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For anyone curious, because Gemini is relatively new and kind of has flown under the radar: ### 1.1 What is Gemini? Gemini is a new application-level internet

by kick 6y ago

For anyone curious, because Gemini is relatively new and kind of has flown under the radar: ### 1.1 What is Gemini? 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 linking between files. Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as possible. Instead, the design strives to maximise its "power to weight ratio", while keeping its weight within "acceptable" limits. Gemini is also intended to be very privacy conscious. You may think of Gemini as "the web, stripped right back to its essence" or as "Gopher, souped up and modernised a little", depending upon your perspective. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.txt https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.txt Gopher and finger should be obvious, but just in case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol

apatters 6y ago
I was delighted when I saw that Gemini is maintained by someone on SDF (named Solderpunk, never heard of him before). This seems as good a time as any to plug https://sdf.org https://sdf.org, a great little community which has the feel of a 90s BBS that never went offline.
- kick 6y ago
  The site isn't at www.sdf.org for the record, it's just at sdf.org. There's a big difference in what you'll find!
  - apatters 6y ago
    Don't know how I missed that, I've updated my link!
  - treve 6y ago
    I'm getting redirected from www.sdf.org to sdf.org, but now I'm curious.
    - kick 6y ago
      Try this, which should bring you to MetaArray stuff: https://www.sdf.org/ https://www.sdf.org/ (It's what was originally linked to.)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- visiblink 6y ago
  Speaking of great little BBS-like communities, Solderpunk is actually the admin of zaibatsu.circumlunar.space.
- piffey 6y ago
  Forever grateful for SDF. Graduated into the last depression, was super broke, my computer died, and I could barely get hours between two restaurant jobs just to make rent. For about 3 years used SDF from the library to keep my dev spaces up, learned to work entirely from the terminal. Now I rarely leave one. Should log back in on there. Had all the tools for doing work and for learning bits about computings past.
- rdrey 6y ago
  Wow, this lead me down quite a rabbit hole. I hadn't heard of SDF, thanks!
cookiengineer 6y ago
From an implementor's view I decided to not implement Gemini as it is specified, because I do not like its text/gemini default format. They should either decide for a specified full file format, e.g. CommonMark or HTML5 (with index.html as default routes) or don't try to implement a file format inside a network protocol at all. In my opinion, file structures (and layouts thereof) should have nothing to do with a network protocol. The reason why the web exploded was because HTML was the best technology to allow custom web pages, and more importantly, while in parallel to allow them to interlink. If either of these two aspects are separated, the concept won't work for the discovery and exploration of new content. Remember the sparkling unicorn gifs and construction animations everywhere? That's what the web was about. I do not agree with how JS has exploded over the years, hence the reason for writing my own web browser/scraper/proxy [1] - but I do agree with the "why" HTML5/CSS3 makes sense for themselves while ignoring the scriptable aspects. For me, as someone trying to build a web browser, the text/gemini concept makes it super-hacky and very much prone to future errors to integrate it with the rest of the web. Faking and rendering another file format (based on the runtime environment) should not be its recommendation. A much simpler approach would be e.g. simply using "gemini://" for resources inside an HTML(5) file. Additionally, a killer feature for HTTP/1.1 is the continuous download of files that have been partially downloaded. While I think the practical implementation of 206 ranges is pretty messed up (looking at you, nginx, who cannot count the amount of ranges requested), I do agree with the positive aspects of it. Something like this has to be integrated into a minimal network protocol, otherwise it cannot be adopted in mobile/2G slow areas. [1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth
- astrobe_ 6y ago
  > The reason why the web exploded was because ... Depends on which big bang you talk about. Gopher lost to HTML because Gopher was TUI-oriented when HTML was GUI-oriented. And Gopher lost a second time when Web 2.0 (JS expansion) occurred. TUI is not so vastly inferior to GUI - at least when it comes to reading and writing and sparse multimedia contents. The Web exploded because GUI appears to be more user-friendly. There are vastly more users that need "friendliness" than users that just need honesty ;-) In my mind, if one wants to suggest an alternative to the Web, one either has to go back to the passive, text-oriented web or one-up the current Web with something even more interactive and even more graphical. In my opinion the only way to achieve successfully the latter is to provide a much easier way to make remote interactive graphical applications, with strong security guarantees of course. I believe that something like Squeak could do that job. It kind of already was done with Croquet/Cobalt. As for the former approach, I would suggest 80 columns monospace text as the standard document format, with the footnote-style convention for links - not some oddity that's midway between text and HTML. So in both case I think one has to be extreme in order to succeed. Either extreme sophistication or extreme simplicity.
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
any idea about how to make the font in castor bigger? the default size is impossible for me to read. I tried the usual keyboard shortcuts but doesn't work. Do I have to set some gtk env variables maybe so it uses the correct size font?
- julienXX 6y ago
  Somebody (you?) asked for this feature this morning. I'll add it to the settings. For now it takes your default GTK3 font so I think you can change it globally somewhere.
  - DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
    thanks for getting back. You're right it was in the config file, my problem was that I had the font name surrounded by quotes and so it wasn't recognized. This works: cat .config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini [Settings] gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme=true gtk-font-name = DejaVu Sans Regular 12 ... for some reason ~/.gtkrc-2.0 needs variable values quoted, but gtk-3.0 doesn't.

