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1
2
3
4 The Gopher Times
5
6 ____________________________________________________________
7
8 Opus 5 - Gopher news and more - Jun. 2022
9 ____________________________________________________________
10
11
12
13
14 Bitreich Con 2022, Come and Talk! 20h
15 ____________________________________________________________
16
17 Greetings at 852.770114854 km/h, 34943.004 miles over
18 the Atlantic Ocean.
19
20 This is a happy reminder, that in less than 30 days,
21 brcon2022 will happen.
22
23 There will be two parts:
24
25 July 25th to 28th Online presentations, then one day
26 to get to Belgrade
27
28 July 30th to 31st We will be in presence, having fun
29 in Belgrade, Serbia.
30
31 If you want to hold a presention of your interest,
32 please see the Call for Papers: [1] and send your pro-
33 posal to Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net>
34
35 There is already a wide variety of topics registered,
36 from medicine to simple software over geology and
37 hopefully a special greeting from our science supervi-
38 sor Prof. Skildgaard who wants to give advices to all
39 of us humans.
40
41 See you online and in presence!
42
43 Sincerely yours,
44
45 20h Chief Conference Officer (CCO)
46 1 gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2022
47
48
49
50
51 Animated ASCII art linuxconsole
52 ____________________________________________________________
53
54 With all the history of ASCII art and demoscene, it
55 would be a shame if noone ever tried to combine the
56 two in animated ASCII art. Courtesy of textfiles.com,
57 we can browse through a collection of 93 animated
58 ASCII pieces of arts. [1]
59
60 They are also mirrored at the bitreich gopher site [2]
61
62 The animation speed will likely be too high for a ter-
63 minal, and can be slowed down with the throttle(1)
64 program as advised by linuxconsole.net, or with pv(1)
65 as below:
66 1 http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/
67 http://linuxconsole.net/ascii_art.html
68
69 2 gopher://bitreich.org/1/vt100/animations/
70 ____________________________________________________________
71
72 curl -s gopher://bitreich.org/1/vt100/animations/twilight.vt | pv -qL3000
73 ____________________________________________________________
74
75 You may use the "reset" command to get your terminal
76 normal again after watching.
77
78 Some are just a pun, a few frames to only give impres-
79 sion of movement, while other might be closer to a
80 short animated movie. Talking of which, long movies
81 were also done:
82
83 https://www.asciimation.co.nz/
84 telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
85
86 These characters transmitted through one protocol or
87 another, whispers to us, through our terminal screen,
88 tales from the imagination of plain text artists.
89
90
91
92 Prof. Skildgaard: Only Turtle Fans 20h
93 ____________________________________________________________
94
95 I am happy to announce, that the scientific head of
96 bitreich, Prof. Skildgaard, the professor for slow
97 sciences at the Aarhus university in Denmark, now has
98 opened his own website [1]
99
100 You can see many #turtlefan pictures. [2]
101
102 Please recommend his work! He has done so much for us,
103 like reviewing all entries to the last and the coming
104 brcon. This takes ages!
105
106 Sincerely yours,
107
108 20h Chief Slowness Executive (CSE)
109
110 1 http://onlyturtlefans.com/
111 2 <annna> #turtlefan: gopher://bitreich.org/I/memecache/turtlefan.png
112
113
114
115
116 Synthetic ASCII Art tgtimes
117 ____________________________________________________________
118
119 When an entirely new way to solve problems is discov-
120 ered, all sorts of medias, and not only the tech-
121 oriented ones, are fond to publish abundantly about
122 it. Be it quantum computing, blockchains, machine
123 learning... Shortly after a new big toys like these
124 comes-up, hackers come, and start experimenting with
125 it, sometimes coming-up with entirely new way to use
126 it.
127
128 This time we are reviewing the combo of Machine Learn-
129 ing and ASCII art.
130
131 I was expecting to present cute attempts at drawing
132 images with computer-made text, but this is nothing of
133 the sort. Be prepared to see Science at the service
134 of Art.
135
136 Generated Typewriter Art This research paper (no
137 less!) shows that it is possible to write software
138 for placing characters, later typed during 6 hours
139 by a human operator (for this example). It is un-
140 settling to see details much smaller than the char-
141 acters themself be drawn on paper, along with shades
142 of grey of various intensities. [1]
143
144 Generated ASCII Art in 2010 This is possibly the state
145 of the art of 2010 technology. It was announced in
146 the yearly conference SIGGRAPH hence presented to an
147 audience full of computer graphics engineers. The
148 work of three researchers from Hong Kong, Xuemiao
149 Xu, Linling Zhang and Tien-Tsin Wong, shows results
150 of surprising accuracy. The story does not tell
151 whether there ever was a job offer "looking for
152 ASCII artists for a scientific experiment" posted on
153 the job board of the Chinese University of Hong
154 Kong. While the paper contains the complete math
155 used, it also illustrates and explains methods to
156 achieve this level of accuracy. And no, it is not
157 exactly machine learning, but hand-crafted strate-
158 gies, combined statistics and other data massaging.
159 After all, it was published five years before things
160 like Tensor Flow were introduced... [2]
161
162 Generated ASCII Art in 2017 Is seven years enough time
163 to improve upon that previous achievement? Quoting
164 the previous paper as well as others in its own
165 work, Osamu Akiyama of the Osaka Faculty of Medicine
166 kept the ball rolling. This throws the big guns of
167 machine learning to reach higher skies. Its input
168 data were Japaneses BBS such as 5chan (2chan) or
169 Shitaraba, which extends the ASCII set to all of
170 unicode, notably the CJK set. If the result of the
171 paper are not enough to convince you, the "Bad Ap-
172 ple" often used as a video demo in the Asian market
173 have been converted in its entirety. Something out
174 of reach if doing every frame by hand. The Tensor-
175 Flow and Python code used is released publicly, and
176 an online demo is offered for the curious. [3] [4]
177 [5] [6] [7]
178
179 Is it so futile? Not so sure. After all, representing
180 anything with a computer is a matter of making a real-
181 ity fit onto something terribly awkward and unnatural:
182 a display. The pixels, the square elements praised
183 for providing a grid to throw data at, are promising,
184 but themself have their quirks to be worked around.
