It took me a while to find the specific licences for each icon set. When you select a set on the left, there is a (i) icon to the right of the set name at the top of the page. Click that and it will show each set’s license. There’s MIT, GPL, CC BY, Mozilla, Open Font, and CC0 licenses in there. You’ll want to be careful that you meet the requirements of whichever you use. Many similar sites to this one make those licenses visible on the download screen. Burying the license information is going to lead to more people failing to attribute properly.
Being too young to have used this kind of devices, I find them really fascinating and would be curious to know what it would looks like to work without a screen, only with a printer, to read emails, browse Gemini, etc.
Old fart here. This was the extent of my connectivity until I went to college, though I used a mix of hardcopy (DECWriter, Teletype) and screens (ADM-3A, VT-52, Apple ][…)
300 baud is slower than my full reading speed, but close enough that it feels comfortable to read along with. It’s kind of interesting to read stuff that’s magically appearing beneath your eyes. (But 110 baud is painful. The amazing sounds and aesthetics of the Teletype almost make up for it though.)
BASIC, naturally, worked well with this medium. That’s why every statement has a line number: so you can replace or insert them easily. I don’t remember doing any text editing on dumb terminals (a la TECO or ed) but it sounds painful.
I spent a lot of time on BBSs my senior year; they were a lot of fun, except for the frustration of busy signals. It felt kind of conversational … a conversation with the BBS, I mean, since it moved at a speed closer to speech.
I’d never go back to this, though. Nostalgia aside, it’s so painfully slow and limited.
I tried TECO, and it was terrible. Will never go back.
On the other hand, I used the Unix version of QED on a daily basis for a few years, back in the day, and it was great. I used to switch between VI and QED, and use QED for editing jobs where VI would be just too painful. ED is like QED with most of the useful features removed – it isn’t worth using. I stopped using QED when I lost access to it.
I still use the Unix shell and the CLI extensively. I recently rediscovered QED on github and installed it again on Linux, but I haven’t used it much since it’s no longer part of my habits.
I haven’t read mail using the CLI since gmail came out, but you can still get the mail tool in Linux distro repos. I remember being quite productive with it.
What made printing terminals cool was the general feel, as @snej describes, plus the fact that you had a permanent hardcopy of your terminal session that you could keep if it contained something worth going back to. Video terminals at the time were restricted to 24x80, so you could only see 24 lines of text at once, but you could look at 100s of lines of text on the paper coming out of your printing terminal. I had access to 1200 baud Decwriters way back then, much faster than the 300 baud or 110 baud that @snej mentions (but still slow).
The slowness of printing terminals forces you to slow down your brain and be patient, and that was maybe a less stressful way of working than modern interfaces. I wasn’t being constantly being subjected to notifications and advertising and juggling hundreds of tabs and windows. No distractions because a printing terminal restricted you to doing one thing at a time. Nobody was writing million line programs back then, either. Computers had a lot less memory, code had to be smaller. At 66 lines per page, a million lines is 30 reams of paper at 500 pages per ream. At 10 seconds per page (assuming 1200 baud), that’s 70 hours to print out the code base. Madness. Programs were much smaller, and could be understood by a single person. Tooling and hardware was more primitive (at least for me, I didn’t have access to Smalltalk machines or Lisp machines), but languages and programs were much simpler and you worked at a slower pace. We didn’t have the complexity caused by the accretion of 50 years of legacy software layers piled on top of 1970’s Unix.
gemini would be well suited to dumb terminal output or line printer experiences, especially if your client numbered links in documents for easy selection. Hmmm… ideas!
gemini would be well suited to dumb terminal output or line printer
experiences, especially if your client numbered links in documents for
easy selection.
I’ve build my own gemini/webclient which doesn’t need any adressable cursor. The output is displayed in less an you need to type the number next to a link to follow it.
There’s so much depth to gopherspace. Glad you found your way there. I’d recommend phetch as another great client. Gophernicus is also a wonderful gopherd with active maintenance. I use motsognir myself on gopher.black. I hope you keep burrowing deeper. There’s a ton of content waiting for you.
I went down this rabbit hole last week looking for a suitable VTuber set up for my role playing games. I don’t have much interest in the anime models, but I was hoping that I could find a basic setup that would enable me to create my next D&D character in Blender and use that via virtual camera in Roll20. Sadly linux support for the software is quite poor. VSeeFace has some Wine configuration hints, but I couldn’t get them to work. I found a really basic POC on Githhub that worked with my camera and tracked motion and blinks well, but I couldn’t load any 3rd party models into it, nor did it output to a virtual cam.
