I'm starting this series of posts today. The idea is to explain what is going on in France, or how French people react to the events in the world. Sometimes I'm very surprised by the reactions of foreign people like Americans, Turks, Germans or Serbians for example. It's often cultural differences that can explain our behaviour and reactions. And I know that French are often seen as dirty (true...) and arrogant (not entirely false...) people in the world. It's my way of explaining how complex things are in my country.
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In France, the inflation rate for school supplies is 11,7% (source : Confédération Syndicale des Familles). This may not be as high as in other european countries but in France it's higher than inflation in general. In France, Inflation is quoted at 7% but for many products, it's sometimes an increase of 13% between 2022 and 2023. To help the poorest, some local authorities provide some financial support. The French government also helps every year with a back-to-school bonus for 11 million households. An annual controversy because far-right parties say that some household use the bonus to buy TVs or game consoles. That's obviously fwrong because there are no statistics on TV sales to prove it. The other controversy in France about school supplies comes from teachers' lists of furniture, always strange with some colours, sizes or models of products impossible to find. I remember my childhood with the wardrobe full of cheap supplies for several years of schools, like notebooks, double sheets of paper, rubber etc..Of course, I didn't have any fashionable products or school bags but something cheap or something durable and hard-wearing. I didn't have many products from one of the best paper companies, Clairefontaine (no, they don't paid me...), because they were expensive. But when I was older, I bought a few notebooks to write or draw in. What a moment of happiness.
I don't have any children and people are buying school supplies earlier than they used to, sometimes in June or July and sometimes online. It's not the same magic when supermarkets were full of those school products with colours, heroes of our teenage years on every product. I went to a supermarket last week and there was only a small aisle for it, as if it was a normal month. So sad ! … And at the checkout, we can see more and more people who are stuggling to pay, asking to have products removed because it's too expensive. If you add some digital products to that, it's a two-speed school system that we might see in some cities or regions. Fortunately, digital has shown problems and some countries are going back to paper, like Sweden this year. Ok, if it's not like in Brazil, to teach a controversial history.
I've been busy with work and school. Someone posted on my guestbook today and it reminded me that this thing still exists and I should really put some more effort into it. So here's the post.
I've been juggling school and being sick so chapter 3 may be a day or two late. Going forward I think I'll try to stick to a Wednesday release schedule. I'll do the translations today, cleans tomorrow so hopefully chapter 3 will be out by this Friday!
Ack! I've been neglecting this gemlog over the summer even more than I've been neglecting my blog. Actually I haven't been using Gemini much lately - every once in a while I'll pop into it briefly and see what's new, but that's about it.
One thing I *have* been doing is working on my Reviews minisite/capsule. Figuring out what makes sense for, say, hiking trails vs. mobile apps vs. books. And I have set up a basic gemini converter for the minisite->capsule! It needs work, though, and I also need to tie it into my build process, because I keep forgetting to run it. At least I've updated it within the last month.
I’ll be moving my servers and configuring a new internet connection soon. Hopefully less than 24 hours from now. The new place should have a public IP as far as I know. I had when I was on the same network previously, though I’ll be choosing another ISP this time. I hope the move will take less than an hour, but we’ll see.
Hi folks, this title perhaps sounds a little click-baity, but it's actually a genuine question.
This semester I'm teaching a computer science course to a diverse community of students, and among many other things, I'm teaching html/css/js and node.js and bash. This is the course I taught a few years ago (and wrote about previously) where I built a tilde server for the class, that they tried out. I'm teaching the class again, with a new crop of students, and I wanted some help here. On the one hand, I'm excited to show them Gemini. On the other hand, the last time I taught this class, it didn't make a big impression as I recall.
Thrilled to see so much work on finalizing the gemini spec. If solderpunk maintains his current pace, we'll have something by the end of the year, I think.
Because Gemini isn't "fancy" to look at it's rather difficult to get youngsters exited that grown up with TikTok (...). But you could show them Lagrange for example for their smartphones. Show them the bbs on geminispace and how it equals with for example reddit - the social aspects. Show them how "free" the Geminispace is with no big commercial players, uncontrolled, "dark-webby" and _fast_. You could show them how to quickly browse news (taz.de -german only-, osnews.com, techrights) or the Wikipedia (with proxies).
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