185 For instance, sub-pixel geometry uses the same tech-
186 niques as those presented by these papers for improv-
187 ing the realism of images beyond what a single pixel
188 can offer. It is, for ASCII art like for anything
189 else, a matter of representing something, real or fic-
190 tious, through a medium of some kind.
191
192 ASCII art has the ability to fit an image somewhere
193 where there could only be text. For the example of a
194 train station concourse with a large split-flap dis-
195 play: for displaying a big arrow at the end of the
196 service, replacing the display by an equally large
197 color screen can be costly and much more power-hungry,
198 while an ASCII arrow on that existing display would be
199 consuming no power for that still image.
200 1 https://graphicsinterface.org/wp-content/uploads/gi2021-13.pdf
201
202 2 http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~ttwong/papers/asciiart/asciiart.html
203 3 https://nips2017creativity.github.io/doc/ASCII_Art_Synthesis.pdf
204
205 4 https://nips2017creativity.github.io/
206 5 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=8GulN69Cgbg
207
208 6 https://www.vice.com/en/article/zmymwx/machine-learning-ascii-art-neural-net
209 7 https://github.com/OsciiArt/DeepAA
210
211
212
213
214 BIG BROWSER IS WATCHING YOU! 20h
215 ____________________________________________________________
216
217 Are you feeling watched all the time? Do you feel un-
218 sure when doing something nasty? It is true, you are
219 watched: By BIG BROWSER. Whenever you use the web,
220 someone else is masturbating to your web history.
221
222 You want to know how to be able to do nasty things on-
223 line without someone masturbating to it? Come to br-
224 con2022 and find out more. [1]
225
226 This time online and in presence!
227
228 See you there!
229
230 Sincerely yours,
231
232 20h Chief Espionage Officer (CEO)
233 1 gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2022
234
235
236
237
238 Sailing With Grace tgtimes
239 ____________________________________________________________
240
241 The sea! Water all around, not a single piece of land
242 around to stand in, only a single boat that becomes
243 one with you, its capitain. Infinite waves under the
244 blue or cloudly sky is all you see for a long trip of
245 many days. Feeling lost, but at the same time united
246 with surrounding nature. After all, the largest part
247 of Earth is covered by the sea.
248
249 This is the world of Sailing that awaits each of us,
250 for a single trip hosted by a well proven crew, or as
251 a lone sailor braving tempests after tempests.
252
253 Sailing blogs are definitely a good opportunity to
254 dream, the instant of an article.
255
256 This blog, Sailing With Grace, has taken the decision
257 of offering all its content through HTTP, but also
258 proxied over Gopher. [1] This recalls an interesting
259 point: it proves that Gopher is not only good for
260 talking about Gopher and computer things, but is also
261 oriented toward the outside. Is it ready to be used
262 by people who are not gopher geeks?
263
264 It always was to begin with, so why would it not? Are
265 people less able to use computers now than they was
266 before the web came? The discussion is open.
267 1 gopher://gopher.sailingwithgrace.com
268
269
270
271
272 sfeed 1.5 Released Hiltjo
273 ____________________________________________________________
274
275 sfeed [1] is a tool to convert RSS or Atom feeds from
276 XML to a TAB-separated file.
277
278 sfeed has the following notable changes compared to
279 1.4:
280
281 o sfeed_curses: interrupt waitpid while interactive
282 child program is running. This now handles SIGTERM
283 on sfeed_curses while an interactive child program
284 is running.
285
286 o sfeed_curses: close stdin before spawning a plumb
287 program in non-interactive mode, which is more intu-
288 itive: the program doesn't seem to hang when it ex-
289 pects input in this case since there is no way to
290 send input anyway.
291
292 o Properly escape backslashes in the man pages (thanks
293 adc!).
294
295 o Documentation improvements to the man pages and a
296 progress indicator example script for sfeed_update.
297
298 I want to thank all people who gave feedback.
299
300 Thanks, Hiltjo.
301 1 git://git.codemadness.org/sfeed
302 gopher://codemadness.org/1/git/sfeed
303 https://codemadness.org/releases/sfeed/
304 gopher://codemadness.org/1/releases/sfeed/
305
306
307
308
309 Wireless, wireless everywhere tgtimes
310 ____________________________________________________________
311
312 Wires! Cables! Connectors! Computer and electric sys-
313 tems seems to befriend with plugs and sockets. Why is
314 the computer industry running away from them for ev-
315 erything exposed to users?
316
317 Where do I plug the cable? Everyone needfully face
318 this question at least once, be it the first time
319 they own a computer. From the various connector
320 shapes to choose from, to the various set of proto-
321 col the Universal USB connector supports, cables
322 provoke confusion to cable-haters and computer neo-
323 phytes.
324
325 Cables are ugly It might not be true for everyone, but
326 computer manufacturers seems to say differently.
327 Starting with the name "wireless", that comes by op-
328 position to wires, supposing they were something to
329 avoid. Cable management is a full time job for dat-
330 acenter jockeys, and a chore for the cable-hating
331 computer user.
332
333 Cables are immobile Unless making use of an uncommon
334 cable management strategy, objects connected to ca-
335 bles cannot be carried too far away without unplug-
336 ging everything devices are connected to.
