Links 18/05/2024: BASIC Story, Site Feeds, and New in Geminispace
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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🔤SpellBinding: DFHILOS Wordo: LAMAS
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Frames Of Reference- Chapter 16
Autumn has come to Pueblo, and like all clean-cut smoothly shaded verandas it does its best to keep up appearances. The leaves are swept each morning from the few hardy deciduous species which call it home, and the scent of the burned piles wafts across each porch. Here in West, we aren’t so lucky. Sheila and I spend many an evening outside with some warm cider and our tangential, half-remembered anecdotes.
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Frames Of Reference- Chapter 17
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Frames Of Reference- Chapter 18
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Frames Of Reference- Chapter 19
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paying attention
you know that whole "you don't know what you've got till it's gone", "don't take things for granted" thing? for many years i've been trying to be more present with and appreciative of the good moments, the simple moments, sometimes even the painful but real moments because you just never know when it's your last time. most of the time it's really hard to do, because the potential reason for this being my last time was hard to imagine. i guess probably an accident? i might not be here tomorrow? but that's so unlikely and nebulous, we don't really Expect accidents. that's why they're so shocking when they do happen. it's always been some kind of abstract thought experiment.
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Religion
I wonder where is this God they say is omnipotent? He/She/It is supposed to see all and being all-knowing and all-present, God is supposedly everywhere, all the time. But where is God? Why do I cry in despair? Where is my savior? Why am I left here alone?
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Politics and World Events
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Plain of Jars
I got to looking at World Heritage Sites the other day. I have to admit a certain amount of American/Texan arrogance when I saw that the tiny county of Laos had three sites. How could such a tiny little country have so many sites? I thought to myself.
Well, even though Laos is about the size of a thumbtack, it does give us a rather interesting World Heritage Site in the Plain of Jars. If I understand the story there is a huge field over in Laos that has a bajillion stone jars all over the place. The eggheads have decided that these jars are where ancient folk buried their dead.
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Technology and Free Software
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oPEN Writing oN Fedora
After a few years I still find myself talking (and writing) about "Open Writing On Fedora", a manual focused on the installation of Fedora and the use of open source applications dedicated to writing (creative or technical) and that maybe someone will remember or will have read in version 25. I had published it in 2017 along with the release of Fedora 25 and I must say that it was quite appreciated ^__^
Now I am continuing the same project by changing it from 'personal' to 'collaborative'. If in 2017 it represented my personal memorandum on the steps to follow within my creative process, now I would like it to become a free 'toolbox' that can describe and (most importantly) share the experiences of those who, like me, use a GNU/Linux operating system for their writing work.
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CP/M is Back On
I got the old Grant Searle CP/M machine running again today[1]. This one is built on a PCB designed by Herman[2], with the optional CF board. I'm not a huge fan of the PCB setup (especially the CF board, which just kind of hangs off in space and has no mounting holes), but it works.
My old 128MB CF card has been sitting in there, and appears to still be working fine. I had a little bit of a time recalling how the serial ports were supposed to be set up, but I finally got that going. It's a bit of a mess, but that's alright.
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Logout is back!
Did you guys see that logout is back to writing in his phlog[1]? There's a lot of cool stuff from this month in there, go check it out!
If you like BASIC, perhaps you noticed as logout did that the language turned 60 on the 1st[2]. For him, it's one of his top most used languages today, which brings a smile of joy to my face, personally. He encourages us to "Keep BASIC alive!"; for my part, my anonymous gopher shell (The Red Consensus, a Circumlunar.space project) is written in Chimpmunk BASIC. It's be more or less continuously running for a few years now!
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My BASIC Story
Logout talked about the 60th anniversary of BASIC recently, as I already mentioned[1]. This got me to thinking about my own experience with BASIC, which I have probably shared before, but which I'll pull out and dust off once again.
My older brother was always more in to electronics and things when we were young. I recall being more concerned with running around outside, riding my red BMX-style Huffy, playing with G.I. Joes, eating pizza, and imagining the day when my mom would finally let me get a BB gun. There was this one time, when my brother was 10 and I was 8, when we went to Paradise Valley Mall, in Phoenix AZ[2], where we hung out often, and digging through a bargain book bin with him. He found a reference book on electronics that was about 4" thick at the binding; he spent his own money on it (when he could have purchased snow cones, fed the arcade machines, or done almost anything else!).
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Internet/Gemini
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Site Feeds
By hand is probably tedious and error prone, but on the other hand automated Atom may involve libraries with dependencies (XML, date & time modules, etc) that may break on update (due to the many moving parts of all the libraries involved) or otherwise offer various security problems (supply chain attacks against all the dependencies, bugs in the libraries, etc). The good news here is that you are probably not processing untrusted, maybe malicious content, so the security issues are probably minor. On the other hand, you could throw all the XML stuff out on account of ETOOCOMPLICATED.
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Thinking about a Gemini reader
Something I've been thinking about recently is a hardware reader for Gemini. A dedicated device aimed at keeping up with your subscriptions. It'd be something low-power with an e-paper (or similar) display and some sort of minimal user interface for navigation. I've already been posting about this on Mastodon, but I wanted to write something a bit longer and more rambly here.
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Another first post!
Hello! I've been a long time lurker on Gemini since maybe 2022, but never got round to making a capsule. Now that I'm moving my home web server to something more powerful I've set up a Gemini server to try it out properly.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.