Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Lightning #3231

  • The Stonemason's Daughter

    The next morning, Milley Oslow woke up to the familiar sound of bells chiming beautifully and faintly in the distance. Whenever the bellfish hopped to eat breadcrumbs that had been scattered in the canal, they often chimed to call other bellfish to the same feeding ground. Today, that happened to be beneath a bridge not exactly near the entrance of the Oslow residence. Milley prepared herself for the day and joined her family for breakfast.

    Freshly baked, braided bread with cheese filling! It was crisp and warm and as satiating as it needed to be. Another masterpiece made by her mother, who worked part-time at the Mayfair Canal Bakery. Her father sat at the head of the table and was stuffing his mouth so quickly that it often caused Milley to wonder how he had never choked before. Milley’s mother preferred not to eat since she had lately felt nauseated in the early mornings.

• Technology and Free Software

  • A wee at wrapper

    at(1) is fairly minimal. A particular complaint would be the lack of a "subject" or label on each job, as who knows what job 1778786760.c or whatever is? Apart from peeking at the files under /var/cron/atjobs, that is.

  • Stirling Engine Part 3

    Noticed at this point that the capacitor voltage was oscillating down and then up. Checked and confirmed that the voltage from the generator was oscillating from 1V to around 2.2 V, with the capacitor unplugged.

    [...]

    I'm interested in finding a way to transfer more heat into the engine, but I don't think I have any metal tube or box on hand that is a useful shape and size. I'd need to look into that more. I haven't done the calculations yet on how much energy is in the lighter fluid I'm burning, but I believe it is dramatically higher than what is getting stored in the capacitor, at least one, maybe two magnitudes.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • What Delta Chat was

      Being able to quickly write replies to email, real actual email, was very valuable. That was the core of what drew me to Delta Chat.

      There are plenty of proprietary email apps set up around that feature but in the free world, not so much. Delta Chat was it and it was a gem because it was in many ways better than those other sparks and spikes and whatever they were called. Not to mention the incredible leap of faith it takes to go for a proprietary mail app since they can read the emails.

    • Centralization: wasn't there a baby in that bathwater?

      This post, and others, express concern about the level of "centralization" that is developing in Geminispace. The root of the problem, if I understand correctly, is that there are services which many people use, and which are under the control of specific individuals, not the community as a whole. These posts mention, in particular, BBS, Station, and Antenna. So far as I can see, the folks worrying about centralization aren't particularly concerned about search engines like TLGS, which are provided under similar terms. Rather, they seem to worry more about social media-like services, that have the potential to become "like Facebook".

      It doesn't seem to me that a community of perhaps three hundred Gemini users worldwide should have to worry about anything becoming "like Facebook".

      Still, I understand why folks might be a little nervous. We've seen how enshittification works in the mainstream web: put up a service that lots of people want to use and then, when it would be disruptive for users to move away, find a way to exploit them for the benefit of your investors. We've all seen it happen, again and again.