337
338 So here comes wireless. While not frequent in large
339 computer infrastructure, wireless is invading the mar-
340 ket along with battery devices. Using radio waves to
341 make device talk to each other, at various frequen-
342 cies, modulation, datarate and distance. Ready to
343 sacrifice any amount of good engineering to make it-
344 self more seducing to the market, marketing perpetu-
345 ates the same illusion of making computer troubles
346 fade away with wireless.
347
348 From the Bluetooth protocol swamp of mixed edge-cases
349 and complexity, to the security vulnerabilities of
350 Wi-Fi, to the security vulnerabilities of Bluetooth,
351 to the proprietary but popular protocols like LoRaWan,
352 to the unreliability and unstability as opposed to
353 wires, to the black box of wireless broadband such as
354 UTMS and LTE, Wireless does not have the same fame
355 among developers valuing simplicity and reliability.
356
357 Even the United Army holds griefs against wireless
358 such as Bluetooth, and disrecommends it for use by
359 militaries: [1]
360
361 >> Do not use Bluetooth devices to send, receive,
362 store, or process classified information.
363
364 This means no Bluetooth keyboard, no Bluetooth headset
365 during phone calls, no Bluetooth sharing between the
366 phone and the computer... In other words, no Blue-
367 tooth.
368
369 Nontheless, wireless is fun, beautiful, and filled
370 with culture. While marketting pushed engineers from
371 the wireless cliff, long before computer came, radio
372 waves were put at good use in the most simple forms:
373 radio communication. From the AM and FM radio sta-
374 tions to listen while on the road, the medium-range
375 boat, airplane, truck, pedestrian talkies, and even
376 satellite communications, hobbyists building-up their
377 own antennas for inter-continental communication,
378 garage door openners and remotely controlled drones...
379
380 Complex and twisted wireless protocols are only a spe-
381 cial case of radio communication, and simple unobfus-
382 cated methods of communication are possible, and even
383 frequent.
384
385 Be it a simple and inexpensive RTL SDR dongle receiver
386 [2] or a complete receiver-emitter such as HackRF [3]
387 or LimeSDR, [4] many gears exist for experimenting
388 with radio transmissions.
389
390 Every year, the American Relay Radio League (ARRL) is
391 publishing a large book focused on radiocommunication,
392 and its chapter 1 section 1 is Do-It-Yourself Wire-
393 less.
394
395 This is an invitation for everyone to discover or re-
396 discover the universe of electromagnetic fields commu-
397 nication.
398 1 https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/
399 ARN4771_Pam25-2-9_Final_Web.pdf
400
401 2 https://www.rtl-sdr.com/
402 3 https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/one/
403
404 4 https://limemicro.com/products/boards/limesdr/
405
406
407
408 Open-Source Breathing tgtimes
409 ____________________________________________________________
410
411 The previous opus had a word or two about how diffi-
412 cult it could be to get open hardware medical devices.
413 The Freespireco [1] project aims to bring a respirator
414 device to life as a completely Open Hardware project.
415
416 The challenge is not coming-up with something that
417 works and is reliable, but instead to provide a struc-
418 ture robust enough to be accepted (and funded) for
419 performing all the necessary certifications needed be-
420 fore being allowed to the medical device market.
421
422 There are usually categories of criticalities, and an
423 artificial respirator is not escaping to the rule. The
424 organiser of the project have pursued this goal since
425 long, and might likely have a very long road to go.
426
427 It is essentially a pioneer of Open Hardware for crit-
428 ical medical devices, step-by-step paving up the road
429 toward certification: designing and building devices
430 to test these equipment, issuing standards for data
431 (like a JSON schema received over a serial port di-
432 rectly from the device).
433
434 The strategy: offering reproducible tests as an anchor
435 for trust. Precious argument for facing big pharma
436 equipment vendors that are having an interest in lock-
437 ing their device down, preventing repair or even in-
438 spection.
439
440 In a same journey toward braving Goliath: accessing
441 the Outter Space. And it is, as crazy as it looks,
442 far from impossible to contribute to space research
443 even without a diploma: The RTEMS [2] project is open
444 to contribution.
445
446 But that does not discourage the authors of the respi-
447 rator project to keep going. Not in a blind trust for
448 the medical industry, but in full foresight that no-
449 body would want its mom's life given to a hobbyist toy
450 made in a garage. With this reality in mind, "what-
451 ever it takes" turns into "whatever is done", and the
452 road to certification progresses, one breath at a
453 time.
454
455 1 https://www.pubinv.org/project/freespireco/
456 2 https://rtems.org/
457
458
459
460
461 20h Presents: Geomyidae 20h
462 ____________________________________________________________
463
464 This project existed since a while, and kept improv-
465 ing. In this interview with 20h, he shows us what
466 Geomyidae's got under the hood.
467
468 >> What is Geomyidae?
469
470 Geomyidae is a Unix/Linux daemon/service serving the
471 gopher protocol.
472
473 >> So what is gopher?
474
475 Gopher here is an internet protocol, which was first
476 developed at the University of Minnesota. After its
477 short success, it declined, but is now striving again
478 to be used for its simplicity and hierarchy. For bet-
479 ter visual display of your gopher experience, use
480 something like links, lynx or sacc. Those are gopher
481 clients.
482
483 >> How does Geomyidae help with getting started with
484 gopher?
485
486 The installation of Geomyidae is very simple. You can
487 setup your Geomyidae right away:
488 ____________________________________________________________
489
490 git clone git://bitreich.org/geomyidae
491 cd geomyidae
492 make
493 curl -s gopher://localhost:7070
494 ____________________________________________________________
495
496 Yes, curl supports gopher! And it supports gopher and
497 TLS too!
498
499 >> Are there many alternatives among gopher daemons?
500
501 Yes, there are many. Some are there due to historical
502 reasons, others have gone out of shape over time. One
503 of the most popular alternatives is pygopherd.
