Gemini Links 18/08/2024: Tiny Awards 2024 and Progress on closing GitLab Issues in Gemini Protocol
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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a few slippery syllables
So I was curious about a line from Fear and Loathing in las Vegas - after HST and Oscar Acosta "kidnap" the hotel maid, and convince her that THEY are police working undercover (and not beligerent drug addicts), Oscar escorts the maid to the door and tells her to leave a pile of towels outside the door at exactly midnight - a few other words were said, but then he says a quote that is indistinguishable from the rest of the dialogue. A confident nod and whispered line always had me wondering: "what did he say?"
I looked it up years ago, apparently he said a Mark Twain line like: "may God bless the honest men", or something to that affect.
This lead me to further reading on OZA, he disappeared in 1974 after a boat trip in Mexico saw him either overdosed or killed. He wrote books and hated HST after F&L came out, because "his best lines" were stolen by Hunter.
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U.S.A.
My S.O. and I are back in the U.S.A. enjoying some R and R. It has been so wonderfully cool here, at times in the mid 60s. I cannot express how fabulous that feels after the disgusting heat and humidity of Tokyo.
Everytime I come back I invariably experience culture shock, and this time has been no different. I am on vacation though, so I just try to go with the flow, but two things have bothered me:
1. There are no vending machines here. If you want something to drink you have to go into a store, and drinks can be expensive.
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🔤SpellBinding: EIKYRWN Wordo: AGON
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Dystopian values
I went to a restaurant called Steak'n'Shake (SNS). SNS, when I was growing up and even when I was an adult, was like a '50s diner. That was their theme: good, old-fashioned burger joint. Of course they drifted away from the hats (which was fine), but when I went there tonight, I was just floored.
They turned the dine-in experience to a cleaner pig trough. You order your food ONLY through a kiosk. I didn't know this and when I went in, I asked if we were supposed to seat ourselves. Yeah, and you have to order from the kiosk and they'll call your name when your food is ready. Gee, isn't that nice? It's like a time-delayed vending machine with more exercise because you have to get up from the table to do anything but eat your food. But basically being converted to a public school cafeteria with pricier food wasn't the worst part.
This wasn't the worst part either: I had to clean the table myself for the party of 2 I was with. They didn't bother to clean shit. Great fucking environment for eating, right? No huge deal, but just another indignity.
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week 33 recap
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Technology and Free Software
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A few questions
A few questions have come to me recently, in no particular order of importance.
1. Does anyone run NetBSD? Does pkgin upgrade run really, really slow? I used a local mirror but DLing 700 packages took an entire day.
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Some answers
Thank you to the people who responded to some of my questions!
I run NetBSD on two machines: a Raspberry Pi 3 and an i3. The slowdown happened on both platforms starting a week or two ago. pkgin upgrade just hung so I let it go and it timed out eventually. I tried a mirror closer to home and the update of NetBSD 10 (710 packages) took an entire day to DL and complete. I don't remember what all the packages were, but I guess they were for the WMs I have installed.
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On a Mac
Don't worry. I only have turned on my Apple PowerBook G4 (a machine which was made when that company was named the "Apple Computers") and I'm now writing (and reading the gopherspace) on it. I think I didn't booted it for 6or so months!
Some things regressed - the Evernote no longer syncs (their fault - when my current subscription will end I will no longer use thier services nor apps). I think that some www pages are less usable now than they used to be. But this is not a machine for WWW browsing, of course...
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Indie search for Oddmu
This is a follow-up for 2024-08-16 JSON feed for indexing where I linked to IndieSearch, byJP. I want to see what's required for this to work.
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Dunning-Kruger techies
Sometimes it absolutely blows my mind how many "computer nerds" are fucking stupid. Just because you use Photoshop competently and you're a geek doesn't make you a computer expert.
I recently read an article where the author claimed Notepad was a word processor. Not Wordpad. Notepad. When I read that, I just recoiled slightly... This was supposed to be a tech site. Does a bare-bones text editor really constitute a word processor? Not in my book. I guess you could technically call it that as it does have font selection and text size, but that's still a stretch.
Anyway, often when I'm browsing articles on tech sites, they use the shittiest bloatware around to do things. They think that any program using less than 1GB of RAM is "minimal."
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Internet/Gemini
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The Tiny Awards 2024
The 2024 list of sites are up and voting is open. Lots of interesting sites listed (and I wouldn't say that I understand all of them), my favourite so far is "One Minute Park". It's a helpful reminder of how weird and creative the web can be.
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Software Releases/Announcements
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Official Project Gemini news feed — Progress on closing GitLab issues
Today there are 31, because since starting I have closed 11 of them, about one quarter of what was there. Of those 31 remaining issues, 19 are related to the network transport protocol and 12 are related to the gemtext format, roughly a 60:40 split. My hope is that by the end of this year, that GitLab repositories can be decommissioned and either removed or replaced with simple notices directing people to geminiprotocol.net. That means closing as many issues as possible and making sure those which aren't yet closed are clearly documented elsewhere so that nothing is lost.
[...]
All the issues I have closed were ones which had already been solved. In many cases the original work to close these issues was done by Sean Conner in his updated specification, also hosted at GitLab, and then carried over into the official specifications I published this year at geminiprotocol.net.
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Programming
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For a few hours yesterday, I felt as if I was taking crazy pills. Then again, I was dealing with time in C
Over the past year or two, I've been cleaning up my posts here. Largely making sure the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is valid, but also that all internal links (links where I link to previous posts) are valid to cut down on needless redirects or “404 Not Found” responses, in addition to fixing errors with my web server configuration [1]. So along those lines, yesterday, I thought it might be time to add conditional responses to mod_blog [2]. Given that it's mostly autonomous web crawling agents that read my site, I might as well tell them that most of the links here haven't changed since the last time they came by.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.