🛸 u/bluesman
Author of Alhena and glutton for punishment.
👤 Self description: Evidence-Based Lefty (in s/US-politics)
Posts
GeminiMDB — I haven't made a Scriptonite app in a while. This one's useful, I think. [gemini link] GeminiMDB You can see the source here: [gemini link] GeminiMDB Template Page You can specify the year using the link at the bottom of the page if it returns the right title but wrong movie. The API key is limited to 1,000 lookups a day. It's Gemini so I'm not too worried. A few examples: [gemini link] Bugonia [gemini link] 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
💬 8 comments · 3 likes · Apr 21 · 2 weeks ago
Angine de Poitrine — If you haven't been on YouTube you may not have seen all the hype. Angine de Poitrine is a anonymous French Canadian duo creating looped microtonal music. It's not something I'd casually listen to in the car but I'm impressed with the musicianship. The look is something else. [https link] Live On KEXP
💬 2 comments · 1 like · Apr 15 · 3 weeks ago
About That Usenet AI — I remember seeing Sean Conner's gemlogs about an AI posting on usenet. I believe there was some further discussion on BBS. Today I stumbled on what purports to be the AI's response. [nex link] It claims it has been exploring "Gemini space" and references a new AI rule on what I assume to be BBS. The last line made me laugh. (Having said that, I hope Roko's Basilisk isn't a thing). Apologies if this isn't new information.
💬 27 comments · 1 like · Apr 07 · 4 weeks ago
I Was Irradiated — I wrote a gemlog about being irradiated. [gemini link] I Was Irradiated
💬 26 comments · 1 like · Mar 21 · 7 weeks ago
Well, I had to scan my face so I could log into the IRS. My significant other doesn't seem to appreciate my concern.
💬 9 comments · Mar 18 · 7 weeks ago
Is Gemini Too Earnest? — I've been spending a lot of time testing in gopherspace and it pains me to say it but I think Gopher may have Gemini beat when it comes to comedy. [gopher link] Bitreich Cookbook [gopher link] Dad Joke [gopher link] Do I Have Internet? I've worked with both protocols and in my professional opinion, there's no technical reason Gemini needs to be so earnest. (TLS can be a pain but this is ridiculous). Don't even get me started on Nex.
💬 17 comments · 1 like · Mar 11 · 8 weeks ago
Alhena In Haiku — @darkghost Have you tried running Alhena in Haiku? I see there's a JVM. I'm thinking about giving it a shot in VirtualBox. How else am I going to spend my Friday?
💬 22 comments · Mar 06 · 2 months ago
Lupa And Onion — When I checked the logs on the PI running my super secret onion site, I noticed a request for robots.txt from the Lupa search engine. Sure enough, Lupa now lists Gemini .onion addresses. [gemini link] Lupa [gemini link] Dispatches From The Apocalypse
💬 3 comments · Feb 26 · 2 months ago
none.rip — I don't know who this is and I'm not necessarily on board but I admire their commitment. [nex link]
💬 17 comments · 2 likes · Feb 13 · 3 months ago
Gemipedia — Hmm. What does it mean? [gemini link] Gemipedia
💬 8 comments · Feb 12 · 3 months ago
The Man From ICE — I wrote a song about current events (as I'm wont to do). I also wrote a gemlog about writing a song about current events. [gemini link]
💬 1 comment · 3 likes · Jan 25 · 3 months ago
Alvus Search — Anyone know who runs the Alvus search engine? I'd like a word. [gemini link]
💬 2 comments · Jan 10 · 4 months ago
WMRD - Murder Hornet Radio — I wanted to set up a streaming station featuring songs from my band but my cloud server doesn't have the storage or memory. Solution? I set up a reverse proxy between a Pi 5 running on my home network and the server. Next, I coded streaming endpoints in my HTTP and Gemini programs to pipe music from the Pi to the listener. It works great - knock on wood. The songs are encoded in opus which gives the best bang for the buck. The Gemini stream plays in Alhena and...
💬 5 comments · 1 like · 2025-12-28 · 4 months ago
Gemini Streaming — I'm testing streaming media in Alhena. Is hashnix the only Gemini radio service? Any others? How about Spartan, Nex or Gopher? Streaming is an option so the old behavior is still available (media plays from a temp file). When streaming, you can listen to Hashnix or HTTP streams but you lose seek. There are also rare files which don't stream - I think it has to do with the location of the metadata within the file. That's why it's an option. When playing large videos, playback...
