Woog's very occasional Nex log: -- Sat Sep 5 12:05:30 MDT 2026 Normally I don't reply to Reddit stuff, generally only if it related to was some issue I knew how to address. This last time triggered a "Verify your account in 7 days or it will be frozen" message from the Reddit overlords. Tried several times to "verify" but it just would not take so I told them to go F** themselved and deleted the account. And then I preceded to delete my Google crap. I feel cleansed. -- Sun Aug 30 11:05:53 MDT 2026 May have lured another hapless victim down the Nexspace rabbithole. Sam H. on RTC got curious and before long had written an ALL-protocol python-based smolnet browser (Babbit). Works quite well, probably even better when used in Wily (Unix port of the Plan 9 Acme editor) as Babbit assumes link selection via its more sophisticated mouse chording. Babbit also recognizes NPS links (nps://example.com), launching a simple editor for request submissions; kind of cool. -- Mon Aug 17 11:43:25 MDT 2026 Still plodding through Moby Dick. Thankfully the last 15 or so chapters have mostly been devoid of the forementioned slides into impenetrable Shakespearean prose; thank you Mr. Melville. When it comes to books I've somewhat adopted the habit of reading a chapter or two from 3 or 4 books at the same time which seems to have resulted in actually reading more books over the year. My current reads: - Moby Dick - Rolling Nowhere: Riding the rails with America's Hobos - Dying, Death, and Wisdom in the Age of Denial - Forager: Field Notes for surviving a family cult Looks like the ratio of fiction vs non-fiction is 1:3 -- I do seem to prefer the latter. Fun fact: Melville based the sperm whale on a leucistic sperm whale of that period, "Mocha Dick". -- Thu Aug 13 09:37:57 MDT 2026 Been thinking about simple ways to do per-user messaging via NPS. Easiest is probably just letting the first word be a valid user ID and some sort of sane default if missing or invalid. This would break the current setup where the first word is used to indicate the sender but that's likely okay. A valid sender address would have a "@" present which could be used to filter on, or another possibility is something like this: sender@example.com local_user "rest of message..." where - 1st word is checked for "@" => sender set to word || anonymous - if sender is anonymous => target set to 1st word || default, else if 2nd is local_user => target set to 2nd word || default Too complicated? Most messages would likely be sent anonymously to the default (station manager) but it might be fun to implement this as an option regardless; will think some more on it. -- Sat Aug 8 20:55:38 MDT 2026 Created a "virtual index" file - /woog/vdir - for testing the new anoNex reboot. Noticed some links don't work in some clients; not sure where the problem is or if it's reasonable to assume observed Lagrange client behavior is "Nex correct" .. -- Wed Aug 5 13:16:37 MDT 2026 Been discussing possible ways to reduce Nex's reliance on filesystem structures for generating tiered site content. One idea is to mimic Gemini's support of multiple .gmi files per directory, something that should be doable server-side without adding much complexity. Another possibility is to allow any index file to generate dynamic content if it is executable, similar to the gophericus Gopher server. Will be doing some exploratory experiments soon. -- Fri Jul 31 08:02:02 MDT 2026 Apparently Gopher is now running here and user-level gopherspaces are supported though I'm not sure that is really needed if it is mosty acting as a Nex proxy. Gopher does frequently allow CGI and serving binary files though so maybe a nice option to have. -- Sun Jul 26 13:42:42 MDT 2026 Been slowly reading Moby Dick as years of high school and college were somehow traversed without reading the tome. Thankfully most chapters are fairly short so it feels like progress even when the page count hasn't moved much. Many chapters seem to start with straightforward language then slip into an almost shakespearean prose which has proved quite challenging to parse. Interesting the limited number of film adaptations - just two. A hold has been placed via the local library for the 1950s Gregory Peck film. A more recent and not particularly good 1998 Australian film (possibly made for TV) with Patrick Stewart as Ahab is on YouTube and watched last night (3 hours in 2 parts). Despite the bad acting it seems to have helped some regarding the novel's main metanarrative so perhaps somewhat worth enduring. -- Fri Jul 24 15:47:45 MDT 2026 Wow - 2nd post! Just for yucks wrote a slogger script which should both append to any pre-existing post of the same day AND keep posts in reverse chronological order, ie. "top post". Lets see.. Ho ho - it works! Until next time.. -- Thu Jul 23 16:43:23 MDT 2026 Hey why not? It's for the furtherment of Nex afterall. Regarding user-level Nexspaces, having a full-fledged login account is probably overkill. A NPS-like scheme could be used instead, or better yet, ftp-only access. Think something similar with sftp and pubkeys which might be safer these days.