Links 18/05/2024: KOReader, Benben v0.5.0 Progress Update, and More
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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🔤SpellBinding: ACDEHWK Wordo: EPEES
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Uncaging the Self: A Journey Through Life
There's a curious human yearning, often mistaken for simple nostalgia. It's a longing not just for simpler times, but for a simpler self. We see glimpses in old photographs, hear echoes in forgotten songs – a younger version of us, brimming with a certain spark, a carefree confidence; which touches on a complex concept: the human desire for authenticity and the struggle to maintain it throughout life. There's no single, definitive answer to what the defining hallmark of the human condition is, but perhaps it is hinted at in the tension between societal pressures and the search for one's true self.
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Announcing Smile Dog: The Movie (Maybe?)
Ever since I finished studying TV and film in college I've wanted to produce a zero budget film with the help of friends, but I've never had a particularly good idea for it that can be done on a shoestring budget, enter Smile Dog.
For those who don't know, Smile Dog is an internet campfire story revolving around a cursed image of a spooky looking husky that causes mental harm to anybody who sees it (similar to BLIT, another short story).
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Technology and Free Software
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KOReader
Seeing moddedBear talking about using the pre-installed proprietary reader software on a Kobo made me want to recount my experiences with KOReader.
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Android: boot on plug, launch app after boot, shutdown on condition
Part of the Volty MIR project, but can be used for non-interactive applications.
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Benben v0.5.0 Progress Update
Whew, progress on Benben v0.5.0 is going a lot faster than I expected 😅 But that's a good thing! The trunk currently has all of the new formats implemented except for MIDI as far as playback goes (rendering Vorbis/Opus/MPEG-1/MIDI isn't done yet), and has had high quality resampling added. The high quality rendering is especially cool to me personally since I basically hand-ported libsamplerate v0.2.2 from C to Crystal to implement it. This actually improved performance slightly since some of the things that happen in libsamplerate could be elided by moving to an OOP model. So Benben can now resample anything, and it's going to be high quality throughout.
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Bad Caesar Jokes
Presumably because the IDE forever beachballs or (in these glorious future days) pegs a few CPU cores to 100% for no discernible reason. Another (if perhaps outdated) angle here is "I use SCSI, not IDE". This might have been better to use back in the early 2000s, or never?
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Protocol Update: UDC and Code Blocks
I am preparing a major update to the Scroll Protocol that utilizes the two-digit status codes to provide document categorization in the second digit of success status codes, based on the UDC (Universal Decimal Classification) system. UDC was chosen as the basis because it was simple and intuitive, has 10 main classes, was designed to be universal, and is well-known. It is also an improvement over Dewey Decimal, and is very similar, but more compact, than LCC in how it divides and groups categories.
The goal is to facilitate document categorization and categorization systems, like search engines, directories, and aggregators. Status codes were used to limit the need to add more fields to responses, which decreases the "attack-vector" for extensibility. It also fills all of the available second digits for success codes, limiting any more extension to success codes (unless one switches to hexadecimal or other number bases for response codes).
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Music players with support for classic winamp skins
Winamp was one of the most popular music players for personal computers. It's 2.x versions is targeted by many for it's system of skins that it nativly supported. With so much effort put into different customization by many different people it's no wonder that other players decided that it's a worthwhlle effort to support this skin system. I want to catalogue different music players that do this, and perhaps leave notes about them.
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Haiku
I’m coming full circle with the haiku form.
As a teenager, when I first heard of them, I was told you wrote five, seven, five syllables. Sometimes 5-5-7.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.