504
505 >> How does Geomyidae compares to other implementa-
506 tions?
507
508 Geomyidae offers a unique simple way of expressing go-
509 pher content. See the manpage or the examples in the
510 source for how .gph files are formatted. And it does
511 just what you want it to do. No strange abstraction
512 files like in the original gopher daemons are the de-
513 fault way. In the newest release of Geomyidae compat-
514 ibility scripts were added. But those are to preserve
515 the unique history of gopher.
516
517 >> Did Geomyidae have significant evolutions since the
518 beginning?
519
520 Yes. Originally Geomyidae was named gopherd for Plan
521 9. It then was ported over to Linux. On Linux it was
522 renamed to Geomyidae. During that development much
523 has happened: There were significant speedups (due to
524 the patches and work of other people!), features were
525 added especially in new dynamic content handling. You
526 can easily see all features in the documentation and
527 especially the simple manpage.
528
529 >> Does Geomyidae work with all gopher clients?
530
531 Yes. Geomyidae supports the original protocol from
532 the beginning, up to modern gopher with TLS. For the
533 intermediary gopher+ protocol there is a compatibility
534 layer.
535
536 >> Has NSA inserted a backdoor onto Geomyidae?
537
538 I am not allowed to tell you.
539
540 >> How does gopher help with privacy?
541
542 The gopher protocol has the unique property that all
543 data you send over the line can be easily controlled
544 and seen. This is different to HTTP, where headers,
545 HTML and Javascript got so complex, it is uncontrol-
546 lable. See the gopher onion project [1] for how to
547 combine this with tor for total privacy and anonymity.
548
549 >> Are there TLS support on some gopher clients al-
550 ready?
551
552 There is support in curl, mpv/ffmpeg, sacc and more.
553 It is very easy to add TLS support to any client. You
554 simply connect via TLS on the gopher TCP port (de-
555 fault: 70) and if it works, keep that connection open.
556
557 >> Are there been any evolution of the gopher protocol
558 itself since the beginning of Geomyidae?
559
560 The technology used is simple. Gopher does not allow
561 requests, which begin with the first bytes of a TLS
562 request. So any proper and old gopher daemon will
563 simply refuse the connection. Then the client is free
564 to reconnect without TLS based on its security config-
565 uration. Any ISDN line will handle such probing re-
566 quests for TLS easily.
567
568 >> Did Geomyidae have to adapt itself to the gopher
569 protocol? Did it make gopher change?
570
571 Geomyidae changed the part of gophespace it was able
572 to reach. Many servers run on Geomyidae. There is
573 software written just for Geomyidae and its gph for-
574 mat. The TLS extension of the protocol came from Bi-
575 treich / Geomyidae. We also set the standard to sim-
576 ply use UTF-8 as default representation in gopher
577 menus and so bring it into the 21st century. I can
578 conclude: Yes, Geomyidae changed and will change go-
579 pher.
580
581 >> Have you seen Geomyidae ever used outside a hobby
582 project?
583
584 Well, Bitreich is serious in changing the software
585 world. Most of gopherspace is »hobby projects«. But
586 then, most of gopherspace is made from heart blood and
587 love, which makes it part of the life of the authors.
588
589 >> Is Geomyidae ready for non-hobby uses?
590
591 Geomyidae is ready for any use. It is stable and op-
592 timized to scale better than the cloud.
593
594 >> Geomyidae uses ".gph" files.
595
596 Does it replace the gophermap standard? Yes, in Ge-
597 omyidae it does. Gph is simpler and easier to adapt
598 to, especially when you come from some markup world.
599
600 >> Does Geomyidae support dynamic pages?
601
602 Geomyidae supports two forms of dynamic pages: One
603 which uses the gph markup and one, where the
604 script/application outputs raw gopher output. Addi-
605 tionally it supports in the latest release a form of
606 REST, where paths are transformed into arguments to
607 scripts. There is also support for
608 index.dcgi/index.cgi scripts to have better looking
609 paths and URIs.
610
611 >> Is Geomyidae already packaged in some Linux/BSD
612 distributions?
613
614 As far as I know it is packaged in gentoo, Archlinux
615 (and more), all BSDs. Since it is so simple to pack-
616 age: Just extract the tarball, run make and make in-
617 stall, the packages are easily made for any package
618 manager.
619
620 >> What is planned for the next releases of Geomyidae?
621
622 As of now I have worked through my whole long-standing
623 TODO list for Geomyidae. New ideas will evolve from
624 people sending in patches or through practical need.
625 Geomyidae follows the Bitreich manifesto [2] where a
626 software can be done.
627
628 >> How to get involved? Getting help, discussing, bug
629 hunting, code contribution, documentation...
630
631 If anyone wants to get involved, first download Ge-
632 omyidae, run it, have fun using it, creating gopher
633 content. If you run into problems, have patches or
634 suggestions, come on IRC [3] and discuss with us your
635 problem. For e-mail, send such requests to 20h@r-
636 36.net. All contact is in the manpage too.
637
638 >> Can I have an ice cream?
639
640 Yes, you will get one, once we meet again.
641 1 gopher://bitreich.org/1/onion
642
643 2 gopher://bitreich.org/0/documents/bitreich-manifesto.md
644 3 ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
645
646
647
648
649 Embedded Forth Programming tgtimes
650 ____________________________________________________________
651
652 Big computers can run large and complex programming
653 languages, so what can small computer run?
654
655 Compiled languages, in particular those with a small
656 runtime are often chosen. But the interpreted lan-
657 guages also have an audience willing to code with
658 their favorite programming environment for them. Pro-
659 gramming languages as big as Python have their embed-
660 ded counterpart (MicroPython) thanks to significant
661 efforts. They serve their purpose to embedded enthu-
662 siasts as educational and scripting languages to many.
