Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Books in October

    (I'm mostly writing this down for myself. Probalby not very interesting to other people.)

    First one was (the rest of) "Beatrice" by Lina Bengtsdotter, the last installment of the "Charlie Lager" series. I'm already struggling a bit here, because this was a few weeks ago -- I should take these notes ear- lier. Anyway, I remember it to be a solid, captivating story. I was hop- ing for a more "definitive" ending, though, something that makes it clear that the story really is over now. (Like the soul-crushing ending of "Wallander".) But it was a good read and time well spent.

  • Change

    There was change in the air… ow! It was a penny, maybe the one Beethoven lost. How fast was the penny moving? Here things get complicated. Too little wind (we'll assume it is air, and not some other fluid) and the penny will not move. With some amount of wind sometimes you'll get the penny to scoot along the ground as friction (often the first thing to be tossed from an elementary physics problem) is overcome and the penny unsticks, at least for a while. More wind and the penny may exhibit saltation where it is (briefly) picked up before smashing back into the ground, maybe even rolling for a bit if it lands edgewise. A problem here may be that the "stickiness" of air changes with scale, something the Wright brothers ran into with small tests versus a real airplane (and was it real, or faked by the CIA on a soundstage on the moon?). No idea if this is a factor between things that usually saltate in air and the presumably larger penny.

• Technology and Free Software

  • File management and workflows in terminals or GUIs

    My desktop stopped having icons about 15 years ago. And I stopped using GUI file managers around the same time. It's all terminal-based since then.

    It's well-known by now that I have a certain affinity for the Windows Explorer of the 95 to 2000 era. Every time I start a Win2k VM, I can't help but think "wow, this was nice". Or maybe I'm just growing tired a bit of my current workflow and setup.

    PCManFM is surprisingly similar to Windows Explorer and you can even make the Qt version look somewhat similar. I've been playing with this program for the last couple of weeks.

    It took me a while to realize that it's not really about file manage- ment. It's about the entire workflow. Just using PCManFM every now and then isn't meaningful. I've build so many small things that only make sense in a terminal. I'd have to change everything from terminal-based to GUI-based again. I'd need to have a desktop with icons again, I'd need to have a start menu again. I'd need a Git GUI integration. And so on, and so on.