Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 08/09/2023: Apple Stuff and Migrating to Neovim



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Good evening

        Hello. I've come across this place while walking through Nightfall City several times, but only last month did I decide to enter. I got my pass this week.

      • A rice portion size is eighty grams

        Because i always forget how much to weigh out. Different resources of course say different amounts, but it tends to be in the range of seventy-five grams to a hundred grams. I'm choosing eighty grams because that's the same as what one portion of five a day is measured as, so it's easy to remember.

      • Eating cheap and healthy

        My approximate current shopping list for eating pretty well as pretty cheaply. It could be cheaper in some places but i have chosen some things for taste as well.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • The worst things about iPad OS

        In September 2021, after 22 years using only FOSS except for driver firmware and video games, I got an iPad. Here are the three worst things about its OS. (The sustainability issue of the difficult-to-repair hardware is a topic for another day.)

      • iMac G5 WiFi

        In the past I tried several times to get the AirPort cart for my iMac G5 (1st generation machine with 17" screen). I was never successful - every time I bought one on-line (no matter where) the seller always wrote to me that the offered product no longer works. So I gave up.

      • Macintosh Classic II Repair — Part 2

        the keyboard & mouse arrived first, followed by the Wombat, with the capacitors dilly dallying until Wednesday (the 6th). I was surprised they bothered shipping the Wombat over labor day weekend, but they did so it arrived in typical USPS punctual fashion. Turns out that UPS, that Mouser uses to ship, don't work over labor day “to clarify, I'm not upset about that” so it didn't get sorted or go out for delivery until Wednesday. Luckily I had all afternoon free and they arrived early-ish, so I had plenty of time to work before needing to drop everything for while—time which it unexpectedly turned out I needed.

      • Migrating to Neovim

        I remember my first time using vi, using sudoedit because I was blindly following a guide online for who knows what. I remember struggling to figure out which mode I was in, though exiting never was as hard as the memes made it out to be. I started using it more and more, I never much cared for nano and so once I knew vim worked basically like a regular text editor when in insert mode, I used it, if I was already in the terminal. With my use of tiling window managers the hjkl keys got to be fairly familiar and so more and more often in my journey using Linux I jumped to vim when I needed a text editor.

        For the first 4 or so years of using it, I ran on the stock config, I didn't even have a separate .vimrc. Then a couple years ago I got sick of needing to go back and replace tabs with spaces in python and so I made a .vimrc consisting of a few lines, enabling relative numbers and fixing the aforementioned tabbing issues. When I first heard of neovim I checked it out, but realized it was really not all that different from regular vim, so I had no reason to jump ship, and anyway nobody likes a splitter. With the recent passing of Bram Moolenaar, it pushed me to consider neovim again due to him being the largest contributor to vim. I can't imagine there will be many more major updates to the original project, though his name will live on in our hearts.

      • Rogue Mapgen

        The map generation in rogue (1980) is primitive by today's standards, though if you run Moore's Law in reverse for a few decades you may see why. Nor was there much in the way of prior games to borrow from. Even with the simple map generation there are emergent features, notably where passages (represented by the "#" in the screenshots below) cross or loop back on themselves.

      • Magic’s sieges are weird

        Magic introduced a new card subtype, “siege”, on a card type that itself was also new, “battle”. You can attack battles and try to defeat them. Sieges are special in that you play them on the opponent’s side of the table so you’re attacking your own sieges.


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



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