663
664 But small "language in a nutshell" are fitting right
665 the small resources of microcontrollers. This is the
666 case of Forth and its stack-machine approach.
667 ____________________________________________________________
668
669 Mecrisp This implementation immediately targets micro-
670 controllers. See for instance the work of
671 librehacker.com author Christopher Howard. [1]
672
673 chipFORTH Another implementation of Forth, which were
674 used by NASA [2] for improving reliability of its
675 flight control system, among the mosts critical
676 pieces of software of a shuttle.
677
678 https://github.com/corecode/forth Among notable Forth
679 projects is Simon "corecode" Schubert's nimble forth
680 implementation as well as hardware code describing
681 the working of a CPU that executes Forth natively
682 [3]
683
684 https://forth.chat/ If feeling like having a taste of
685 Forth and Forth community, there are several chan-
686 nels featuring forth that you could enjoy, some of
687 which are oriented toward hardware projects directly
688 [4]
689
690 https://github.com/chmykh/apl-life This is Conway Game
691 of Life in APL in Forth What a long chain! It is APL
692 programming language implemented in Forth, and Con-
693 way game of life implemented in APL
694
695 https://github.com/remko/waforth Feeling like pushing
696 the irony of "Web" assembly even further? Why not
697 blasting a Forth implementation at it? [5] This
698 proves Forth as the new programming language en
699 vogue
700
701 http://collapseos.org/ What else does a programming
702 language need to prove itself useful? A kernel?
703 Check! Collapse OS is an operating system target-
704 ting resilience beyond extreme, as it is designed to
705 resist everything around it tearing apart, including
706 the whole civilisation. When nothing remains but
707 wastelands, CollapseOS will be there for a rebirth
708 of civilisation out of computers made from scavenged
709 parts. Civilisation is rising and falling all of
710 the time, just not all parts at the same time.
711
712 >> Forth is, to my knowledge, the most compact lan-
713 guage allowing high level constructs. -- Collapse OS
714 author.
715
716 gopher://retroforth.org/ https://retroforth.org/ A
717 forth implemented in C, Python, C#, Nim, JavaScript
718 and Pascal! The C version permits to embed the
719 script into a binary along with the interpreter, for
720 a single-binary deployment process. The more clas-
721 sic way to use it is to use shebangs scripts to have
722 executable scripts.
723
724 Many smaller utilities can already provide something
725 you needed:
726
727 http://retroforth.org/examples/Casket-HTTP.retro.html
728 An HTTP server
729
730 http://retroforth.org/examples/Atua-WWW.retro.html A
731 Gopher to HTTP+HTML Proxy on top of Atua.
732
733 http://retroforth.org/examples/Atua.retro.html A go-
734 pher server, already listed on the Gopher index of
735 links, the Gopher Lawn [6]
736
737 http://retroforth.org/examples/7080.retro.html A s
738
739 https://gitlab.com/goblinrieur/spreedsheet/ A spread-
740 sheet application in the terminal.
741
742 gopher://forth.works:100 This is a collection of code
743 blocks written in the Retro Forth's author (crc)
744 newest Forth implementation. It is itself served by
745 a gopher server (blocks 203-205 on the list above)
746 in Forth.
747
748 https://github.com/oriontransfer/pl0-language-tools A
749 PL/0 implementation in Python that can emmit Retro
750 Forth code as ouput. It looks like Forth simplic-
751 ity, portability, stability and speed of execution
752 made it a good candidate as a target language. The
753 PL/0 language is known for the book Algorithms +
754 Data Structures = Programs from Niklaus Wirth, him-
755 self famous for the Wirth Law:
756
757 >> The hope is that the progress in hardware will cure
758 all software ills. However, a critical observer may
759 observe that software manages to outgrow hardware in
760 size and sluggishness. --
761 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law
762
763 https://ribccs.com/candy/ If you were doubting about
764 Forth being fit for the industry, bear in mind that
765 the above is a very-large scale VFX Forth project
766 with over a million lines of code!
767
768 http://sam-falvo.github.io/kestrel/2016/03/29/vibe-2.2
769 Why not spin a vi-like text editor itself in forth?
770 See how few code it takes to implement one.
771
772 https://git.sr.ht/~vertigo/shoehorn An answer to the
773 bootstrapping problem: how to get from no software
774 to a complete system? Which compiler compiles the
775 first compiler? Forth's simplicity is a good candi-
776 date for solving this problem.
777
778 https://git.sr.ht/~vertigo/forthbox Software environ-
779 ment for computers to base upon right after booting:
780 a system shell in forth with real hardware projects
781 dedicated to it. Think of a LISP machine, but in-
782 stead being a Forth machine.
783
784 http://deathroadtocanada.com/ This video-game uses
785 Forth as a scripting language. When a whole script-
786 ing language fits on a thumb, putting it everywhere
787 costs nothing!
788 ____________________________________________________________
789
790 Such a large tool chest for such a small language.
791 With the Covid, Wars under disguise, and other supply
792 chain troubles, the demand of feature stability rises
793 face to the traditionnal "more features". In these
794 trying times, anyone is welcome to go Forth.
795 1 gemini://gem.librehacker.com/gemlog/tech/20220331-0.gmi
796 gemini://gem.librehacker.com/gemlog/tech/20220305-0.gmi
797
798 2 https://www.forth.com/space-shuttle-instrumentation-interface/
799 3 https://github.com/corecode/forth-cpu
800
801 4 ircs://irc.hackint.org/#forth-hardware-projects
802 5 https://el-tramo.be/waforth/
803 https://el-tramo.be/thurtle/
804
805 6 bitreich.org/1/lawn/c/gopher.gph
806
807
808
809 A new IRC network: IRCNow! tgtimes
810 ____________________________________________________________
811
812 A new IRC network is in town! [1] Ever wanted to feel
813 what an early community looks like? The admin jrmu
814 brought the project together, and is currently col-
815 lecting users along the way.
