Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 31/08/2023: Launch of the smolweb.org Web Site



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Navigation

        Whenever I go out exploring I passively create a mental map of what's around me such as stations, parks and where different roads lead to. When I go somewhere new and find it's just down the street or around the corner from a place I've already visited, it helps fill in the pieces of that mental map.

        I've also been slowly learning to navigate the train system here by memory, because I'd rather not use my phone. One thing I've learned that has come in handy, is which stations are close to others so I can avoid the always crowded ones (take Akihabara station on the JR Yamanote Line, for instance.)

      • A Fire Upon The Deep

        "A Fire Upon The Deep" by Verno Vinge (1992) is slightly incoherent and jumps around a lot, as opposed to say a Jim Butcher series that mostly sticks to the protagonist. The threads mostly do eventually come together. The incoherence is in part the jumpy storyline, and also various inclusions of what look use USENET, only "in space" as said in one of those deep drawn out booming voices. Some things are not really explained. Kurzweilian Transcendence and faster than light travel are taken as givens, which is perhaps typical for the genre and maybe for the epoch.

      • Timid hello

        I shouldn't be at a pub mid-afternoon on a Thursday... there's work to be done. But there's always work to be done, that will never change.

        I order a tall pint of Guinness but quickly change my mind. Espresso con panna instead. I'll regret the caffeine, but not as much as I would the alcohol.

        I'm no stranger to places like this. I've been in and out of them for years, nearly two decades at this point. This one feels different, but maybe that's just my wishful thinking. I give a fake name so I can tell a real story.

      • What’s the deal with parking lots?

        The history of humanity is all about overcoming nature. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. And yet we as a society seem to be perfectly happy with parking lots being totally exposed to the elements.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • FuckHub Actions (or: what even is privacy?)

        Following the recent deadline of my student plan on FuckHub, I updated the mirror repo of my capsule/website to have no history; added a simple index page pointing to the main website (where you're reading from, hopefully); and made the repo public.

        [...]

        EVERYTHING is still somewhere in FuckHub's servers. I can actually browse all of the repo's history, up until some known commit (e.g., if I know commit abc123, I can read that and all parent commits on the website).

      • OpenBSD vmm and qcow2 derived disks

        Let me show you a very practical feature of qcow2 virtual disk format, that is available in OpenBSD vmm, allowing you to easily create derived disks from an original image (also called delta disks).

        A derived disk image is a new storage file that will inherit all the data from the original file, without modifying the original ever, it's like stacking a new fresh disk on top of the previous one, but all the changes are now written on the new one.

      • My top 20 video games

        Trivia, I'm not a huge gamer, I still play many games nowaday, but I only play each of them for a couple of hours to see what they have to offer in term of gameplay, mechanics, and see if they are innovative in some way. If a game is able to surprise me or give me something new, I may spend a bit more time on it.

      • My top 20 video games

        I wanted to share my favorite games list of all time. Making the list wasn't easy though, but I've set some rules to help deciding myself.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Launching smolweb.org website

          I think that Gemini is a response to bloated website that does not fit to many people. It needs a specific browser, it limits creativity and possibilities.


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



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