Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 13/08/2023: Browsing Gemini with Lynx



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Simplicity 4 -- Eyecare

        Applying eye drops every hour the analog way.

        Some time ago I had to deal with a health issue regarding my eyes. This involved applying two kinds of eye drops regularly: once every hour and once every three hours. If both are due, wait 15 minutes between them.

        Of course everyone else would just charge their timer app on their smartphone and be done with it, right? Except, I do not have such a newfangled contraption. So other means had to make due.

      • Our “Twenty Questions” houserules

        Twenty questions is a game where one person things of something secret and the other person has twenty yes-or-no questions to narrow down who it can be and finally guess it. “Is the person alive today?” “Yes.” That sort of thing.

        The way we play it these days, it’s almost more like a puzzle or co-op experience because of the first rule, which is that the person who came up with the secret should aim for something that will be discovered by question number 17 or thereabouts. If they find the secret a lot sooner, you came up with a too easy secret, and if they don’t find the answer within 20 questions, you came up with a too difficult secret. For that reason, you obviously should pick something that you believe they are aware of.

      • Two down, two to go

        This morning a little bit before 09:00 I got another PREP notification that it was going to rain. Within a few minutes it did start raining, and then suddenly the skies opened up and it came down with a ferocity I don't think I've ever experienced before. It was so bad we could barely see out the windows, but within a few minutes it stopped and for the rest of the day the sun was out. Of course after it stopped raining the humidity went over 85%.

      • Mountain Day

        Friday was a national holiday in Japan - Mountain Day - and this coming week is Obon (or Bon?) and so I'm on vacation. As is the rest of the nation; my SO and I hit the road yesterday, and the roads were crowded in places. It was my first time in an EV, which was interesting.

        The navigation system (what's it called in the West, a satnav?) was functional, but only that. I'm used to pinching and swiping but this system didn't have that feature, and the UI's response to button and screen taps was slow.

      • Brussels restaurant recommendations 🍽️

        They bring you four courses, no choice, but they upsell extras. The staff were enthusiastic but disorganised. The food was small amounts of intense flavours. They have a sommelier (fancy!) who's equally as loquatious about canned beer as he is about wine. Don't sit inside unless you want loud music; outside in the square is pleasant.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Earned my Terraform certification but not for a good reason

        This is a bit of a rant, I just need to vent.

        I work as a Platform Engineer, and I use Terraform daily for deploying infrastructure in Azure/AWS and writing modules. The problem is my current place of employment; they have a very unique take on Terraform design that goes against many, scrap that, all documented best practices. This is a "design" decision they have actively chosen.

      • open source

        yesterday was the day when hashi decided that it didn't need the open source community which helped build it. hashi has decided to switch from mpl to busl. busl is not open source, it reverts to open source after 4 years. this is unfortunate, to start, it's a security risk.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Browsing Gemini with Lynx at portal.mozz.us

          A couple of years ago, I posted on the Lynx mailing list about adding Gemini support to the browser.[1] That's never happened. It's too bad, because Lynx supports a *lot* of protocols: gopher, http(s), telnet, ftp, nntp, wais, finger... the list goes on.[2]

          I like Lynx a lot and I want it to be my go-to browser in the terminal for Gopher, Gemini, and the web. So in the absence of built-in Gemini support, I browse Gemini sites through Michael Lazar's great SmolNet Portal at portal.mozz.us.


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



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