Gemini* and Gopher

• Science

  • problem analysis spread

    i designed another "problem analysis" tarot spread, this time a bit more in-depth. it has a bit of everything - analysis of the past and present, and advice for the future.

    the spread forms a compact diamond shape, with a vertical line, then a square around the center card, then a card each on the very left and very right. lay them out and read them in whatever order makes sense to you.

• Technology and Free Software

  • 🎵 Listening to Music From My Tiny Server

    My music doesn't live on my daily laptop. It lives on a tiny Ubuntu Server machine in another room. My Arch laptop just mounts it and plays. Simple.

  • Mandatory car, mandatory smartphone

    I'm old enough to remember a time when not everybody owned a car or, indeed, any motor vehicle. When I lived London in central London I managed without one for years.

    Where I live now, owning a motor vehicle is essentially mandatory. There's no public transport to speak of, and every place I need to get to is too far to walk. Most of Britain is now like this -- cars have become so entrenched in our lives that planners and developers don't even consider the needs of non-motorists. Since everybody now owns a car, they assume, why should anybody go to the effort and expense of providing for somebody who doesn't?

    Consequently, to live any kind of normal life, we now all need a car. Never mind that cars are expensive and a huge source of pollution; never mind that they kill thousands of people every year. You have to suck it up and buy one, and few people complain.

    Of course, we would have complained, had the situation been foisted on us overnight. Instead, it crept up on us with such stealth that nobody really noticed what was happening. By the time we realized that our country had become a mass of tarmac, full of gridlocked, frustrated motorists, it was too late to do anything about it. In fact, we buy ever more cars, because there's no alternative. A car is now mandatory for almost every British adult.

    Things are going the same way with smartphones.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • twttr.eu

    • On letting perfect be the enemy of good in the small net

      The aphorism "perfect is the enemy of good" reflects the fact that even imperfect things can be valuable. Many of us -- especially those of us who work with computers -- tend to be perfectionists. We can spend hours or days trying to make something just right, even something relatively trivial.

      It's a trait I recognize in myself. I've spent hours getting all the metadata tags in my huge collection of audio files perfectly consistent, to the extent that I don't actually have time to listen to the music. Sometimes I obsess for hours about the perfect choice of word in my writing, only to come back later and delete the entire page. I've been know to get up at night, and straighten paintings on the wall.

      In the world of the small net/web, the Gemini protocol is not perfect. Spartan is not perfect. IndieWeb 'micro-formats' are not perfect. The Gopher protocol is definitely not perfect, in a way that ought to have been patently obvious even in the 1970s.