Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • through the eyeglasses darkly

    People heal. Heal from cuts, bruises, sprained ankles, and (in my experience) vision, as well.

    I used to wear glasses ("then I read this book.." (j/k)) and every year I would need to increase the prescription strength. It got to be almost thin "Coke-bottle-like" thickness in lens density. From 2011 to 2023, glasses.

    Then I moved to Farmington. My eyeglasses prescription needed renewal. In the meantime, my glasses became beer goggles. I also felt I was wearing beer goggles when I *wasn't* wearing glasses, but at least I didn't have a headache and feel as though I had vertigo when I just didn't wear them.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Another Incarnation

      I've shut down all my Social (BigNet) whimpers. It is no fun.

      This is just a quiet corner of the WholeNet, really a part of the OldNet. Not as old as the MilNet I got to play with in the 1980s. But old in the current meaning of the Nets. So I can open up to hear myself think.

    • Delete Your Twitter (And Almost Everything Else)

      Here we are, two years on from Musk's purchase of Twitter, and the corpse of it is still staggering aimlessly through the shared space we create for ourselves. The reactionary, or truly principled (take your pick) got out early - nothing good can come of the purchase, they claimed; this place is going to be a hole! We laughed, or kind of ignored them. After all, is there even an unproblematic platform? FB and Instagram (never mind WhatsApp) have Zuckerberg. cohost rides its weak financials and developer passion in a burnout-courting haze. Mastodon, the jewel of the Fediverse, has a reputation for difficulty and scolds (IMHO, only the latter is deserved).

  • Programming

    • Tired of programming

      I wanted to work on some sort of editor. I contributed some lines to Anvil, an Acme-inspired editor, and then I figured I should go back to text editing because writing acceptable GUI editing is just sooo much effort. So now I’m trying to use ed again… I'm experimenting with using `rlwrap` around `ed` and it's not so bad if you're just writing, like writing an email. But really writing, organizing, moving things around… it really doesn't work all that well. I had imagined a sort of conversational UI – which I guess ed has? – if ed is your grumpiest of companions! – and I guess I was looking at my Oddmu site generator and Markdown file server and thinking: what sort of editor would I need to maintain this? What sort of minimal SVG editing capabilities would be nice to have? That was my starting point. Then I dropped the graphics because writing that seemed like a pain. Then I started thinking about the GUI components: using fonts with Harfbuzz, Unicode support, hyphenation (per language), spell-checking (per language), and on and on. It's too much.