Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • april decks

    i picked the crystal tarot for its vibrant green, it feels springy. the RWS was simply one of the leftover decks that didn't get its own definite month, so i paired it up with the crystal as a "safe" bet, seeing as the crystal tarot uses the picard system which i'm not all that comfortable with.

    well, my "safe bet" deck immediately went back on the shelf. while i can read it easily, the art is just extremely off-putting, i just never feel like reaching for it. the crystal tarot is much more attractive and appealing to look at, but doesn't speak too clearly. and to be fair, i have no real interest in learning the picard system. i'm trying to read "despite" it, not integrating it.

  • Piezo Waiters

    One of the cafés I really like recently started using those li’l “beepers”. Customers get one when ordering their food and when they start beeping you’re supposed to bring it to the disk and pick up your plate yourself.

    So far so good. I’m all for it if it makes the job of the wait staff easier. I’m not blaming the café for what I’m about to rant about below:

    I blame the manufacturers of the beepers for having such an incredibly annoying and never-ending piezo beep. I do think piezo beeping is useful tech and not every instance needs to be replaced by an actual speaker and sound chip, but, the ambiance used to be the main draw of this particular place! If they had put in like birdsong or something, that’d‘ve been perfectly charming.

• Politics and World Events

  • Is Fahrenheit 451 becoming relevant again?

    Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 envisages a future where books -- all books -- are banned, because of the risk they pose to a totalitarian state. Books, after all, contain knowledge, including the knowledge of how things used to be. They inspire us to look beyond the narrow confines of our experience, and to ask whether things could be better. In the world of Fahrenheit the role of the "fireman" is not to put out fires, but to start them, using books as fuel.

    The novel follows the fortunes of one such fireman, Guy Montag, as he gradually awakens to the pointless destructiveness of his day-job (been there!) and finally rebels.

    Fahrenheit has, on the whole, not stood the test of time.

    Attempts to adapt the story for TV and cinema in the last twenty years have been dismal failures. That's because we no longer rely on books for knowledge or, in fact, on any physical medium. Knowledge is distributed around the world on a vast network of computing devices.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Weening myself off the big web

      I've been looking into other options to try and ween myself off the socials and be much more intentional about what I ingest online. In doing so I learned about Mastodona nd Lemmy. I'm still trying to get my bearings as it is definitely a different vibe than Reddit, but I don't think that is a bad thing. All the things I have read so far are most devoid of the bot traffic, the useless responses, and seem quite intentional. Granted, I have only browsed a few communities.

      Some of the hashtags I am following are #selfhosting, #smolweb, #linux, #FOSS, #fediverse, #indieweb, #geminiprotocol, #aiethics, #philosophy, and #history

    • Re: mkcd

      Hey, if `mkcd` works on a machine - it's not necessary *your* machine, it can be as well *my* machine!

      🤣

      On a serious note, nice to meet a like-minded geminaut over there. Great minds think alike!

    • Why AI is not a thorn in the small web

      I know people have different feelings about AI and that in the small web community that view is typically not favored.

      I am an old school tech guy who cut his teeth in the mid-1980's as a hobby and it eventually became my career. Started with building, then BBS sysoping, then troubleshooting, then installing/supervising broadband internet for @Home, then help desk, then servers and web dev, some networking, help desk supervisor, systems administrator, SharePoint Admin, trainer, and now a IT bsuiness systems analyst.

      I've been in IT a very long time and have seen tech come and go. The past ten years I have been very burnt out with the world of tech.... that is until I explored the AI world. It not only opened up new ideas but has allowed me to effectively return to my tech roots.

      It has helped me better understanding coding principles by working along with it, see results, and actually understanding the code that is generated by being involved in what the finished product should be. It has helped me gather my thoughts on projects, give me guidance on which stacks to use, how to implement them, and when my idea is not really worth the time to invest in it (or if its a great idea). Web pages look slick and come together in minutes rather than hours.

    • Why AI is not a thorn in the small web<

      My view of why I feel that AI is not a thorn in the side of the small web

    • Welcome to Offgrid Holdout

      I got fed up with social media a while back. Not in a dramatic way, just quietly tired of it. The way everything is optimized to keep you scrolling. The way conversations evaporate. The way you can spend an hour on something and come away feeling worse than when you started.

      So I built a thing.

      It's a simple webpage with posts by me along with sites/gemlogs/gopherholes/etc that I find interesting on the small web. There's also a Gemini capsule and a Gopherhole that mirrors the info on the website. No accounts to create, no emails, no tracking.

    • The Small Web: A Viewpoint

      I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Every few months someone writes a piece declaring the personal web dead...the hand-coded homepages, the blogrolls, the webrings, the capsules on Geminispace, the gopher holes that still get a quiet handful of visitors a day. The eulogy is always premature and always misses the point.

      The small web was never competing with the large one. That's the confusion. It was never trying to scale. A person who keeps a Gemini capsule and updates it twice a month isn't a failed content creator they're just doing something categorically different. The metric isn't reach. It's something closer to what you feel when you find a note tucked in a used book. Someone was here. They thought about something. They left it for no particular reason.