Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 23/05/2023: Bubble v2.0



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Big gold medal 🏅

        I once heard on a podcast about Brian Schmidt's experience with a Nobel prize medal. It's a nice story which you might enjoy reading.

        But mostly I had trouble finding it, and that will be easier next time if I post a link here.

      • Into the Odd

        Into the Odd Remastered by Chris McDowall, published in 2022, is horror dungeon- and hex- crawling with swords, guns, and strange magical artifacts, stripped down to the minimum of rules, set in an unmappably large weird world full of strangeness and inconsistent technology (an abandoned pier of amusement rides is mentioned, but weapons are single shot), and dominated by one huge city, Bastion. It is a complete game full of weirdness and danger in 144 pages.

    • Technical

      • Nwg shell for Sway

        As a follow up, I found a pretty cool project called Nwg Shell which provides a lot of the functionality that you might miss from a full blown desktop environment, but for Sway specifically.

      • Lo-Fi Machine Learning

        And we don't entirely know yet but part of the hope is that by starting with a stripped down library that's not built for Big Machine Learning but is, instead, built around being understandable and extensible and implements as much from scratch as possible: everything from markov processes to baby's first automatic differentiation library

        It doesn't have to be super efficient if we're focusing on small datasets and intentionall janky uses of ML for artistic purposes.

        So I've been brainstorming a lot of demos and collecting resources the past few days and we're going to be writing a grant to help support our work as faculty members at the college basically all of next month.

      • Science

        • Male contraception with a ring

          And here we are 3 months later, after a new test at the lab and I am at 700k/ml, which is considered infertile. So I'm on birth control, woohoo!

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Bubble v2.0: Fundamentals

          GS.org has been updated to Bubble version 2. There is a bunch of new features and some bugfixes to improve the fundamental features of the system.

        • Server was broken

          Apologies to anyone who made the unfortunate mistake of attempting to view this capsule or otherwise make requests of it any time from Sunday through to just now today.

        • A hiatus for ^Z, and other things

          The zine, Ctrl-ZINE (^Z) is taking a break. It's been monthly for three issues, but despite people saying they will send in content, it never hits my inbox, so I will let some entries "pile up" (if they do) and go from there.

          But it's still around

          Also, someone put on their blog a list of other blogs they like to read, and some of them are daily logs, and I think "I remember when I actually *liked* doing that stuff!". I suppose expiration dates come for everyone, especially if they have been doing the same thing for so long.

        • Summarizing HTML: a quixotic and questionable quest with an overly long subject that has excessive alliteration

          A foolish errand might be to try to parse HTML, wherein one may experience (again) that HTML can and does omit closing tags, which may cause your most elegant parser to pear. Also the fancy and clean Object Oriented parser... the code is maybe pretty, but it takes pretty long for it get through the 340,239 characters of the random page linked from some RSS feed.

          A not terrible option might be to pipe the HTML through w3m, as w3m does a pretty good job of textifying HTML. This still has problems, as there is no content on the first page of the display, and the handy "skip to main content" link takes you to a "trending" section which, again, has no content. Lucy, with the football. Another page down or three there is the actual content to be had; this is actually not too bad as web pages go. For something like github or reddit I often start paging, my eyes glaze over from all the noise, and suddenly I'm at the bottom of the page having missed what little content there might have been. Also w3m can render things too far indented and unwrapped if there's some table insisting that the text be like that.

        • Re: Exploring Federation and Public Communication On Gemini

          I had promised myself that I would write at least one non-technology-related article before writing a techcetera one. Which is why I haven't posted in two months. Breaking my promise, there's this.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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