Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • More Dams

    Another morning with a dodgy internet connection, so I'll briefly write up yesterday's dam adventures instead of doing my morning browsing. Unfortunately I still can't recover from such excitements anymore so I'm left tired and with a headache, which would've been alright if I'd gone on Saturday as originally intended but now Monday's work is going to be hard.

    I left it a bit late to set off, so skipped the twisty route via Elane to get past the Lal Lal reservoir, and I also skipped the nearby Moorabool falls for about the third time, maybe I'll get to them one day. I did stop by the long one-lane bridge on the road from Mount Mercer to Meredith which is a really pretty, quiet, spot overlooked by a tall, imposing, rock cliff face. Last time I walked up to the top of the valley and explored some old mine workings, though there was too much water running over the forward through the river to walk over there again even if I'd had the time. Along with my new gemstone fossicking interest noted in my last post, I dug up my father's old 1970s "White's Coinmaster 5000/D" metal detector last week and took another look at it. It could be a good place to try out metal detecting for gold one day.

    Beale dam is just next to the Western Freeway but there's no exit nearby. That's fine by me since I avoid freeways like the plague, and instead enjoy flying over them on one of those little country-road overpasses that you never see anyone driving over. Unfortunately the reservoir is gated off, but there's a good view of the well-maintained earth-wall dam from the gateway. The level looked quite high even though rainfall has generally been below average, and especially back around home. It's surrounded by a pine plantation, which seems to be a trait of most of the reservoirs supplying Ballarat.

  • Call me Giacomo

    It's that time once again. Hot ladies are hot, and Gojira is getting just a little lovesick.

    So far, he's only being picky and a little reluctant in the morning, lying down away from the food bowl for a while before going to eat. However, he's being careful to leave the veggies he deems too big and the rice in the bowl.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Another step towards owning your data.

    A while back I was looking at things which kept me tied to certain platforms, especially things that would throw a spanner in the works if my account disappeared. For example if google locked my account. Because I'm pretty sure that I would have zero recourse, no matter if it was a mistake or justified or not.

    And so I looked around for a simple to host alternative for my contacts as that was the main thing worrying me, and after checking a few decided upon Radicale.

  • Re: Gemini... plus?

    I love all the discussions and ideas about extending and changing Gemini which come up again and again and again! I also have a really good idea for an extension:

    Why don't we redesign the whole Gemtext spec in some very reasonable way? The new format should have all the niceties of CommonMark and even more! It should have styles, we could call them "Cascading Style Sheets" or "CSS"! And it should have it's own scripting language, which runs directly in the users browser. The name could be "Javascript" as an example. And it should be heavily extensible to be future proof! We could call the format, let's see... what about "Hypertext Markup Language"? And the new extensions of course need some changes in the browser. We could create a new one! Let's call it "Chrome" or "Firefox"!

  • Fuck Spotify

    An automotive podcast popped up on youtube this morning while I was zoning out having my Saturday morning coffee. I was like "sweet, I'll add them in AntennaPod" and then proceeded to not find them anywhere.

    So I thought I should check spotify. I have an account but endeavour to not use it. So checked in the web player and yep, their "podcast" is there. A bit more searching on the line and I discovered it's a setting that needs to be enabled and then the feed shared to the other platforms, HOW THE SPEC WAS DESIGNED AND SHOULD WORK ANYWAY.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Gemini ...plus?

      I am here to say I hate scope creep / feature creep. The original spec is what appealed to me. It is simple and minimal while still doing enough for a text-centric protocol.

      Something I did note in a reply was someone saying to stop talking about it and just write up their ideal spec and implement it and see if it gets any traction. Which is 100% the right take.

      Many wanted to implement Commonmark and I think that is a terrible idea. I love commonmark, but it is too much for the Gemini space. Shrimple would be better. Have a look and tell me that isn't more readable.

    • Gemtext2 discussion?

      I think all of these could be handled in a pretty backwards-compatible way, with the worst-case scenario being that non-compatible browsers that do not understand markdown formatting just show e.g. [foo](gemini://foo) if they do not support e.g. inline links, likewise for **bold** etc.

      I think the existing gemtext preformatted blocks offers a lot of possibilities for use in enhanced rendering. E.g. we could have ```csv to provide a hint to browsers to treat the preformatted block as a CSV table and render it appropriately (... or not for backwards compatibility, likewise ```python or ```rust etc to allow for pretty-printed code and so on.

• Programming

  • Re: i was corrected on the internet about my inefficient use of awk today

    Like jecxjo’s own post, I’m not necessarily speaking “at” the person to whom I’m responding; but instead responding to “the thread as a whole”, chiming in with related thoughts that the topic has teased out from me.