the photos transferred, I should figure out whether it’s worth repurposing the device with a new battery or just running it without one. And then dispose of the fire hazard.

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

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