Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 10/05/2023: Gopher Sites and Proportional Fonts



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Tea and Biscuits - Thank You, Sergio Busquets

        Today I got the news that a Football Club Barcelona Legend is retiring after this season. One always want your legends to play forever, because it is such a joy see them work. Sergio played in a very thankless position, but a crucial one, CDM - Central Defensive Midfielder. This position is the engine of the midfield for Barcelona, he protects the Center Backs from counter attacks and are always on the lookout to get a toe in somewhere to disrupt the flow of the opposition's passing. But what Sergio did best was his positioning and his passing. He passes the ball to where he wants his players to be. So he dictates the shape of the formation and where attacks essentially comes from. He makes the pass before the assist pass is made to the goal scorer. It's not flashy at all, but is crucial to the success of the team.

      • More Rhubarb Sprout Photos 2023-05-10 (Fairbanks, AK, USA)

        The rhubarb has continued to grow since my photos a few days ago, so here are some new ones. The complex folding is fascinating to look at.

    • Politics

      • Two Energy Crises

        The Western world seems to have two energy crises occurring simultaneously.

        One is the obvious crisis we all know: our over-reliance on fossil fuels and the issues it causes. Fossils fuels, while efficient, are finite and create pollution. While renewable sources of energy are important to offset the issues of traditional energy, they still rely on rare-earth minerals and energy-intensive production methods to build out at scale. We also use energy wastefully and recklessly, further exacerbating environmental problems.

    • Technical

      • Dabbling with Misfin

        The implementations (surprise!) did not interoperate, which was fun. Also divergent readings of the specification have already turned up. Whose fingerprint are we sending back to the client, again?

        Probably a test suite would help here. Probably I need to unrustify my SSL session debugging skills.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Email and a Few Gopher Sites

          I received a nice email from Matto [0] last week, which I greatly appreciated. He came across my phlog visiting the gopher.viste.fr random gopher site list generator [1], which is a great distraction when you have some time to kill. Matto's own gopher site is full of interesting tutorials and commentary on life at the text console.

          Hear, hear for Old Debian! I came across Wirefull's gopher hole [2] where one can see "Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 'etch' sparc64". Nothing beats the simplicity and stability of old Debian, and it's perfect for running a gopher server.

      • Programming

        • Proportional fonts for coding? No thank you

          There's some back and forth in the Gemini [1] community about coding with a proportional font [2]. You can pry my monospace font from my cold dead hands.

          I've been coding for nearly 40 years now, and it's always been some form of a monospace font, some pretty, like the character set for VGA (Video Graphics Array) on IBM (International Business Machine) PC (Personal Computer)s, and some not to pretty, like the character set on the TRS (Tandy-Radio Shack)-80 Color Computer. Code in a proportional font just looks weird to me.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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