Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ACDETSK Wordo: HONES

  • Thursday-7

    After a few days in the 80F's, weather in these parts shifted to become a lot more in accord with Halloween: much wind to bring leaves to the ground, a chill - but not debilitating - in the air, autumn colors everywhere.

    Candy is ready. A degree of costuming in accord with the youngest grandchild's wishes acquired.

  • The Cost of Community

    If people want to actively encourage mutual aid groups or mutual support organizations, then they have to get used to the idea of paying dues, membership fees, or otherwise including financial support in their contributions, since so much of what we deal with in the world is facilitated by money. Alas, though we wish it weren't so, not everything can be paid off through labor alone, nor can we always support everyone with garden-based donations. Room or building rentals, healthcare, childcare, funerary expenses, repair bills—all of that, until such a time as we can actively get away from money, requires money, actual cash.

    If people want to belong to such an organization or community that engages in mutual support for its members, then they need to realize what actually goes into maintaining—and supporting—that community. It's not just about getting together for whatever ends or purposes; it's also about logistics and sustainability, and that requires more than good feels. In my opinion—for whatever that's worth—balking at mutual-aid organizations requiring dues to facilitate and ensure that mutual aid can actually be feasible is kinda passé and gauche, if not just outright immature. Without committing to actually supporting others, all that's left are thoughts and prayers.

  • City places

    Welcome to my city. Enjoy a multitude of location names as they directly translate to English (some more literally than others):

    Moon Mountain

    Place for Making Someone Swim

• Technology and Free Software

  • The price of living a healthy life style

    Today I read an article about the findings of an investigation examining the influence of various lifestyle choices on health-care costs.

    Living a healthy life style leads to more years of good health, and promoting a healthy life style was thought to be a means of reducing overal health care costs.

    According to the study, this is more complicated than it first appears.

  • Non-electrical Storage

    One of NNCP's core strengths is its ability to transfer packets by several means. NNCP itself has three methods to send data: synchronously over a network using `nncp-call`, asynchronously over a file system using `nncp-xfer`, and asynchronously in a byte stream using `nncp-bundle`. These can be combined with other tools to send data via everything from the Internet to radio uplinks, USB drives, optical disks, tape storage, as payloads for other applications, and so on.

    There's one paradigm of data transmission missing from the above list: non-electrical communication. I don't want to use the term "analog" here, because many non-electrical forms of communication are digital in their function, such as punch cards or QR codes. But very few tools currently exist that will convert arbitrary binary data into a non-electrical form.

  • NNCP benefits and doubts

    I'm not sure I'd been back to Old Street since the Indentation Riots of 2013 ("four spaces good! eight spaces bad!"). The insouciant fixie bike shop is still there on Tabernacle Street.

    Getting back to NNCP log-rolling: NNCP is a bidirectional asynchronous encrypted transport layer. It's infrastructure: like TCP or PPP, it's generally something that other applications and services together would build on top of, rather than something that would always be used just by itself. It occupies the same ecological niche as its predecessor UUCP did.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • the second issue is out, I hope you like it

      SAVE THE OLD WEB

    • Declutter the Web: Browse Every Site with Just ONE Fixed-Width Font

      Browsing the web can become a very tiring experience when each website or even section of each website is sporting a different font. It sure as hell looks nice, but is it optimal for reading? Not really.

      I prefer to read the web the same way I read and write code: with a fixed-width font. This type of font lets your eyes move smoothly across the text, allowing you to almost anticipate where the next word will appear. It makes reading faster, more intuitive, and ultimately a more enjoyable experience.