Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • UKLG vs JKR

    I read Planet of Exile the other day and loved it. Talking about it to a friend, he had never heard of Ursula K. Le Guin, which is fine, but he asked me “is it hard SF?” in a way where it seemed like it was a trap—I’d be a nerd if I said yes and a flake if I said no. It’s a pretty orthogonal question for that book. She creates cultures.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ZHILOPC Wordo: SORRY

  • Too many books

    I hoped that by reading this many books I’d start enjoying more of them, that there’d be a lower threshold for a worthwhile book since the opportunity cost is lower. “Those who only read a book a year, well, that book better be awesome, but for those who read many books I can appreciate every book for what it has to offer, it doesn’t need to be the best in all categories”, that was my thinking.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The Iron Law of the Internet

    My family has never had cats. I've visited people who did have a cat plenty of times, of course, but I never really interacted with them much. We were just always dog folks.

    That is until recently, when my sister got a cat a few months ago. And this week she went on vacation, leaving the cat in my care. This is the first time I've spent any real time with a cat. She's a friendly cat, by the name of Cherry. She seems to like me well enough. Petting her is an interesting feeling: her fur is soft, but under that her body is very hard and muscular. It's a vivid contrast. And the way she moves is very different from what I'm used to with dogs. I don't know how to describe it in text.

  • The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

    First published on Monday, August 12, 2024, before the game actually came out.

  • Templates and copies

    Our economic system never adapted to anything that has an expensive template with cheaper copies, like movies where producing the movie is expensive but making digital copies is way cheaper. We’ve been too stuck in a marketplace of exchanging one-for-one, a model that is fundamentally incompatible with “template” production.

  • Shared solutions

    I understand why people are like “But I figured out how to populate my autoexec.bat so why can’t everyone else do that same work too?” but one reason why I’m always harping on usability is that the great thing about FOSS is that it enables sharing solutions.

    I hung out adjacent to a hacker group in high school and the mindset there was always like “Don’t ask questions! Don’t answer questions! Just tell people to RTFM! I did, and I learned things better and more thoroughly that way” whereas I was more like this:

    “If it takes me 4 hours to learn something on my own and you 4 hours to learn something else on your own, and then we can have two ten minute conversations where we help each other, we’ve both saved 3h40m each compared to if I had to spend 4 hours to learn my thing and then 4 hours more to learn your thing.”

  • FOSS is so dumb

    There are places on this planet where everyone “needs” to use the same app. In some countries it’s Line, in others it’s WhatsApp and in others it’s Zalo.

    That is not a good situation to be in. Infrastructure must be democratic, not corporate. Here in Sweden, our politicians can tend to be a li’l bit loosy-goosy with this, and some proprietary apps like Kivra or BankID or Facebook Messenger have started to gain a serious foothold.

    FOSS is such a dumb issue that only nerds care about, and that’s great, I don’t want anyone else to have to care about it, but... policy-makers do need to get nerducated (and not get fooled by openwashing). The reason FOSS is such a dumb issue is because “intellectual” “property” and binary code and SAAS leads to a lot of dumb things.

  • The SNES should have had ZL and ZR instead of X and Y

    Multicolor vs. two-tone purple doesn’t matter. The Japanese got the multicolor one, while we here in the US got light purple concave Y and X buttons paired with darker-purple convex B and A buttons.

    I’d provide you with search-engine links, but I’m kind of in between search engines at the moment. Your favorite one should suffice for all this.

    What you might not notice in photos of these things were the L and R buttons on the top of the controller, meant to be pressed with the index fingers.

    By contrast, the controller for the Nintendo Entertainment System didn’t have Y and X buttons. It didn’t have L or R buttons, either. All it had, from left to right, was the D-pad, Select, Start, B, and A.

  • Terminals are good, Full Screen is Better

    Terminals are still pretty central to my day-to-day: I use Linux via wsl at work, switched to fish at my (much-younger) colleagues' suggestion, found it easy and intuitive and a little bit faster than bash for how I use it.

    And so I agree with everything cda writes on his microblog regarding terminal email clients - like a lot of people, my usual usage is one of the usual big suspects (GMail occasionally, but mostly Outlook). Here at tilde.club, I switch between mutt and alpine, though usually the latter. pine was my first email client and I loved it. It was simple and easy to use and fine.

    alpine is a rewrite? continuation? of pine and it's fine for what I use it for, which in tildeland is replying to the occasional email. I was thinking a bit about why it didn't quite feel like pine and what I was missing, and came to the conclusion that it had to do with all the additional context of modern computing. At the time when I first used pine, almost thirty years ago, I was using Telix to dial up an ISP. All this was being displayed full screen on my old monochrome monitor. Now, I'm connecting to a tilde in putty with a bunch of applications littering the desktop behind it. I can maximize the terminal, but the taskbar is still there. We live in the land of compression and notification and distraction.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • [Old] [Old] Sneakernet in a Free, Developed Society

      Regardless, the coolness of the very idea of sneakernet is incredible. I just want to use one. For something! I don't even know what, just something. When I talk about "sneakernet" in this post I don't mean the occasional file moved on a USB thumb drive between friends once in a while (even though that technically counts). I'm thinking about organised sneakernets between several actors, be they individuals or organisations.

    • Sneakernets Revisited

      But is there an actually useful purpose of sneakernets in democratic countries in the developed world?

    • NextCloud Server Adventures

      It has been awhile! It has actually been *over a year*. Anyone who went to this server's http port (https://lantashifiles.com) would not see a working webpage. At first they would get a screenful of PHP... not exactly helpful. Later, after some work, the server was feeling generous, and an error message saying that the PHP version was too new for the version of NextCloud installed.

      How long was it? Well, I upgraded the server to Debian 12 over a year ago. And it was then that NextCloud broke. During the upgrade of Debian, PHP was updated as well, and the new version of PHP was incompatible with my out-of-date NextCloud installation.

    • Hello World.

      Sorry, I kinda felt my first gemlog should open with something very, very old school. For the record, we never really used the phrase "old school" back when we were programming in the 80's. Because we thought we were on the bleeding edge with IBM's Cartridge Basic and everything else was just "old fashioned", with electric typewriter sitting over there on my roll-top desk.

  • Programming

    • Lisping on an old Acer Aspire One

      During the last edition of the Old Computer Challenge I used an old Acer Aspire One 522 POVE6 [1].

      The CPU is an AMD C-60 APU with Radeon HD Graphics which is not the fastest in the world.

      During the challenge this machine ran a Xorg-less FreeBSD 14.1, and I just worked on the console/virtual terminals. I was quite happy with it. Running Emacs on a machine without X brings some headaches, while some often used key-bindings collide with the terminal.

      Recently I upgraded this laptop with extra RAM and an SSD [2]. This creates the possibility to run X11. The ratpoison window manager is a natural choice for this laptop: I is very light weight and eats zero screen real-estate. Being a purely keyboard driven window manager is also a big plus, as the mouse pad on the Acer is not the greatest.