Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Travel Tips: Las Vegas Vice Edition

    Friends often ask what they should do/avoid when in Las Vegas, one of several towns I’ve lived in.

  • Day Off

    It's my day off, and I fancied doing something Linux-y. I have Alpine on my phone (thanks to iSh) and just got rsync on it. Got my Gemini folder locally now.

    folder locally now.

    Typing on a phone keyboard without autocorrect is a bit of a challenge. But otherwise it's fun to faff around on here.

    We're watching On the Air, an ill-fated Dave Lynch TV comedy, on Internet Archive. I'm very glad my partner is as silly as me.

  • And Then There Were None

    My latest book through a period of not reading very much is 'And Then There Were None' by Agatha Christie. This was in fact my first Agatha Christie book. I had avoided her work as it felt so twee and seemed to lack excitement. Kindle deals of 99p made me consider a couple of her work and I am sort of glad they did.

    A group of strangers are invited to a strange island just off the coast of Devon for a weekend. As they meet one another, they realise they have no connection and know very little about their host. Even the staff are unaware of what is going on, hired just for the event. Strange events occur and you are plunged into a mystery. Well, what did you expect, eh?

    This strange island, referred to in the book as Soldier Island, is clearly Burgh Island. It is well known for Agatha Christie's links and is one of many locations in Devon which she used as inspiration. I know the area thanks to being a great location for walking the dogs after the summer. A huge tidal beach which is sandy and so perfect for dogs to go wild. Burgh Island sits off the coast, reachable during low tides by a strange huge wheeled tractor and trailer. There is an art deco hotel on the island and I occasionaly wonder about visiting. It was a pleasant surprise to stumble across a location I know in this book.

• Technology and Free Software

  • POWER9 OS update and other news

    I finally have upgraded my POWER9 workstation. I was running the Fedora [1] 38 for years and it was already unsupported. So some weeks ago I upgraded to 39. Today I have upgraded to 40. The current one is 41 so it isn't that bad as it was two months ago.

    I got sick two weeks ago. It wasn't too bat but it was limiting. No cycling, home office only (I really need to ged a new chair!) and so on. I tried to limit the time in front of the computer to 8-9h per day so no hobby computing happened, just work.

    I have noticed that Solderpung announced the FFLFIRSOCH 2025 [2]. An interesting idea, I think. But it only reminded me that I didn't write any useful piece of software for years! Should I try to do something now?

  • funny but it's not

    I just installed the Cloud Firewall extension for Firefox. It lets you block anything that's coming from Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Cloudflare.

    ...It broke like half my bookmarks, haha. Including a couple things I didn't expect to be hosted on Cloudflare.

  • Mission accomplished - #ConsoleChallenge

    I've participated in the #ConsoleChallenge initiated by @adele@social.pollux.casa (@adele@phpc.social) and it was an interesting experience. I really like that it's a short term challenge because for more time consuming tasks I often make breaks of a few days/weeks.

    The Challenge was to only use the console TTY for two consecutive days. No Wayland, no XOrg!

    I've read of many people working in the console TTY regularly on Fedi, Gemini and Gopher. And they have a lot of experience. But for me it's a new experience so I wanted to partake in this #ConsoleChallenge even if not many people do it.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Anyway to post here without using a web browser?

      I usually read through midnight.pub through gemini and its inconvenient to have to open another separate browser just to post or reply here and so I usually don't. I know gemini user input is limited which is nice but I wonder if there is way to still participate?

    • Sunday wind-down

      I've just made myself a hot chocolate (Knoops 54% if you really want to know) and I'm kicking around Geminispace to relax on Sunday night. I had really bad anxiety this morning but that seems to have gone away after spending time with my cats, watching The Outpost on Shudder, having a little nap, and doing some game design.

    • formatting links in Gemtext is easier than in HTML or Markdown

      but molly, why would you dump hundreds of links to your Gemini capsule when most of them are https and the Web has so many more people to read and enjoy them

      Because formatting links in Gemtext is easier than in HTML or Markdown. Thanks for asking!

  • Programming

    • Syntactic Macros (Rust & Lisp)

      I've been playing around with Rust macros a bit recently, and have been slightly annoyed when taking them in comparison with Lisp. To be clear, it including real macros rather than C-style textual macros (or no macros at all) is a real win for Rust, it's just annoying when taken in contrast with Lisp.

      Primarily, they're just too difficult to write due to Rust not having homoiconic syntax. Even the simplified `macro_rules!` (“Scheme-like”) macros aren't the easiest to wrap one's mind around, and they're as limited as Scheme's hygienic macros system. And then the procedural (“Common-Lisp–like”) macros, on top of being very complex to write, require being placed into a completely separate crate, and the stdlib provides zero batteries so one is basically required to pull in two or three other dependencies to write one.

      I do think that in particular `derive` macros are a stroke of genius, explicitly enabling and endorsing one of my two favorite genres of Lisp macros: automatically defining auxiliary types and helper methods for a type definition. Although in Rust it is a bit clunky because one can't design a partially bespoke syntax (IIRC the input to derive must be a *valid* struct, enum, or union), so one ends up with lots of `#[whatever]` annotations above every item; while in Lisp one can design a nice syntax suited to the particular macro, for example the macro for serializing/deserializing binary files from Practical Common Lisp[1].