I would love to explore this more, and I think there’s a great value in it for table-top virtual gaming. Hopefully Linux support will continue to grow.
Does it have any git hooks in place to prevent someone accidentally pushing dura branches to the remote? There’s many, MANY git worflows out there and it seems likely that someone has a “git push –all” that’s going to lead to an absolute mess without a little safety check.
I tend to use functions when I need to execute within the current shell scope. If you’re going out of your way to use a subshell it’s just easier to write a shell script instead. Do you have a reason to pick a function using subshells over a shell script?
Although this was pretty centered on development the lessons translate to other things. During my time in college I made time to improve my reading speed through practice and technique. The dividends paid back have been incredible. I find it’s usually the inputs and the outputs I can most easily improve through simple technique. The middle part, which happens between your ears, takes a bit more time to develop. Anyway, overall very good sentiments, especially one bit:
Or do 5x as much and go home after lunch every day.
Make sure you’re speeding up for a good reason. Work is infinite. It will never be “done”. Learn when to take breaks and use your speed wisely.
Ahh, yes! I was going to try and make this with unicode box-drawing symbols but I hit a lack of diagonals of a certain style. Scale it up and use ascii characters! A simple solution.
I was considering using the mathematical falling diagonal character, (‘⟋’, U+27CB) instead of the box drawings light diagonal, (‘╱’, U+2571), but it didn’t seem to make enough of a difference, to skip the extra line needed, so I decided to stick with the box drawing set.
I used her gist and did my own weechat logs. As a result, here’s a little repo with a requirement.txt and info on how to easily do your own. Really the python just reads a file of date/time stamps, one-per-line. If you can transform your source data into that then this will Just Work™
Very nice solution. I also find it useful to have a default help task, but I’ve been manually building them. This seems easier to manage. I did tweak one small thing. In the sed, I inserted a pipe into \1|\3 and then told column to -s '|'. I like having more than one word in my task descriptions. I could use a comma, but I use those in descriptions too. Pipe seemed easy, but whatever character you don’t use often would be fine.
Fun fact, in the Debian bug report, the author of pygopherd (John)!states that he is working on a python3 version. I hope it adds ipv6 support as well.
I believe on the gopher mailing list the author stated ongoing frustrations with the upgrade to python3 and was seeking a new maintainer of the code-base. There were several replies and other packages discussed adding support for some of the specific older specialty types/formats (.link & .cap perhaps?) that pygopherd was handling. Geomyidae (from the bitreich community) and bucktooth (floodgap) were mentioned, but I haven’t followed up on progress.
If you’re not married to pygopherd specifically, you might try gophernicus, bucktooth, geomyidae, or motsognir instead.
It mentions it’s inspired by z and z.lua. There’s also jump or autojump, or twenty more if you search a bit. “It’s in Rust” is the big helper here, I suppose. Jumping to directories is never something I’ve found noticably slow even with z, but there’s always an audience trying to eek out the best performance.
zoxide’s README says it’s mainly trying to speed up displaying the prompt, as opposed to speeding up the actual jumping. All z-like tools delay the prompt a bit because they run code to track the current directory before each prompt.
Ahh, that makes more sense! I used to run some pre-prompt display stuff to get git statuses added into my prompt and that definitely slowed things down. Now I just run a ‘git status’ when I actually want that info and things are snappier. Every little bit adds up on those things.
Blog author here. It looks like my little intro got shared on HN and here. There’s a lot more power to recutils than the bits I showed in the post. I recommend you look deeper if the format appeals to you. For you emacs users out there, it integrates well with org-mode too.
My personal hub is https://tomasino.org (static HTML/CSS) which links to all my other sites. It’s designed to mimic a markdown file in design, but it itself is not. It implements a few indieweb features, avoids JS, loads quickly and cleanly in lynx, and overall just gets the job done. Here’s a few notable things of mine:
The website is a pretty straightforward static site. Built with Jekyll, served out of S3 through CloudFront, and with the bare minimum of styling necessary to work cleanly on mobile and desktop.
The Gopher hole is … less straightforward :) It’s my personal place on an experiment to see if I can drive adoption of Gopher and (system-local) mail, Usenet, and IRC as an alternative to conventional social media here in Melbourne (Australia).
