2026-07-20T22:44:17Z https://nostr.now PurpleJillybeans https://nostr.now/npub1up994aksg4hm8kh9rvsdpth9p9g7nkzdf9mldcly8x8qzmnm082szuptyd https://blog.n8fq.org/social/jillybeans/s/avatar-0813c0870c76ac9b13bb924c7e8f4607.jpg https://blog.n8fq.org/social/jillybeans/s/avatar-0813c0870c76ac9b13bb924c7e8f4607.jpg https://nostr.now/nevent1qqsgar4922psrnjm6wjgw4jknezfwpk76acfudz63esju6z27aarsxszyrsy5khk6pzklv76u5djp59wu5y4r6wcf4yh0ahrusucuqtw0dua2vyfcpk One Small Step into GeminispaceAround this time last year I decided to dig out a #Gopher hole for myself. Without much else to offer, I figured my best bet for content would be a phlog built from a copy of my blog posts here on my #snac server, so I threw together a shell script to periodically grab my posts and export them as a Gopher tree. It was crude, but it&#39;s been working well.<br/><br/>When I first announced it, several people asked if I had any plans to make a #GeminiProtocol capsule. I wasn&#39;t really considering it at the time since I felt like I was accomplishing all I wanted to do with Gopher, but now I&#39;ve decided I want to give it a shot. I installed Solderpunk&#39;s Molly Brown server (which I chose because it was the only one in Debian&#39;s repo) and, after much struggle with cert permissions, got it up and running.<br/><br/>For content, I went with the same thing as with Gopher: a gemlog powered by a snac-to-Gemini exporter. snac uses Markdown for formatting, which is of course very similar to Gemtext. I went back and edited my earlier blog posts to make them more Gemtext-like, which mostly meant adding header lines. The only real complication was inline links: I would need to strip them out of the Markdown source. Since I&#39;m doing this all with shell scripts (as opposed to something like Python that&#39;d probably work better), an actual Markdown parser wasn&#39;t really an option, so I decided to do it with a regex. The thing is, I&#39;m not very good at writing regexes. After many, many fruitless searches trying to find an existing solution I came across a bash script that did what I wanted. The script itself was obvious vibe-coded filth, but it did contain a sed -E command that did exactly what I needed.<br/><br/>The exporter is a comically-inept hackjob and has a backslash-itis problem (which I imagine is coming from the JSON parser I&#39;m using) but it does, somehow, work. Some day I&#39;ll see about redoing the whole thing in Python, but for now it&#39;s good enough.<br/><br/>Take a look if you&#39;re interested: gemini://gemini.n8fq.org<br/><br/>#blog<br/> 2026-07-20T13:26:49Z https://nostr.now/nevent1qqsq3xynmqlky0u0tnguawjw6cmfaeqyn7mpdzv975lvc8s3xwtsa5gzyrsy5khk6pzklv76u5djp59wu5y4r6wcf4yh0ahrusucuqtw0dua2j9qycn A brief update<br/><br/>It&#39;s been over a month since I posted anything here so I feel like I should give it a gentle poke in the side. There hasn&#39;t been a lot going on with me lately that warrants more than a toot over on my Mastodon profile. For the most part, my routine is to get up at some point, have something to eat, take meds, then read random things online either in silence or with a Twitch or Owncast stream going in the background. Lester the black&#39;a&#39;white cat occasionally jumps up on me for high-intensity snuggles which makes me put the laptop away for a few minutes. I go downstairs once in awhile to help my parents with something. About once a week or so I head into town to pick up groceries. I go to bed after about 14 hours. That&#39;s pretty much it.<br/><br/>I&#39;ve been trying to do a Spoopy Season Stream Series™ on my Owncast channel since September but I rarely feel like I have the energy to do any gaming, much less put on a show. I started a playthrough of the Costume Quest series late last month and I&#39;m about a third of the way through Costume Quest 2. Once I&#39;m done with that I might start messing with some retrocomputing projects again.<br/> 2025-11-08T09:03:56Z https://nostr.now/nevent1qqsdl3kd3lcvpgtja9nrskgw29vhv7redxnm9wxeu08lcd0g5vs5knqzyrsy5khk6pzklv76u5djp59wu5y4r6wcf4yh0ahrusucuqtw0dua2q9m3k7 Tonight&#39;s experiment: TriTeal CDE ships with a shared build of the Motif 1.2 library, but doesn&#39;t include headers. Presumably you were meant to be able to run CDE/Motif apps you&#39;d gotten elsewhere, but not to build your own.<br/><br/>Thankfully, someone uploaded a source package for Motif 1.2.5 to archive.org. I wasn&#39;t able to get it to build in the few minutes I tinkered with it, and it&#39;s not clear if the entire source tree is actually there or not, but at least all the headers were included. I made a /usr/dt/include directory and put the headers in the appropriate places, then I tried building something: xsol, a Motif-based Klondike solitaire game.<br/><br/>The result: not perfect, but that it works at all is pretty amazing to me. The code built with no warnings and the basic game works, though it&#39;s a bit glitchy. Trying to open the options or about dialogs makes it segfault, and occasionally a card will just cease to exist mid-drag, but it&#39;s still playable and winnable. Either the headers are slightly mismatched (they&#39;re from 1.2.5, while the libs are an unknown 1.2.x revision) or the game just wasn&#39;t meant to be built against such an old version of Motif.<br/><br/>Considering that Lesstif was available contemporarily and Motif itself has since been open-sourced, this was really just a stunt. But it was fun!<br/><br/>#RetroComputing #RetroDev<br/><br/><br/> <img src="https://blog.n8fq.org/social/jillybeans/s/post-7652e5e113059439aa0b6d8280bd8ac0.jpg"> 2025-06-20T05:10:03Z