It’s important to remember how to play.
Many of us struggle with that, I think. It’s probably what draws us to Amateur Radio. It’s that desire to dig in and learn new things while at the same time just screwing around. Poking at things to see what they do. Doing things for their own sake. After all, at this point in history, Amateur Radio is really for people who want to have a serving of fun with a side of technology.
The community that comes from Amateur Radio is wonderful. Mostly helpful people who like to go deep and really understand things. People who like to explore. If you spend enough time talking with folks like that, you will - if you’re lucky - find yourself tugging at strings and falling down rabbit holes. It’s a great way to spend some time and stretch the mind. Don’t want yourself getting stiff and achy in a mental way, right?
The Gemini Protocol
Something that has come across my radar more than a few times is Gemini. I’m no stranger to Gopher and I do remember using lynx and pine as my daily drivers (that’s all we had, really) but I’d not really poked at Gemini. I kind of filed it away as being Gopher Part Two which isn’t fair. More and more it bubbles up in my Mastodon feed as a part of the “smolweb”. That is to say, hand made, artisanal web content served up without algorithms and ads and things that are not fun. Well, I like to think I’m fun, so I started to poke at Gemini for a minute. I pulled on that thread and ended up exactly where one might expect.
What Did You Do, Ray?
Man I need to rewatch Ghost Busters.
Anywho, I downloaded Lagrange.
brew install --cask lagrange
With that on Ye Olde MacIntosh, I started to browse around. I found some things that were fun. Stuff that was out there just to be out there. No real interactivity. Just cool stuff. I remember when the web was like that. It was great! Then we started doing dynamic stuff with Perl and it all fell apart. Oh well.
The attraction to that kind of weird fun was just too much. I stumbled across Awesome Gemini which was a road to Agate (it’s Gemini’s birthstone…get it?!). The next thing I knew, I was running a capsule on my internal Nextcloud server. But that was too easy! I looked across the room and saw a Raspberry Pi 3B blinking away. I’d set that up 2 or more years ago as an Allstar node so I could run Echolink. Well, when we got a new internet provider and a new pile of networking hardware I never bothered to fix the routing so that box was talking to nothing. Oops. That made the upgrade from Debian Stretch (WHAT?!) to something more modern less painful.
And side note? Why is svxlink stranded on Stretch anyway? I know my dad has fussed with that for the club’s Echolink server and it just feels like a nightmare. I know things get abandoned all the time, but this feels weird. I did a lot of looking to see if I could keep it running and I just couldn’t. So now it’s a Gemini server and maybe something else soon. Who can say?
Potential
The thing about Gemini is that it’s brutally simple. The syntax is limited. There’s no concept of interactivity. The page is served and that’s it. That’s not to say that you couldn’t write a page or update it with something fun. I dunno, maybe I could use it as a way to spot myself for the 5 or 6 people who are both Ham Radio operators AND have Gemini clients. I mean, let’s be clear: those are My People.
For the moment, I’m going to mess around with it and see where it lands in my technology space. It feels so much closer to something that I want to do than something big and heavy like Wordpress or, well, anything that could call itself a Platform.
Check It Out
Go to that Awesome Gemini repository and get a client. Then head over to gemini://kc8jc.online and see what’s going on over there. I promise you won’t regret it!
Have some fun and thanks for reading!