I’m always happy to stumble on new gopher holes. We’ve got a decent number of aussie gopherites hanging out with us in the tildeverse and on SDF. Come by IRC sometimes and connect with us in #gopher.
I’ve been doing this for years and it’s wonderful. I’ve left banks and other services when it quickly became apparent who was selling my contact information to spammers. On the technical side, a solution like simplelogin might very well make this more accessible to non-technical folks. I started with the unique email per site process when I was self-hosting my email, where it was easiest to get just the way I wanted it. Once I moved to hosted providers I’ve had to be careful that they supported all my needs. Tuffmail, Neomailbox, and Fastmail have all proven reliable. Some services limit or charge for aliases, which rules out their use.
While the + tag trick works for simple cases, I don’t like it reveals your true email address to anyone familiar with the syntax. It’s too easy for someone to parse it and spam your main account. Fastmail’s alternative form using subdomains is more interesting.
I’m with you. It takes some discipline to keep things in order but this seems to be one of the least terrible approaches. I use a ring model for managing my email world:
I have an single email address that is for meatspace use only
I use per-site emails on my domain for services I want to read emails from
I consolidate behind burner addresses - {shop, bills, burner}@ - for emails I don’t care about seeing. These are shunted into archive folders I never look at but can grep if I truly cared. And if the noise gets too intense, I turn them off entirely
For things I trust the least, I have a pseudonymous domain that is completely disconnected from my online identity
Fastmail makes managing this almost seamless - I get one inbox with things I care about and some folders that automatically capture and hide the dross. The most overhead I get is logging in to blacklist a per-site email because they’ve become naughty.
While the + tag trick works for simple cases, I don’t like it reveals your true email address to anyone familiar with the syntax. It’s too easy for someone to parse it and spam your main account.
What I do is filter out any email sent to the bare/true address. i.e. for me to see an email (under normal circumstances), it must be sent a tagged email address.
Oh cool! I wrote a similar solution using node. It runs an express server and converts markdown to HTML on demand. My wiki: https://wiki.tomasino.org/ My source: https://github.com/jamestomasino/wiki-web
It took me a while to find the specific licences for each icon set. When you select a set on the left, there is a (i) icon to the right of the set name at the top of the page. Click that and it will show each set’s license. There’s MIT, GPL, CC BY, Mozilla, Open Font, and CC0 licenses in there. You’ll want to be careful that you meet the requirements of whichever you use. Many similar sites to this one make those licenses visible on the download screen. Burying the license information is going to lead to more people failing to attribute properly.
See, now I’m tempted to set up nohtml.club and just have a blank document.
It’s been done, and it needn’t even be blank: https://lobste.rs/s/n7hkay/page_with_no_code.
Being too young to have used this kind of devices, I find them really fascinating and would be curious to know what it would looks like to work without a screen, only with a printer, to read emails, browse Gemini, etc.
Old fart here. This was the extent of my connectivity until I went to college, though I used a mix of hardcopy (DECWriter, Teletype) and screens (ADM-3A, VT-52, Apple ][…)
300 baud is slower than my full reading speed, but close enough that it feels comfortable to read along with. It’s kind of interesting to read stuff that’s magically appearing beneath your eyes. (But 110 baud is painful. The amazing sounds and aesthetics of the Teletype almost make up for it though.)
BASIC, naturally, worked well with this medium. That’s why every statement has a line number: so you can replace or insert them easily. I don’t remember doing any text editing on dumb terminals (a la TECO or ed) but it sounds painful.
I spent a lot of time on BBSs my senior year; they were a lot of fun, except for the frustration of busy signals. It felt kind of conversational … a conversation with the BBS, I mean, since it moved at a speed closer to speech.
I’d never go back to this, though. Nostalgia aside, it’s so painfully slow and limited.
I tried TECO, and it was terrible. Will never go back.
On the other hand, I used the Unix version of QED on a daily basis for a few years, back in the day, and it was great. I used to switch between VI and QED, and use QED for editing jobs where VI would be just too painful. ED is like QED with most of the useful features removed – it isn’t worth using. I stopped using QED when I lost access to it.
I still use the Unix shell and the CLI extensively. I recently rediscovered QED on github and installed it again on Linux, but I haven’t used it much since it’s no longer part of my habits.
