Gemini Links 18/01/2025: Surge in Illnesses, ctags, and Gemsync
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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17 January 2025
Well, this was a rather rough start into the new year...
After the first few days junior was back into Kindergarten he brought home a little gift... a nice little puking and diahrrea disease that (luckily) hit him only for a day, but my wife and me, we were out of order for the better part of a week. Now i am very happy that we build enough bathrooms into our barn conversion project, otherwise thing would have been way more messy than they already were.
Alas, we are now back into action again, a few kg lighter, with stomachs that are still a bit squeamish, but we are back!
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Looping loops
I bought a looper. I've briefly tried it out, but this weekend will see me give it a proper spin. I can loop a bassline and a guitar accompaniment to practice on top of. It's gonna be great fun once I get some cool layers going!
Reading sheet music has a surprising consequence where you get better at reading sheet music. I've noticed this playing in a hobbyist orchestra at the worker's institute. The notes themselves are a bit of a tricky business still, but I'm intuiting the rhythm better than before! And if I ever get lost, I can listen to the bass player and catch up from there.
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Supplementary Diggy Files — Weekly links 7
John Harper's game Agon has come up on my radar a few times recently. It seems worth learning more about. He does seem to be a brilliant designer. The only game of his I've played is Lasers and Feelings but I've read several others.
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🔤SpellBinding: ADMNSUT Wordo: BULK
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It's 2020 again
Hi L--,
I understand you're responsible for infectious disease control. If I'm wrong, can you please help this email get to the person who is?
The infectious disease outbreak on unit 1, compounded on the high census and the lack of a daytime house supervisor, is overwhelming our ability to provide basic humane nursing care. We need a plan to make sure patients get seen, and potentially some public health measures beyond handwashing encouragement (in an overcrowded unit with one bathroom).
As far as I know, COVID and flu tests have been negative on this unit, but we are overwhelmed by the census, the behavioral acuity, and the medical acuity on the unit, so it's possible we've done the tests wrong.
Today I was alarmed when several of my patients went from headache to paroxysmal coughing, to vomiting observed by staff, to reporting vomiting blood.
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Fighting the Screen
Since pandemic first started in 2020, I’ve gone from that sixth category to the fourth category. I spend so much energy and effort trying to live more away from screen, with mediocre success and not much grass actually being touched. I don’t even have socials, just like Wikipedia and the notes apps and Emacs or just fiddling with settings or watching movies, but it’s enough for me to be glued to the screen for hours on end.
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Games
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Mythic Bastionland: Oath's End
I wrote a short hack of Mythic Bastionland by Chris McDowall (a game I love). I think it would be a fun way to play for a one shot, kind of inspired by stuff like Trophy ("play to win... play to lose").
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Technology and Free Software
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OK Go Is a Strange Loop
The first minute and 30 seconds in terms of medium is pretty straight forward, although lining up shots is pretty impressive up to that point. It's what I EXPECTED this music video to be... BUT NOPE! It just had to be an incredibly tangled up strange loop! The thing is though... it can't be irrepairably tangled, because ALL OF THE VIDEOS ARE JUST 1 TAKE EACH!!! It should, in theory, be possible to work backwards to get a general sense of how this was done, but I will not be able to follow everything backwards in a way that I get the whole picture. THEY HAD TO THINK/FOLLOW THIS ALL FORWARDS!!!
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These robots enable employment
An incredible video [1] about the development of robots not solely controlled by software but by people that enable them to work jobs they otherwise could not do so. While I guess you could technically call these “robots,” they come across more as “waldos [2],” devices that enable people to physically work from a remote location. In any case, I think it's a fantastic use of technology.
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ctags
ctags(1) is old outdated BSD software, use something else instead, like maybe universal-ctags, or something even more recent? On the other hand, software that ships with the OS may have fewer third-party problems.
Still with me? ctags(1) parses text (C and other code) and emits a "tags" file. Other tools, text editors in particular, have features (or, bloat) to jump to the location of a tag. This allows one to quickly get to the definition of a function. An example may help.
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Internet/Gemini
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.