A Long Needed update
It’s been a long time since my last post. A lot of stuff has happened in the intervening time. Here is just a small recap of the stuff I have been doing.
A New Home on the Web
For years, I have ran a site, stormdragon.tk. The .tk TLDs are provided by Freenom for free. For several years, this was working great.
One day, some friends had their domains taken for no reason, and had a lot of difficulty in getting them back. Freenom is not known for its excellent customer service. The taken domains all pointed to less than reputable destinations on the web, which further compounded the problem. No one wants to build a web presence, then pull a switch to one of these other sites.
BasHTML and Social Media
Although the plugin system makes BasHTML extremely powerful, there is one thing I was still wondering about. In several other platforms, like WordPress, there are plugins that make it possible to announce new writing using social media. I could very easily write a plugin to announce after the post command completes, but if you happen to write on the local computer, and wait for a few minutes to sync to the server, there would be a link to a nonexistent article until the sync actually took place. So, how to solve this problem?
Using BasHTML Plugins
The plugin system for BasHTML was designed to be easy to use. To use a plugin, just create a plugins directory and drop .sh files into it. There is a complimentary BasHTML Plugins repository that offers several plugins I hope will be useful.
Because some of the plugins require configuration, it is advised to read the comments at the top of the file before using it. The files from the plugins repository all end with a .txt extension, and must be changed to .sh to become enabled. Here are instructions for using the sync plugin to make it extremely simple to edit locally, then push to the server.
Decentralization and Peer to Peer, Why and How
Perhaps you have come across articles in your wanderings on the internet talking about decentralization. It means that no one or two central authorities control or own the internet. This setup makes it impossible for one or two organizations to hit the kill switch for everyone. Also going decentralized and peer to peer will let the internet regulate itself instead of being corrupted to the point of not being usable. Moving services to a decentralized or peer to peer format is also a great stride toward regaining your privacy.
I have spoken with several people who have told me “I’m not doing anything wrong, let them spy on me.” This, of course, is not the point of privacy. My response to these people tends to be, if you feel that way, why not go bathe in public, at a high profile public fountain. Just strip down, right in front of everyone, in rush hour, and bathe. You’re not doing anything wrong, in fact, bathing is quite healthy, and cleanliness is a virtue.
Audio Gaming in Linux
One of the first things new Linux users often ask is “What games are available?” There is no shortage of games, both open and closed source, that run in Linux. For a long time though, there was a large gap. There were nearly no games for blind people.
Fortunately, now, that is changing. More and more audio games are supporting the Linux operating system. Here are some of the available games with a short description. Note that because of multiple package managers across multiple distributions, installation instructions are not included. Please refer to your distributions documentation, or the documentation for the game itself to get things up and running.
This article covers games for the graphical user interface, GUI. The command line, or CLI has always had a lot of games that are completely accessible to blind players. They will be covered in a separate article.
BasHTML Reborn
After a lot of thought and hours of coding, I decided to give BasHTML a huge overhaul. The new code is a direct fork of Bashblog by Carlos Fenollosa. I have several reasons for the rewrite, some of which are below.
- The website layout is well designed by default. As a blind coder, it is hard to make sure that pages look good visually.
- All the page building, tags, etc is already done.
- With the infrastructure already in place, I can focus mainly on adding the features I wanted the original BasHTML to have.