Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The inspection finally arrived

    Talking to old colleagues at my last school, they finally had their inspection, twenty months after going on high alert. They did well, so it will be a great relief for them all, but was the sustained stress worth it? Much of the work 'preparing' for a no-notice inspection is wasted, as even a cursory look at the inspectors' handbook will tell you. There is no need to keep updating department handbooks, homework records, spreadsheets of different categories of students for inspector guidance. The constant 'improvements' demanded by managers to make their own jobs seem worthwhile puts them firmly into the category of 'bullshit jobs' that cause more harm to the school than good. They don't seem to realise that teacher time is a finite resource, and taking time for unnecessary tasks takes effort away from more productive tasks, like supporting children.

  • Lazy Teachers

    Teachers have to be wary if they want to contribute to education discussions, and they have to tread especially carefully in discussions about children taking holidays in term time. Exchanges have a habit of turning towards the long school holidays, and how teachers dare complain about families taking pupils out for term time holidays. Or about workload. Or pay. Or, indeed, about anything. But it always comes back to the holidays.

  • Bullet Journaling

    I want to write by hand more. I bought a Pilot Vanishing Point fountain pen a few years ago, and I greatly enjoy it, but I've hardly done any writing with it in the last half-year.

    At the same time, I'm trying to be more organized and proactive about time management. Last year I tried to kill two birds with one stone by buying a paper planner, my goal being to update the planner daily with the pen.

• The Greenwash

  • Recycling of TetraPaks in Sweden

    10000 tons Tetra style packages get recycled every year in Sweden. That’s way more than I feared. I’m such a pessimist and knowing how Tetra loves to greenwash things, I expected way less. This is millions of packages.

    Just over half of what gets collected (19800 tons), the rest is used as fuel.

    This was reported as a downer story by people less pessimistic than me and my fear is that it’d be even more grist for all sloppy readers who say “see? there’s no point trying to recycle” and use this as an excuse to not.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Installing Hare on FreeBSD

    I recently heard about a new systems programming language, Hare, so I decided to give it a spin. I haven't used it enough to give a full review, or to really even speak to strengths, I might do that later.

    [...]

    There are 4 total things you need to install to get Hare working on FreeBSD, 2 pre-requisites and 2 Hare packages. It's possible that you already have the pre-requisites setup, in which case you can skip the step, but they are uncommon enough that I'm including them here.

  • Ecological machines

    Ecological machines are systems we make, inspired by the natural world.

    Ecological machines have a particular nature. They have many little components called "cells" that follow simple rules. These components interact with one another to create emergent properties.

    Ecological machines are brought into existence by the will of a creator, who specifies what its cells' rules are. In other words, the creator specifies the initial conditions of the universe in which the machine operates, and then allows it to progress towards its natural outcome.

    [...]

    Ecological machines have finite resources. Resources are recycled within the machine and cells must adapt to the dynamic constraints of the universe to be productive.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Updates to in-progress separated specifications

      Over the past week or so I have some updates to the separated, more formal specifications for both the Gemini network protocol and the "gemtext" markup format. As a reminder, these are non-binding works in progress so nobody has to update their implementations in response to these changes. However, I intend for these to become official and binding by the end of March at latest, so implementers ought to keep an eye on them.

    • govidious

      I made a new service for triapul's gopher hole. It's a simple URL parser for youtube links.

  • Programming

    • Fixing mistyped spaces

      An Emacs function that reads a single char, then runs a query replace backwards from where you are, letting you optionally replace that char with spaces. After the query replace it then sends you back to where you were.

      It’s a vanilla query replace which has lots of convenient ways to get out of it or tweak the text at point and so on. One that I learned today is period for “yes, but this is the last one”, which can be pretty convenient.