816
817 Whether you looked for a place to host your own commu-
818 nity, or wanted a see a fresh community be grow from
819 fertile ground, the community is welcoming and active.
820
821 >> IRCNow: Of the Users, By the Users, For the Users
822
823 Something else from this community might catch your
824 attention, is its orientation toward being adminis-
825 trated by its users themself: rather than letting the
826 founder handle everything, the community is oriented
827 toward serious teaching of unix command line and sys-
828 tem administration to anyone, from beginners to ad-
829 vanced users seeking improvement.
830
831 In-person teaching sessions were covered during the
832 LibrePlanet 2022 event [2] with recording of a test-
833 run of the event [3] where future and present hackers
834 met together working our their system administration
835 and community building skills. Linux Magazine also
836 ran an interview giving a good impression about the
837 spirit of the project: [4]
838
839 Beyond yet another IRC network to chat with, IRCnow
840 offers hosting services for IRC bouncers, Bots, E-
841 Mail, VPN, Code, File Storage, and Shell Accounts.
842
843 The wiki itself features plenty of technical informa-
844 tion on system administration as a support for its
845 bootcamps, which offers a comfortable step-by-step in-
846 troduction to a complete server administration. [5] I
847 have seen system administrators getting hired knowing
848 less than this!
849
850 1 irc://irc.ircnow.net:6667
851 ircs://irc.ircnow.net:6697
852 2 https://jrmu.host.ircnow.org/libreplanet/libreplanet.pdf
853
854 3 https://0x0.st/oTal.webm - 0h20m: audio starts - 1h15m: talking about Gopher
855 4 https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2021/249/Interview-IRCNow
856
857 5 https://wiki.ircnow.org/index.php?n=Minutemin.Bootcamp
858
859
860
861 Search podcasts via Gopher tgtimes
862 ____________________________________________________________
863
864 Do you happen to be a podcast enjoyer? Maybe you con-
865 sidered to have something to listen to on the road or
866 while cooking.
867
868 Combining many different sources, you may encounter
869 some heirlooms by searching through this gopher
870 front-end for podcast search. [1]
871
872 The platform aggregates multiple search APIs of RSS
873 link aggregators with a focus on audio podcasts, and
874 extracts the RSS links for you, so you do not have to
875 search throug a dozen of webpages just to find the RSS
876 button.
877
878 For instance, knowing about the Amp Hour podcast, I
879 tried searching for it: "Amp Hour" in the search
880 field, and bingo! The first result is "The Amp Hour
881 Electronics Podcast", that was quickly added to my
882 list of RSS feeds in a blast.
883
884 Being based off Gopher, this makes it insanely easy to
885 automate a script searching for podcasts, then down-
886 loading the entries and uploading them to an MP3
887 player of any kind (dedicated, or as part of a phone
888 or other portable computer).
889
890 Want to know more about it? One place to discuss
891 about it is the Bitreich IRC server [2]
892
893 1 gopher://gopher.icu/1/pod
894 2 ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
895
896
897
898
899 Relics of Fast Fourrier Transform rue_mohr
900 ____________________________________________________________
901
902 In 1967, the Kooley-Tukey FFT algorythm (the one we
903 all use now) was written in Fortran. What the hell
904 were they running it on, and what damned data were
905 they feeding into it?!