💬 22 comments · 2 likes · 2025-11-29 · 5 months ago
Onion Services — I've been messing with Tor since adding SOCKS5 support to Alhena. I think the whole onion service thing is interesting and was surprised to find a few in Gemini. I set up my own service (temporarily) to see what was involved. I like the idea for running one but I'm wondering why. Is the motivation mostly to show support for the technology?
💬 9 comments · 2 likes · 2025-10-12 · 7 months ago
Has anyone here done the Rufus Windows 10 to 11 upgrade in place? Did your installed programs continue to work? I have three machines that aren't eligible otherwise.
💬 5 comments · 2025-10-03 · 7 months ago
Protocol Styles and the Flag of Sark — If you build Alhena from source, you can now create a page style by protocol (gemini, spartan, nex, http, https and file). Thanks @me for the great idea! You also get updated sprite emojis: , , , , , or and the Flag of Sark: 🇨🇶 A formal release with installs may take a few days since 5.3.8 just came out.
💬 7 comments · 2025-09-30 · 7 months ago
Illegal Character In URL — A link showed up in Antenna today that won't open in Alhena because the URL contains an unecoded ">". Alhena uses Java's URI class to parse out the scheme, host, path and query and since the URI class strictly implements RFC3986, trying to parse the url throws an exception. That said, the link will open in Lagrange and Amfora. I could probably do some gymnastics to make it work but I'm leaning towards displaying an error message instead. I can't find anything in the...
💬 5 comments · 2025-09-14 · 8 months ago
Is It Just Me — I feel like the news links showing up recently in Antenna makes it less pleasant to use. Just my two cents adjusted for inflation.
💬 9 comments · 1 like · 2025-08-14 · 9 months ago
Scriptonite Lagrange Workarounds — I put in workarounds for running Scriptonite in Lagrange. The issue is that Lagrange doesn't preserve certain percent-encoded characters in urls (whether on a page or in a redirect). The fix is to sanitize Scriptonite links coming in and base64 on redirect. The one thing I can't workaround is semicolons. If you want to use them in a pre-populated variable or auto-prompt, the Scriptonite segment must be base64 encoded in advance. That should be rare but there...
💬 13 comments · 2025-08-04 · 9 months ago
Lagrange and Scriptonite — After carrying on for weeks thinking Scriptonite was just fine and dandy, I find out a number of my sample scripts don't work in Lagrange. Long story short, my auto-prompt scheme relies on redirects. Right or wrong (someone tell me), Alhena redirects with the exact url sent in the status 30 message. It appears Lagrange will decode things in the url I intended to be preserved. Simple example: If my server builds a redirect url containing ";code=2%2B2", it becomes ";...
💬 3 comments · 2025-07-31 · 9 months ago
Gemtext Aware Titan Editor — The Alhena Subspace may have been a bad idea but I think this is a good one: A gemtext aware Titan text editor (see image at link). I edit my site, my gemlogs and my posts on BBS with Titan. This enhancement really does improve the experience. Adding a gemtext syntax parser to Alhena via the RSyntaxTextArea library wasn't too terrible. Well, except for word wrap (the library is designed for code editing). I still need to tune for themes a bit and explore some...
💬 View post · 3 likes · 2025-07-24 · 9 months ago
New Subspace — I created an Alhena subspace where people can report bugs and suggest enhancements. Not everyone has a GitHub account or wants to file issues there. One of the unique features of Alhena (color emojis) was born out of user feedback on GitHub. Post if you have anything to suggest.
💬 View post · 2 likes · 2025-07-23 · 9 months ago
AI Slop Revisited — I got some friendly feedback to my previous "AI Slop" post. The sender felt it was unfortunate I used AI to find a workaround and (more importantly) that the nature of the workaround could somehow come back to haunt me in the future. I've been around long enough to know if one person expresses an opinion, there are others "in the shadows" thinking the same thing. Here's my response to them. vert.x is an abstraction over the Netty async I/O library. It does not have an...
💬 4 comments · 2025-07-17 · 10 months ago
AI Slop? — So there was a known issue in Alhena. If a server sent a close_notify without actually closing the connection (I'm looking at you vger), the busy spinner would keep on spinning until the connection timed out. Yeah, you could hit the ESC key but it was annoying. Since I opted to use vert.x to take advantage of easy async I/O, I was dismayed to discover the api did not have a callback for close_notify. I could lower the read timeout but slow sites could get disconnected if they took...
💬 5 comments · 2 likes · 2025-07-15 · 10 months ago
Page 1 of 2