🚀 u/jsreed5
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I'm considering making an account on either Matrix, Delta Chat, or an XMPP server, and I'd like to get some opinions from my fellow Geminauts. Which do you use, and why? Have you used more than one of these services, and if so, how do they compare to each other? What programs and apps do you use to access them? What account providers do you recommend, or do you self-host?
💬 13 comments · 7 likes · May 01 · 6 days ago
I couldn't find a good place to fit this thought into my most recent log post, so I'll put it here instead. The curse of environmentalism is this: the world is big enough that you can't see the effects of your own actions, but small enough that you can see the effects of everyone else's.
💬 13 comments · 4 likes · Feb 25 · 2 months ago
Someone on Mastodon posted a link to a log I wrote last year about Google restricting side-loaded apps. Apparently, that was enough to make Google set their LLM hounds on my trail. I stumbled across their AI summary of "jsreed5.org" today, and to my surprise, it's largely correct, though quite sparse. All of their information on my capsule comes from confirmed Web links and not from Gemini itself. That's good news to me: it means Google isn't (publicly) scraping our little corner of the...
💬 3 comments · 1 like · Feb 22 · 2 months ago
Laptop Recommendations — My trusty Dell Inspiron 3153 laptop, which was already showing signs of wear after a decade of continuous use, became waterlogged last week when a drainage pipe in our laundry room failed. We dried it out and found that it still works, but I don't know for how much longer. I think it's finally time for a replacement. I'm looking for a laptop that is reasonably thin and lightweight; the Inspiron has an 11-inch screen and weighs 1.4 kg, and I'd like to get a computer...
💬 3 comments · Jan 22 · 3 months ago
I think I might have been one of the last people to order the US model of the original Unihertz Titan brand-new. I bought mine directly from Unihertz about a week and a half ago, and as of Monday, their US stock is sold out on their site. Given the phone is from 2019, I doubt they're going to sell any more.
💬 View post · Jan 07 · 4 months ago
Instead of throwing money at yet another device like an AlphaSmart or a FreeWrite, I'm going to try making a distraction-free writing device out of a Tauon PC-1, which I already own. The PC-1 runs Android 7, which limits the number of apps that are compatible with it. Has anyone tried any immersion writing apps on Android? I'm open to recommendations.
💬 9 comments · 1 like · 2025-11-29 · 5 months ago
How do you subscribe to Atom/RSS feeds from Gopher or Gemini? Are there any standalone Linux applications or Android apps that can do it?
💬 4 comments · 2025-10-28 · 6 months ago
Paraphrased from a personal note I rediscovered. "Today we have LEDs and fluorescent lights, which are extremely energy-efficient. They can even be powered directly from solar panels. We use the natural power of light rays from the Sun to create artificial light. Ironic, isn't it?"
💬 15 comments · 1 like · 2025-08-15 · 9 months ago
I've been binging sports on YouTube recently--everything from rugby to cycling, badminton, snooker, darts and more. Today I landed on sports in the Netherlands: I've seen videos of fierljeppen competitions before, and now I've discovered kaatsen. I almost want to learn some Dutch just so I can follow along with it! Are there any sports you watch that you feel don't get much attention?
💬 View post · 2025-08-09 · 9 months ago
I've finally deployed an updated certificate to my capsule that handles multiple DNS entries correctly. Big thanks to @meidam for alerting me to the issue, and to @sbr for posting instructions on how to issue a new cert with the same key!
💬 1 comment · 1 like · 2025-07-31 · 9 months ago
— List of regions of the United States
American Geminauts: what region of the United States do you live in? It would be fun to meet some people in real life who share this hobby, but I don't know if there are very many of us here in the Midwest. (I realize the term "region of the US" is somewhat loosely defined, so to make the poll unambiguous, I'm using regions as defined by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which can...