I haven’t read mail using the CLI since gmail came out, but you can still get the
mailtool in Linux distro repos. I remember being quite productive with it.What made printing terminals cool was the general feel, as @snej describes, plus the fact that you had a permanent hardcopy of your terminal session that you could keep if it contained something worth going back to. Video terminals at the time were restricted to 24x80, so you could only see 24 lines of text at once, but you could look at 100s of lines of text on the paper coming out of your printing terminal. I had access to 1200 baud Decwriters way back then, much faster than the 300 baud or 110 baud that @snej mentions (but still slow).
The slowness of printing terminals forces you to slow down your brain and be patient, and that was maybe a less stressful way of working than modern interfaces. I wasn’t being constantly being subjected to notifications and advertising and juggling hundreds of tabs and windows. No distractions because a printing terminal restricted you to doing one thing at a time. Nobody was writing million line programs back then, either. Computers had a lot less memory, code had to be smaller. At 66 lines per page, a million lines is 30 reams of paper at 500 pages per ream. At 10 seconds per page (assuming 1200 baud), that’s 70 hours to print out the code base. Madness. Programs were much smaller, and could be understood by a single person. Tooling and hardware was more primitive (at least for me, I didn’t have access to Smalltalk machines or Lisp machines), but languages and programs were much simpler and you worked at a slower pace. We didn’t have the complexity caused by the accretion of 50 years of legacy software layers piled on top of 1970’s Unix.
You can simulate this experience on a UNIX machine by using
export TERM=dumbor similar.I don’t know about browsing gemini. Do gemini pages require an addressable cursor?
gemini would be well suited to dumb terminal output or line printer experiences, especially if your client numbered links in documents for easy selection. Hmmm… ideas!
There’s a line-mode browser for Gemini, gmnln, available here: https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/gmni/
Somebody also wrote a Gemini plugin for the line-mode browser edbrowse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26116372
I’ve build my own gemini/webclient which doesn’t need any adressable cursor. The output is displayed in less an you need to type the number next to a link to follow it.
See https://notabug.org/ploum/offpunk/
There’s so much depth to gopherspace. Glad you found your way there. I’d recommend phetch as another great client. Gophernicus is also a wonderful gopherd with active maintenance. I use motsognir myself on gopher.black. I hope you keep burrowing deeper. There’s a ton of content waiting for you.
I went down this rabbit hole last week looking for a suitable VTuber set up for my role playing games. I don’t have much interest in the anime models, but I was hoping that I could find a basic setup that would enable me to create my next D&D character in Blender and use that via virtual camera in Roll20. Sadly linux support for the software is quite poor. VSeeFace has some Wine configuration hints, but I couldn’t get them to work. I found a really basic POC on Githhub that worked with my camera and tracked motion and blinks well, but I couldn’t load any 3rd party models into it, nor did it output to a virtual cam.
I would love to explore this more, and I think there’s a great value in it for table-top virtual gaming. Hopefully Linux support will continue to grow.
Does it have any git hooks in place to prevent someone accidentally pushing dura branches to the remote? There’s many, MANY git worflows out there and it seems likely that someone has a “git push –all” that’s going to lead to an absolute mess without a little safety check.
No. You should create an issue for it so we can generate ideas on how to do this!
I tend to use functions when I need to execute within the current shell scope. If you’re going out of your way to use a subshell it’s just easier to write a shell script instead. Do you have a reason to pick a function using subshells over a shell script?
A separate script is a much more complete boundary. This of course has its pros (better defined interface) but it also has its cons:
Lovely blog! The smolnet folks on gemini and gopher are applauding you with ascii claps.
Although this was pretty centered on development the lessons translate to other things. During my time in college I made time to improve my reading speed through practice and technique. The dividends paid back have been incredible. I find it’s usually the inputs and the outputs I can most easily improve through simple technique. The middle part, which happens between your ears, takes a bit more time to develop. Anyway, overall very good sentiments, especially one bit:
Make sure you’re speeding up for a good reason. Work is infinite. It will never be “done”. Learn when to take breaks and use your speed wisely.
Ahh, yes! I was going to try and make this with unicode box-drawing symbols but I hit a lack of diagonals of a certain style. Scale it up and use ascii characters! A simple solution.
I was considering using the mathematical falling diagonal character, (‘⟋’, U+27CB) instead of the box drawings light diagonal, (‘╱’, U+2571), but it didn’t seem to make enough of a difference, to skip the extra line needed, so I decided to stick with the box drawing set.
