Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 12/08/2023: TUI and IBM/Lenovo



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • 🔤SpellBinding: CLNOSUY Wordo: SKIRT
      • Gazing back from “The Universe Next Door”

        Maybe it’s dumb to try to review a 40-year old book that has already had thousands of other readers & commenters weighing in but here we go! And I’m not talking about the contemporary Robert Anton Wilson classic by the same name that was published at around the same time.

        Nope, the book I just read was Jim Sire’s The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog.

        He is a Christian theist who lays out his own worldview and then does brief forays into other worldviews for contrast.

    • Science

      • Occam’s Turtles All the Way

        And the standard non-theist/​pantheist/​atheist/​polytheist answer is, of course, “who created that creator? And the creator of that creator?”

        Ultimately it becomes a matter of semantics.

        Theists define “creation” as the subset of what exists and what’s there that excludes the theistic God and the entire realm of that God, labeling that excluded part as “transcendent”.

        I’m not onboard with that definition. By cosmos I wanna refer to the whole shebang, not just a subset.

        Theism, to my mind, diminishes God so much. Shrinks the idea down from something that encompasses all to this tiny li’l superhero flying around.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Re: TUI music players

        Yeah, that’s just facts. Most TUI things are bad. CLI is where it’s at. mpc, for example, is a good basis for shell scripts & automation. I love it. And since it’s for mpd, you can still connect it to a GUI or TUI app also, to get the best of both worlds.

        He also thinks that a conf file full of comments, including commented-out defaults, is bad. That’s also a good point. With a good editor it’s easy to hide away all comments or to navigate a huge file, ostensibly making the advantages of having those comments outweigh the drawbacks, but not everyone has that and starting from a blank file can often be a lot easier.

      • Games I've played on my brother's PSP back then

        I've never had a PSP myself, but my brother had. He is really one of those guys who has always been into Sony. I think it must have been back in 2007. My dad bought me my first computer a few years ago for christmas and it has been the time when we have got our first internet connection at home. An usb UMTS modem with EDGE/HSPA+ support, 8 mbit/s and a limited data plan of 1.5 gigs a month. Not much but enough to download some demos and funny videos for my brother's PSP every now and then. I've even built him a wiki of his favorite wrestlers (Jeff Hardy, The Hardy Boys, CM Punk, Edge) from WWE/Smackdown.

      • My last ThinkPad

        I've been a ThinkPad user for more than a decade now. I've enjoyed many of them, some for the better, some for the worse. But at the end of they day they all had something in common.

        I'm sorry for the clickbait, but Kai Hendry inspired me to use the same title for my own post. And I'm with him, this is probably my last ThinkPad, for sure.

      • The $50 ThinkCentre M600/M700 tiny series

        A few weeks ago, a friend from a local hackerspace told me about them becoming so cheap the first time. A lot of them are currently being sold from many ebay sellers in Germany. The price? Approximately EUR 50,-

        The ThinkCentre tiny series is the ultra small form factor (USFF) computer sold by Lenovo, while others, such as HP calls them mini or Dell who came up with micro. They are as small as a book but have nearly the same performance as their desktop brothers and sisters. At least when it comes to office work. I've got the M700 tiny which sits right next to my ISP router and I hardly ever notice. They are silent, reliable and just do their job.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Emphasis On

          Still interested in the question of Gemtext and emphasis, I figured I’d gather some data.

          [...]

          But as there’s very little support for it, the more important question is: why?

          To see if data would help answer that, I sampled three sources to check for use of emphasis: news articles on the web, Gemlog entries, and Phlog (Gopher log) entries.


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



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