906 ____________________________________________________________
907
908 SUBROUTINE FOUR1(DATA,NN,ISIGN)
909 C THE COOLEY-TUKEY FAST ROURIER TRANSFORM IN USASI BASIC FORTRAN
910 C TRANSFORM(J) = SUM(DATA(I)+W**((I-1)*(J-1)). WHERE I AND J RUN
911 C FROM 1 TO NN AND W = EXP(ISIGN*2*PI+SQRT(-1)/NN). DATA IS ONE-
912 C DIMENSIONAL COMPLEX ARRAY (I.E.: THE REAL AND IMAGINARY PARTS OF
913 C THE DATA ARE LOCATE IMMEDIATELY ADJACENT IN STORAGE, SUCH AS
914 C FORTRAN IV PLACES THEM) WHOSE LENGTH NN IS A POWER OF TWO. ISIGN
915 C IS +1 OR -1, GIVING THE SIGN OF THE TRANSFORM, TRANSFORM VALUES
916 C ARE RETURNED IN ARRAY DATA, REPLACING THE INPUT DATA. THE TIME IS
917 C PROPORTIONAL TO N*LOG2(N), RATHER THAN THE USUAL N**2. WRITTEN BY
918 C NORMAN BRENNER, JUNE 1967, THIS IS THE SHOURTEST VERSION
919 C OF FFT KNOWN THE THE AUTHOR, AND IS INTENDED MAINLY FOR
920 C DEMONSTRATION. PROGRAMS FOUR2 AND FOURT ARE AVAILABLE THAT RUN
921 C TWICE AS FAST AND OPERATE ON MULTIDIMENSIONAL ARRAYS WHOSE
922 C DIMENSIONS ARE NOT RESTRICTED TO POWERS OR TWO. (LOOKING UP SINES
923 C AND COSINES IN A TABLE WILL CUT RUNNING TIME OF FOUR1 BY A THIRD.)
924 C SEE-- IEEE AUDIO TRANSACTIONS (JUNE 1967), SPECIAL ISSUE ON FFT.
925 DIMENSION DATA(1)
926 N=2*NN
927 J=1
928 DO 5 I=1,N,2
929 IF(I-J)1,2,2
930 1 TEMPR=DATA(J)
931 TEMPI=DATA(J+1)
932 DATA(J)=DATA(I)
933 DATA(J+1)=DATA(I+1)
934 DATA(I)=TEMPR
935 DATA(I+1)=TEMPI
936 2 M=N/2
937 3 IF(J-M)5,5,4
938 4 J=J-M
939 M=M/2
940 IF(M-2)5,3,3
941 5 J=J+M
942 MMAX=2
943 6 IF(MMAX-N)7,9,9
944 7 ISTEP=2*MMAX
945 DO 8 M=1,MMAX,2
946 THETA=3.1415926535*FLOAT(ISIGN*(M-1))/FLOAT(MMAX)
947 WR=COS(THETA)
948 WI=SIN(THETA)
949 DO 8 I=M,N,ISTEP
950 J=I+MMAX
951 TEMPR=WR*DATA(J)-WI*DATA(J+1)
952 TEMPI=WR*DATA(J+1)+WI*DATA(J)
953 DATA(J)=DATA(I)-TEMPR
954 DATA(J+1)=DATA(I+1)-TEMPI
955 DATA(I)=DATA(I)+TEMPR
956 8 DATA(I+1)=DATA(I+1)+TEMPI
957 MMAX=ISTEP
958 GO TO 6
959 9 RETURN
960 END
961 ____________________________________________________________
962
963 And no, you cannot get the IEEE document because IEEE
964 broke it up into pages and sells each page individu-
965 ally.
966 ____________________________________________________________
967
968 "PROGRAMS FOUR2 AND FOURT ARE AVAILABLE THAT RUN
969 C TWICE AS FAST AND OPERATE ON MULTIDIMENSIONAL ARRAYS WHOSE
970 C DIMENSIONS ARE NOT RESTRICTED TO POWERS OR TWO."
971 ____________________________________________________________
972
973 But, this code was easy to port because it was small,
974 so, to this day, we use it. It was ported from For-
975 tran to BASIC, then to C, then to C++ and everything
976 else.
977
978 Nobody ever actually understood it, so they didn't fix
979 anything. You see, Fortran has no bitwise operateors,
980 so alot of the acrobatics in that code are just doing
981 bitwise operations in regular math. Its absolutely
982 amazing when you tear it apart.
983
984 I got the code from a bad scan of a document off a
985 military ftp site. What I love, and find halarious,
986 is that this code has been ported and hacked a million
987 times since it was written.
988
989 But, from the comments, it, itself, is a hack. It is
990 a mash up of cooley and tukeys code. It is a hack,
991 from 1967.
992
993
994
995 Maemo Leste keeps kicking in! tgtimes
996 ____________________________________________________________
997
998 The ultimate hacker's toy project: a OpenSource pow-
999 ered hand-held computer.
1000
1001 Where to start from? There can be two walls prevent-
1002 ing every Linux enthusiast from having its own phone
1003 with a "Linux Powered" sticker on it:
1004
1005 1. hardware support: getting Linux to boot on the
1006 twisted hardware setups of smartphones can be frus-
1007 trating.
1008
1009 2. application support: writing all the tools that
1010 make a plain unix shell useable as a phone, that we
1011 usually take for granted on a phone operating sys-
1012 tem. It may be as simple as a daemon watching in-
1013 coming phone call from hardware abstractions (those
1014 from in 1.) and playing a ringtone.wav whenever a
1015 call comes in, it still has to be written. Same
1016 goes for a keyboard application if it uses a touch-
1017 screen. Same goes for anything.
1018
1019 Since it goes beyond the scope of a week-end hack,
1020 collaboration takes place for making these projects
1021 happen.
1022
1023 Maemo Leste is now existing since more than four
1024 years, and keeps being developed at good pace. It
1025 even shines where Android does not: it uses mainline
1026 Linux kernel instead of forks that never get upgraded
1027 nor contributed back to Linux. This means that all
1028 software officially supported by Maemo Leste might
1029 also be available to many more Linux-based projects.
1030
1031 Of course, there are non-official porting efforts for
1032 more hardware underway to become a completely sup-
1033 ported target. Like it is for every operating system
1034 project.
1035
1036 Maemo Leste, the project bringing a real UNIX shell
1037 where you only had a Android Java ecosystem, featuring
1038 GPS chips reverse engineering, and a working phone
1039 module.
1040
1041 The support for the inexpensive PinePhone means you
1042 can get a fully working linux phone in your pocket.
1043 Grab it while it is hot, the lack of bloated prebuilt
1044 application forced into it by the vendor means it will
1045 not catch fire! [1]
1046
1047 1 https://maemo-leste.github.io/maemo-leste-sixteenth-update-november-and-
1048 december-2021-january-april-2022.html
1049
1050
1051
1052 I Do Not Know, Do Not Ask Me josuah
1053 ____________________________________________________________
1054
1055 The post-Snowden era is marked by a new fact that can-
1056 not be ignored anymore: NSA (among others) is watching
1057 you (among others).
1058
1059 Does that change anything to my everyday life? Proba-
1060 bly not, they already were before you knew about it.
1061 Should I do anything about it? No answer. The eter-
1062 nal doubt that modern society is famous for:
1063
1064 >> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
1065 weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
1066
1067 That same doubt that occurs when you look up on a su-
1068 permarket and see the mess of wires, tubes, cables and
1069 neon lighting, barely even hidden, at best painted in
1070 white... The worst scene of industrial warehouse, as
1071 if taken straight out of the Brazil [1] movie.
1072
1073 A landscape that is in such opposition with the images
1074 printed onto every food product being sold, picturing
1075 what more or less fits the collective imagery of
1076 "house of my grandparents in back-country", promising
1077 a natural environment and suggest quality, authentic-
1078 ity, tradition to the buyer... Pictures of a caring
1079 lady baking something appetizing, a honest farmer of-
1080 fering a handful of home-grown vegetables or meat...
