Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Vietnam

    I spend the last two weeks with my wife and son in vietnam visiting the in-laws, eating interesting and great food, trying not to get killed on a motorcycle and ... well ... marrying my wife a second time.

    So, where do i start? Well, we had planned this trip since forever, but every single time something prevented it from happening, may it be a global pandemic, work shedule, the birth of our son or a ton of other things. But this year we made it happen even if right before the start the universe again tried to throw sticks between our legs...

• Technology and Free Software

  • NeXTStep, OpenStep, AfterStep

    I fell in love with GNUStep back in the mid-2000s, when I was running Ubuntu of all distros. Didn't like where GNOME 3 was going, didn't like that the community was cratering Unity (which I liked), and KDE4 was kind of a puddle of sadness when it came out.

  • A Society That Lost Focus

    In the early 90s, after tweaking my MS-DOS computer, I was able to play games. One of those game was called "Battle Chess". A Chess game were pieces were really fighting against each other. It was fun. I was, and still am, a mediocre chess player. I was mate in less than 10 or 15 turns at the easiest level.

    For the sake of the experiment, I turned the difficulty to the harder level and started playing. Something strange happened: I was still losing but it took a lot more turns. I was able to protect my game, even to manage a few draws.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • 2024 Week 10/11: Status and Photos

      I have not added much public-facing content to my capsule in the last two weeks, but that doesn't mean I haven't been using Gemini heavily. Over the last two weeks I've focused on changing my daily habits to focus on my to-do list. My primary method of interacting with my to-do list is my own todo.txt over Gemini service, which handles repeating tasks better than the standard todo.txt-cli.

    • My dwindling use of the web

      So, I recently dumped all of my social media[0]. I deleted all four Fediverse accounts[^0], my old Tumblr account, my Wordpress account, my YouTube channel, my BlueSky account, and anything else I wasn't using anymore.

      [...]

      I've just found myself incompatible with "modern" social media communities, and while I have no desire to go back after a legit panic attack hit me one day, I won't deny there have been withdrawal symptoms from what was very clearly an addiction for me.

      Social media, for me, became the source of a lot of my fears, as well as the constant creeping doom & gloom that sat in my brain. Seeing people constantly "cancelled" over the dumbest things, and all of the drama from the various "commentary" communities, put so many bad things into my head that I always felt like I was walking on eggshells just existing anywhere. It's not healthy, and no, the Fediverse doesn't help that with filtering and the like. It's like putting a bandaid on a mortal wound, and that's not what's needed.

      [...]

      Getting away from all that has helped immensely, even with just the 12 days since I cratered my social accounts. As my partner Sildrae put it, it's liberating. He's the one who suggested I step away, as he did the same thing when Twitter killed TweetDeck.

      [...]

      In the end, gopher and the like might be the perfect /community/ for me. You're not expected to be terminally online and constantly knowledgeable about everything going on. You can write as much or as little as you want. And you can "disappear" for days or weeks at a time without people freaking out that you've not said anything in the last few hours.

      That last part actually happened to me on more than a couple of occasions on Twitter. I once went offline for about 20 hours while I was sick, and it caused at least /five/ of my followers to freak out that I hadn't said anything there for so long.

    • 20240318 Monday

      Winter on here wrote something a couple months ago, about the text based web, and it got me thinking of how annoyed I got, some 6-7-8 years ago, when all the search results on the very interesting thing I needed to learn about RIGHT NOW, were videos. NO! I want to READ the instructions. I want to be able to COPY the instructions. I don't want to sit and watch, I want to DO.

  • Programming

    • Re: Ambivalent about code linters

      That's an error by me from, uh, Friday. The warnings were being ignored on account of playtesting, which is quite a different state of mind from a "looking for errors" critical review, and being distracted by warnings may knock you out of the playtesting state. Ideally you switch between these modes now and then, or maybe you actually have other people who can take a glance at the code and give you a "wtf/minute" review. Tests, etc.