It seems the code to do this is from this twitter thread, https://nitter.net/lunasorcery/status/1334519572330909696
I used her gist and did my own weechat logs. As a result, here’s a little repo with a requirement.txt and info on how to easily do your own. Really the python just reads a file of date/time stamps, one-per-line. If you can transform your source data into that then this will Just Work™
https://tildegit.org/tomasino/weechat-plot
Very nice solution. I also find it useful to have a default help task, but I’ve been manually building them. This seems easier to manage. I did tweak one small thing. In the sed, I inserted a pipe into
\1|\3and then told column to-s '|'. I like having more than one word in my task descriptions. I could use a comma, but I use those in descriptions too. Pipe seemed easy, but whatever character you don’t use often would be fine.Fun fact, in the Debian bug report, the author of pygopherd (John)!states that he is working on a python3 version. I hope it adds ipv6 support as well.
I believe on the gopher mailing list the author stated ongoing frustrations with the upgrade to python3 and was seeking a new maintainer of the code-base. There were several replies and other packages discussed adding support for some of the specific older specialty types/formats (.link & .cap perhaps?) that pygopherd was handling. Geomyidae (from the bitreich community) and bucktooth (floodgap) were mentioned, but I haven’t followed up on progress.
If you’re not married to pygopherd specifically, you might try gophernicus, bucktooth, geomyidae, or motsognir instead.
It mentions it’s inspired by z and z.lua. There’s also jump or autojump, or twenty more if you search a bit. “It’s in Rust” is the big helper here, I suppose. Jumping to directories is never something I’ve found noticably slow even with z, but there’s always an audience trying to eek out the best performance.
zoxide’s README says it’s mainly trying to speed up displaying the prompt, as opposed to speeding up the actual jumping. All z-like tools delay the prompt a bit because they run code to track the current directory before each prompt.
Ahh, that makes more sense! I used to run some pre-prompt display stuff to get git statuses added into my prompt and that definitely slowed things down. Now I just run a ‘git status’ when I actually want that info and things are snappier. Every little bit adds up on those things.
If you’d still like to do that (and use zsh), check out powerlevel10k. You can have your cake and eat it too…
Blog author here. It looks like my little intro got shared on HN and here. There’s a lot more power to recutils than the bits I showed in the post. I recommend you look deeper if the format appeals to you. For you emacs users out there, it integrates well with org-mode too.
My personal hub is https://tomasino.org (static HTML/CSS) which links to all my other sites. It’s designed to mimic a markdown file in design, but it itself is not. It implements a few indieweb features, avoids JS, loads quickly and cleanly in lynx, and overall just gets the job done. Here’s a few notable things of mine:
https://duncan.bayne.id.au/
gopher://eyeblea.ch:70/1/~duncanb
The website is a pretty straightforward static site. Built with Jekyll, served out of S3 through CloudFront, and with the bare minimum of styling necessary to work cleanly on mobile and desktop.
The Gopher hole is … less straightforward :) It’s my personal place on an experiment to see if I can drive adoption of Gopher and (system-local) mail, Usenet, and IRC as an alternative to conventional social media here in Melbourne (Australia).
I’m always happy to stumble on new gopher holes. We’ve got a decent number of aussie gopherites hanging out with us in the tildeverse and on SDF. Come by IRC sometimes and connect with us in #gopher.
I’ve been doing this for years and it’s wonderful. I’ve left banks and other services when it quickly became apparent who was selling my contact information to spammers. On the technical side, a solution like simplelogin might very well make this more accessible to non-technical folks. I started with the unique email per site process when I was self-hosting my email, where it was easiest to get just the way I wanted it. Once I moved to hosted providers I’ve had to be careful that they supported all my needs. Tuffmail, Neomailbox, and Fastmail have all proven reliable. Some services limit or charge for aliases, which rules out their use.
While the + tag trick works for simple cases, I don’t like it reveals your true email address to anyone familiar with the syntax. It’s too easy for someone to parse it and spam your main account. Fastmail’s alternative form using subdomains is more interesting.
I’m with you. It takes some discipline to keep things in order but this seems to be one of the least terrible approaches. I use a ring model for managing my email world:
Fastmail makes managing this almost seamless - I get one inbox with things I care about and some folders that automatically capture and hide the dross. The most overhead I get is logging in to blacklist a per-site email because they’ve become naughty.
What I do is filter out any email sent to the bare/true address. i.e. for me to see an email (under normal circumstances), it must be sent a tagged email address.
That’s a really good idea and a super-easy way to negate most of the negatives of that method.