Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Combinatorial Music

    Besides permutations there are also combinations, which have seen use in music composition. Computers make this easier, both for generation and performance. Most interesting might be the emergence of patterns, depending on the notes selected, how they are combined, and any other random rules one might dream up (one might imagine a future school of music with very strict rules on what combinations are allowed, as happened for counterpint).

  • |sobriety| >>> part DEUX ^¥^

• Politics and World Events

  • Between Longing and Rejection: A Former Israeli’s Reflections on Identity, Zionism, and Israeliness

    I was born in Israel in the 1970s, to a family that deeply believed in the Zionist vision, in the value of work, in the power of education, and in the hope for a better future in this land. Over the years, like many Israelis, I left the country—at first for adventure and freedom, but eventually out of a growing sense of alienation, aversion, and even a quiet, searing hatred toward the place I came from. This essay is not meant to strike at Israelis themselves, but as an honest expression of pain, disappointment, and fierce critique, and as a need to shed light on aspects often hidden under a veil of patriotism, religion, and nationalism.

  • Books? Does anyone still read books? We have to admit: Educated Israel is extinct

    I remember Book Week in Kfar Saba. A huge square of lights and people.Someone at a crown stall rang the bell every time a book was sold, and the bells rang like in a nearby church.As a teenager I bought books there that I would never have been exposed to, and which were definitely not suitable for my age, and perhaps that is why I wanted them: "The Rebel Man", "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", "Justine or the Agony of Virtue".Today there is nothing there. The lights of the fair went out.Hebrew Book Week shrank to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In a few years, Jerusalem will also be extinguished.Tel Aviv will remain flashing like the last light bulb, and not for long.

    People mistakenly think that Book Week is a national holiday, an initiative of the Ministry of Culture or Education. But the fairs are organized by the Book Publishers Association – a professional association of the large publishers Yedioth, Kinneret, etc.In other words, the decision not to hold a fair in Kfar Saba, Holon or Ashkelon, or even in Haifa or Be'er Sheva, is a purely business decision.It just doesn't pay off. Even with the help of the local authorities—who are willing to give away the land, the security, the generators for free—they don't sell enough books to cover the costs.When 50,000residents lived in Kfar Saba, there were enough calls for a book fair.Today it has100,000residents, and there are not enough people to afford a book fair.That's the whole story.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Combining pdf and zip proof of concept (by ~seifferth)

  • Maybe they’ll update the app first, rendering this entire post moot

    They’re nice, I guess, but the overwhelming majority of them aren’t particularly interesting. The app also has an irritating tendency to disconnect from Nintendo’s servers every so often (keep your eye on the icons in the top right) and it’s set to BEEP BEEP BEEP by default when searching for Zelda Notes (you can turn that off; BotW is beepy enough already). I was pleasantly suprised to see that each Zelda Note is delivered in a way that works well on an iPad in landscape mode — image on left, transcript on right.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • An old member says hello from their first self-hosted site!

      Hi! Its been a long time since i've earnestly interacted with the gemini-space. I was once an active poster here by the name of 'Smokey', using the pubnix tilde.team. I wrote some blog stuff and had some small side projects going on. Well, life happened and I took a break from all that for a while. I always kept gemini/the small net in the back of my mind. I recently started spinning up my first ever website self-hosted on an old thinkpad. I was aiming for it to be a portfolio piece that showed off some edge computing im doing and renewable energy systems I designed/built by hand as an electromechanical engineer trying to transition into a more computer-science type gig. I wanted to also open up a gemini capsule of my own too.