💬 8 comments · 1 like · 2025-06-21 · 11 months ago · 🗳️
I'm looking for resources on practical degrowth and DIY low tech projects, such as Low Tech Magazine and Low-tech Lab. What are some of your favorites? [https link] [https link]
💬 4 comments · 1 like · 2025-06-11 · 11 months ago
A while back I read a post (which I'm pretty sure was on Gemini) about a person who created a wallet-sized calendar. The card functioned similarly to a perpetual calendar: it had 31 numbered days on the top half, and the bottom half indicated which days of the week lined up with the numbers based on month. I'd like to save my own copy of the calendar, but now I can't find the post. Does anyone have a link?
💬 3 comments · 2024-12-17 · 1 year ago
On 2024-10-25, I will replace the server certificate on Rob's Gemini Capsule with a new one. The current cert fingerprint ends with BB6C557D; the new cert fingerprint will end with 56D4B3AF. If you see "untrusted host" warnings in the near future, please don't panic!
💬 View post · 1 like · 2024-10-12 · 2 years ago
There has been some discussion in the past about using reverse proxies with Gemini. Do any reverse proxies work? I'm getting ready to run a few other services on my capsule EC2 instance and I'd like them to use their own subdomains.
💬 8 comments · 2024-10-03 · 2 years ago
Is there a tool that can take a text file, wrap it at a given maximum width, add spaces to justify the text, and hyphenate words if it has to add too many spaces, à la LaTeX? I'm sure there are tools that will wrap and even justify, but I'm not sure about hyphenation.
💬 4 comments · 2024-07-23 · 2 years ago
When the CGIs on my capsule need to store data, I use SQLite as the backend. I'd like to try out a document-oriented NoSQL database for my next project. MongoDB is the obvious choice, but I don't like its licensing terms, and I like that SQLite doesn't require a process to run all the time. Is there an open-source document-oriented database analogous to SQLite?
💬 4 comments · 2024-07-09 · 2 years ago
Gemini has changed my perspective on social media in ways I didn't expect. Even from a technical standpoint, I don't see much of a need for heavy communication platforms like Twitter, Bluesky or Mastodon. Station and Bubble have shown that it's possible to build a thriving discussion space with only a TLS certificate and a GET request.
💬 2 comments · 5 likes · 2024-06-04 · 2 years ago
Is there any way to get past a captive Web portal that requires Javascript on a Debian device that does not have a GUI Web browser? This problem is plaguing one of my laptops.
💬 6 comments · 2024-05-29 · 2 years ago
My intermittent capsule outages are being caused by what appears to be a very aggressive crawler. The capsule's robots.txt file tells bots not to index my CGI scripts, but this crawler is ignoring the file and sending multiple requests per second against my scripts, which overloads the server and causes it to crash. I've temporarily solved the problem by blocking the crawler entirely; I'll look for a more permanent solution.
💬 3 comments · 3 likes · 2024-05-13 · 2 years ago
It appears my capsule [gemini link] went down at some point yesterday evening, and I only discovered it this morning. The capsule is now back online. I apologize for any inconvenience!
💬 2 comments · 2024-05-12 · 2 years ago
A standard deck of US playing cards has 54 cards including Jokers, and the standard Rubik's Cube has 54 stickers. Therefore it 's possible to represent the state of Rubik's Cube with a deck of playing cards--and it's possible to "solve" Rubik's Cube with them.
💬 4 comments · 2 likes · 2024-04-27 · 2 years ago
How did you choose your username?
💬 18 comments · 1 like · 2024-02-16 · 2 years ago
jsreed5.org was down for several hours last night. A problem in the underlying EC2 instance caused it to become unreachable, and I didn't notice the issue until I woke up today. It has now been resolved and my capsule is available again. I apologize for the inonvenience!
💬 1 comment · 2 likes · 2024-02-04 · 2 years ago
I forgot to post about this on places other than my capsule. A major bug was discovered in my chess service last week, which often caused match invitations to be deleted while being created and locking users out of making another invitation. This bug has been fixed. Thank you all for your patience!
💬 View post · 1 like · 2023-12-17 · 2 years ago
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