1081 Where did they even find all these landscapes of back-
1082 country without phone line everywhere, tracktors, al-
1083 sphalt, cattle warehouses, wind turbines to put on
1084 these product background images?
1085
1086 >> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
1087 weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
1088
1089 How did such a landscape, neon distopia pictures that
1090 seems straight out of a /r/cyberpunk [2] post or the
1091 latest Blade Runner, got invited into the cozzy bubble
1092 of the average citizen doing shopping? [3] Who made
1093 these places so ugly? Why do I feel like human is be-
1094 ing considered like cattle in these kind of places?
1095
1096 >> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
1097 weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
1098
1099 What weird things am I even saying! It is not like an
1100 NSA agent is sitting on every metal beams of these su-
1101 permarket looking at passersby with an empty gaze.
1102 There are cameras though. What do they film?
1103 Thieves? Who is checking? Software? Peoples? Are
1104 marketting managers looking at these pictures? Of me
1105 too? Right now? What do they think of me? Did they
1106 look at my hand hesitating between these two products?
1107
1108 >> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
1109 weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
1110
1111 Going out, one might encounter someone sitting on its
1112 empty backpack, with a small cup filled with coins,
1113 looking a bit panicked, looking a bit dirty, looking a
1114 bit lost, sometimes even a bit drunk, or is it dizzi-
1115 ness from living outside? Occasionally they will ask
1116 you for another coin to add to their small collection.
1117 Passerbys offer them a lie such as "I do not have
1118 cash", or a kind word like "no, sorry", keep walking
1119 faster without looking, and eventually stops paying
1120 the tax and quickly keep going before they got asked
1121 for more. What did happen to them? Did they choose
1122 to live here? How can I know it will never happen to
1123 me? Why do I feel bad if I do not give them what they
1124 ask? Why do I feel bad if I give them what they ask?
1125
1126 >> I do not know, do not ask me. That question is
1127 weird anyway. Let me go back to my life.
1128
1129 Let's not get fooled or reverse the roles here: Writ-
1130 ing this, I am not asking these questions to you, nei-
1131 ther you are asking these questions to yourself. The
1132 places we live in are suggesting these questions.
1133
1134 By building a supermarket out of a warehouse but dis-
1135 playing eye-catchy pictures of a scenery that does not
1136 even exist, it is obvious that people will notice the
1137 disbalance between the two.
1138
1139 By placing cameras filming every square meter of such
1140 a place, or even a whole city, it is obvious that peo-
1141 ple will wonder at some point, who is behind the
1142 screen reviewing these images.
1143
1144 The questions are left open. Nothing is made to even
1145 give hint about the answer. We are left in the doubt,
1146 letting some comfort themself with "it is just in case
1147 of a burglary, only a police officer is going to
1148 watch" or other claim "they are using these images to
1149 study how we think to better control us!"; claims
1150 based upon convictions, not facts.
1151
1152 The technician installing these cameras up there has
1153 no hint either, its manager just followed the recom-
1154 mandations of the mothership company, itself getting
1155 directions from the investor group who purchased the
1156 brand, who themself are only trying to keep-up with
1157 the trends in that domain.
1158
1159 Why would I care? I stopped to care about these silly
1160 questions since long. I came back to the real world
1161 for the better. I live my life ignoring what happens
1162 around me and it works plenty well.
1163
1164 >> So why is that, at deep down, in the middle of my
1165 gut, there is a voice whispering to me that
1166 something's wrong. [4]
1167
1168 The thing with living like an ant in the anthill is:
1169 you do not get too many answers about how the whole
1170 anthill works.
1171
1172 1 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
1173 2 https://teddit.net/r/cyberpunk
1174
1175 3 https://theuws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/supermarkt.jpg
1176 4 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=QcSlAihVM0Q
1177
1178
1179
1180
1181 Mallumo Encrypted IRC darkfi
1182 ____________________________________________________________
1183
1184 IRC is part of the protocols that survived to the ad-
1185 vent of the Web.
1186
1187 It still has users, it still has new network and com-
1188 munities initiatives springing out, it is alive.
1189
1190 One single little touch it lacks is end-to-end encryp-
1191 tion. Without it, it is perfect for public communi-
1192 ties such as software projects discussions and support
1193 chat, live event chats... but private 1-to-1 communi-
1194 cation could suddenly become a good candidate for
1195 end-to-end encryption.
1196
1197 Part of the DarkFi project, this is what Mallumo [1]
1198 brings in a simple piece of code using libNaCl, the
1199 crypto library from Dan Bernstein, author of ED25519
1200 (in its repackaged libsodium form). This is state-
1201 of-the-art, well-proven and fast cryptography for
1202 end-to-end communication.
1203
1204 With this plug-in dropped in the plugin folder, all
1205 private communication start by a simple key exchange
1206 over normal IRC, and the conversation upgrades to
1207 nacl-encrypted messages over regular IRC.
1208
1209 There might not be any simpler way to encrypt peer-
1210 to-peer communication online.
1211 1 https://github.com/darkrenaissance/mallumo
1212
1213
1214
1215
1216 Publishing in The Gopher Times you
1217 ____________________________________________________________
1218
1219 Want your article published? Want to announce some-
1220 thing to the Gopher world?
1221
1222 Directly related to Gopher or not, reach us on IRC
1223 with an article in any format, we will handle the
1224 rest.
1225
1226 ircs://irc.bitreich.org/#bitreich-en
1227 gopher://bitreich.org/1/tgtimes/
1228 git://bitreich.org/tgtimes/
1229
1230 Did you notice the new layout? We now can jump be-
1231 tween single and double column as it is more fit: Some
1232 large code chunks will not fit in a two-column layout,
1233 but text is more pleasant to read on two columns.
1234
1235
1236
1237
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