Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ADHISRP Wordo: CUSPY

  • Algorithmic Pattern 2025 workshop proposal — qiudanz technique: computational manipulation of minimalist movement sequences

    The workshop consists of a guided movement and play session in which we will (re)connect with our bodies and re-appropriate computational concepts for the sake of creating nerdy dances and having a fun time. In the workshop, we will introduce and explore the minimalist movement vocabulary of the technique, learn how these movements are combined into sequences, and practice queue-based computational operations to transform these sequences while dancing them. We will engage in several one-to-many and one-to-one activities and games based on the technique. The experience will combine cognitive abilities such as memory and logic thinking with movement coordination and somatic expression.

  • Addition addiction

    Well, the summer is here, and it's time to take a rest from all those electronics (except probably the one I'm typing this post on). To be honest, I had always wanted some kind of a purely mechanical adding machine (any kind will do but smaller and lighter are preferred) but never got a chance to obtain one. In case you didn't know, an adding machine is a type of calculator that bases all its operations on maintaining a running total. Yeah, that's it. I had watched a lot of videos on this topic (including but not limited to all of them from Chris Staecker and Stephen Freeborn, most from Jaap Scherphuis and some from Jens Puhle) and am pretty amazed at the amount of models or even different types of adding machines and mechanical calculators as a whole that the industry and individual inventors had come up with throughout last several centuries. Just to recap from memory: Schickard's design, Pascaline, Troncet (aka Addiators), Leibniz wheels and the original Arithmometer based on them, Odhner's pinwheel design, co-axial Pascalines, Comptometers, Webb-type column adders, Adix-type column adders... And that surely is not all. This industry was so vast and diverse it's hard to even find the full list of all of the different device types, let alone brands, yet all those essentially served a single purpose: add (and sometimes subtract) decimal numbers. If they had any additional features advertised as those for multiplication and division, those features just helped automating the same addition and subtraction, nothing more. Some of them even went beyond decimal, like the Troncet-based Hex Adder or Odhner LuSiD for calculating old British currency. What's even more remarkable is that, unlike slide rules or sectors which were purely analogue, adding machines of any type were purely digital. That is, they all worked with discrete digits and always returned the exact result as opposed to an approximation given by a slide rule. You don't count money with a slide rule if you want to be accurate down to a cent, you better have an adding machine. Or... at the very least...

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • How I would have done Gemini differently

      If you don’t have nitpicks about what gemtext supports (or, more likely, doesn’t support) you haven’t written much in it.

      With that in mind, I’d have tweaked the following if I were the Gemini BFDL:

      * Six levels of headings, not three. Occasionally I want to publish a single document with a deep structure.

    • Using Nitride - Entities

      From yesterday's post, there was an dangling topic, the `Entity` class. Unlike most of the static site generators I've worked with, [[MfGames.Nitride]] uses an ECS (Entity Component System[1]) to generate its files.

      [...]

      I've worked on a number of static site generators over the years, including more than a few adhoc ones until I finally got something stable with [[CobblestoneJS]] which carried me for almost a decade of heavy use. A lot of the patterns that Nitride was based on were on how I found I had to build my pages in Cobblestone, including having a separate “gather” step which wrote out temporary files and then the “process” step which formatted them and made everything pretty. I had to do that because I wanted to have cross-linking and references work across multiple Git projects.