Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 14/09/2023: Learning LaTeX and Using Slackware



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • teaching kids

        after 2 months of resting from 4 years of studying in college, i got a job. now i am a teacher of computer science. in the school where i studied. everyone here were inviting me for about half a year, including some highschoolers i knew.

        the first week i questioned my experience (still do, im not a teacher, i just write english words in nvim and they get colored differently). but the kids are kind to me. i talk about different topics with them. yesterday a lot of girls tried to make me watch their favorite anime series. also i got a... love letter? there are a lot of hearts. perhaps they are trying to brown-nose, knowing that I am not such a mean or experienced person. but i will not give good grades just because of pretty eyes.

      • Expanding the concept of Rules for Life

        Our initial reaction to any rule is to reject it, since we have free will, even if it is good for us. We tend to think that rules restrict and oppress us when, in fact, the opposite is true. Without rules, we quickly become slaves to our passions; without rules that give us clear guidance on what to do or not, we end up declining more and more. Therefore, rules are not restrictive but liberating.

        If we take all possible models of life from Greek literature, we will see that there is a limit that cannot be exceeded.

      • Fall Scenery (publ. 2023-09-14)

        These are some photos I took along the Tanana River (Fairbanks, AK, USA) last Friday (Sept 8). After visiting my parents a few days ago, who have a much slower Internet connection, I decided to start uploading lower resolution photos along with the original 4MB files.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • termemu

        xterm, because it comes with OpenBSD. xterm is bloated, but finding (or writing) something more suitable would be a pain. Rarely urxvt if a silly game needs it; urxvt buffers better; you can see a flicker in xterm if the code is bad and sprays escape sequences, a lot. Otherwise not urxvt as there are a few annoyances I'd have to figure out how to fix, and there's no tuits there, especially given that xterm is mostly good enough.

      • My email setup

        On the server side, it’s pretty vanilla. Postfix, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, WKD.

        On the client side, I use mbsync and notmuch and I have a ton of automatic filters via nmsync.

        Everything that those filters label with feed I read in a feedreader instead of an email app thanks to nmatom. I can check in on those newsletters once per day. No stress. And they’re not getting tangled up in my personal business, they don’t trigger notifications, they don’t require responses, they show up when I have time to read ‘em etc. Pretty great.

        I also have the opposite, thanks to rss2email; I have one RSS feed (janitorial type news from inside my building) that are so urgent that I get them in my email client.

      • Learning, Loving, LaTeX

        I first used LaTeX last year for a final assignment for one of my computer science classes. It involved needing to put a long series of images (more than 30) in a specific order, in a document and after struggling immensely with the first five, I decided to reassess my approach. LibreOffice is both an excellent and poor example of free software. It serves as a great one to one competitor to the Microsoft Office suite, albeit not as polished or feature rich, but enabling you to at the very least view files from the rest of society. That being said it also comes with all the same upsides and downsides as Word and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Google Docs. Graphical word processors are great for less-than tech savvy people, because it gives you the "What you see is what you get" experience, which works great for easy-to-format text. Now try to insert an image and watch your document rip itself to shreds. This is the position I was in, trying to put four images on a page, with them all being equally sized and occupying the four quadrants of the page, unable to get it working for the life of me in either LibreOffice or Google Docs. Then I remembered hearing about LaTeX and how easy it made formatting documents. I had never tried it and so I watched a few video guides on how to use it. It seemed simple enough and so I gave it a shot and just about instantly fell in love. I was able to do the whole assignment in vim (and GIMP for creating the images) and properly insert the images the way I wanted in a matter of minutes!

      • Using slackware

        I recently started to use slackware for my desktop, I tried it a few time in the past and didn't take the time to create a setup.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • AuraGem Music Relaunch

          I am announcing the relaunch of AuraGem Music. AuraGem Music was a project I originally announced on 2022-07-15 that allowed people to upload their private collections of music with Titan and stream their private collection with Gemini. Unfortunately, the service was slow at that time, for various reasons, but this situation has been improved; although, it's still not perfect since the AuraGem server is still on a home network, but for 320 kbps mp3 files, it should still be fine.

          Streaming on AuraGem Music should support any Gemini browsers that allow for streaming (by not timing out on long streams). Uploading music will require a client that supports Titan. Lagrange is an example of a client that supports both Titan and Gemini.


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



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