by kick 6y ago

apatters 6y ago

I was delighted when I saw that Gemini is maintained by someone on SDF (named Solderpunk, never heard of him before). This seems as good a time as any to plug https://sdf.org https://sdf.org, a great little community which has the feel of a 90s BBS that never went offline.

kick 6y ago
The site isn't at www.sdf.org for the record, it's just at sdf.org. There's a big difference in what you'll find!
- apatters 6y ago
  Don't know how I missed that, I've updated my link!
- treve 6y ago
  I'm getting redirected from www.sdf.org to sdf.org, but now I'm curious.
  - kick 6y ago
    Try this, which should bring you to MetaArray stuff: https://www.sdf.org/ https://www.sdf.org/ (It's what was originally linked to.)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
visiblink 6y ago
Speaking of great little BBS-like communities, Solderpunk is actually the admin of zaibatsu.circumlunar.space.
piffey 6y ago
Forever grateful for SDF. Graduated into the last depression, was super broke, my computer died, and I could barely get hours between two restaurant jobs just to make rent. For about 3 years used SDF from the library to keep my dev spaces up, learned to work entirely from the terminal. Now I rarely leave one. Should log back in on there. Had all the tools for doing work and for learning bits about computings past.
rdrey 6y ago
Wow, this lead me down quite a rabbit hole. I hadn't heard of SDF, thanks!

cookiengineer 6y ago

From an implementor's view I decided to not implement Gemini as it is specified, because I do not like its text/gemini default format. They should either decide for a specified full file format, e.g. CommonMark or HTML5 (with index.html as default routes) or don't try to implement a file format inside a network protocol at all. In my opinion, file structures (and layouts thereof) should have nothing to do with a network protocol. The reason why the web exploded was because HTML was the best technology to allow custom web pages, and more importantly, while in parallel to allow them to interlink. If either of these two aspects are separated, the concept won't work for the discovery and exploration of new content. Remember the sparkling unicorn gifs and construction animations everywhere? That's what the web was about. I do not agree with how JS has exploded over the years, hence the reason for writing my own web browser/scraper/proxy [1] - but I do agree with the "why" HTML5/CSS3 makes sense for themselves while ignoring the scriptable aspects. For me, as someone trying to build a web browser, the text/gemini concept makes it super-hacky and very much prone to future errors to integrate it with the rest of the web. Faking and rendering another file format (based on the runtime environment) should not be its recommendation. A much simpler approach would be e.g. simply using "gemini://" for resources inside an HTML(5) file. Additionally, a killer feature for HTTP/1.1 is the continuous download of files that have been partially downloaded. While I think the practical implementation of 206 ranges is pretty messed up (looking at you, nginx, who cannot count the amount of ranges requested), I do agree with the positive aspects of it. Something like this has to be integrated into a minimal network protocol, otherwise it cannot be adopted in mobile/2G slow areas. [1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth

astrobe_ 6y ago
> The reason why the web exploded was because ... Depends on which big bang you talk about. Gopher lost to HTML because Gopher was TUI-oriented when HTML was GUI-oriented. And Gopher lost a second time when Web 2.0 (JS expansion) occurred. TUI is not so vastly inferior to GUI - at least when it comes to reading and writing and sparse multimedia contents. The Web exploded because GUI appears to be more user-friendly. There are vastly more users that need "friendliness" than users that just need honesty ;-) In my mind, if one wants to suggest an alternative to the Web, one either has to go back to the passive, text-oriented web or one-up the current Web with something even more interactive and even more graphical. In my opinion the only way to achieve successfully the latter is to provide a much easier way to make remote interactive graphical applications, with strong security guarantees of course. I believe that something like Squeak could do that job. It kind of already was done with Croquet/Cobalt. As for the former approach, I would suggest 80 columns monospace text as the standard document format, with the footnote-style convention for links - not some oddity that's midway between text and HTML. So in both case I think one has to be extreme in order to succeed. Either extreme sophistication or extreme simplicity.

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago

any idea about how to make the font in castor bigger? the default size is impossible for me to read. I tried the usual keyboard shortcuts but doesn't work. Do I have to set some gtk env variables maybe so it uses the correct size font?

julienXX 6y ago
Somebody (you?) asked for this feature this morning. I'll add it to the settings. For now it takes your default GTK3 font so I think you can change it globally somewhere.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  thanks for getting back. You're right it was in the config file, my problem was that I had the font name surrounded by quotes and so it wasn't recognized. This works: cat .config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini [Settings] gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme=true gtk-font-name = DejaVu Sans Regular 12 ... for some reason ~/.gtkrc-2.0 needs variable values quoted, but gtk-3.0 doesn't.