Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • underneath the ash

    the wildfire calms
    and the glowing embers
    quietly smouldering 
    underneath the ash
    wait for a waking gust
    

  • A map of London bookswaps

    I had a copy of a paperback that I had very much enjoyed and thought that others might enjoy but it had sadly been battered beyond the point of being saleable in a charity shop so this helpful map reminded me that there is a little bookswap hut just two streets away from my house.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Pixel Perfect

    The mouse can be somewhat awkward:

    * Stray trackpad brushes or bumping the mouse can be problematic, to the point that I recompiled Brogue with the mouse totally disabled. Ideally there would be a -M option or something to disable the mouse, or maybe an in-game toggle. Bonus: there's no screen gnat on the screen if you disable the cursor in SDL.

    * Being off by a pixel can cause a text selection area to flip around randomly, and then you must waste time to re-establish the desired selection without running into the "haha I'm inverting the selection area on you!!" land mine.

    * Popups, like the ones on Wikipedia, are another land mine and why I mostly browse Wikipedia with w3m instead. On other sites you have to keep the mouse pointer in some empty column to help avoid such annoyances.

  • My Laptop is so Hot

    I've bought my reconditioned DELL Latitude 7490 a year and a half ago. I reminder Latitudes to be good laptops since I had one fo my PhD studies and keep warm memories of that machine. However something clicked instantly when I started using it: bro's so hot 🥵

    I find it really annoying. I essentially use it to write code, compile stuff and mostly terminal-based tasks. I installed an Archlinux with AwesomeWM on it, so clearly we're not talking about heavy load. But still, that 4x2 cores beast and its 32GB of RAM easily get busy and the fans kick off extremely soon. The laptop gets warm, the fans are loud and I discovered two days ago that the battery had already lost more than 30% of its capacity. Bueno...

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Another Old Web Pillar Gone

      Sadly, it seems Angelfire and Tripod are now gone, shuttered by Lycos. In the late 90s, they (and GeoCities, and others such as FortuneCity) were where people hosted their personal websites if they didn't have better options, and most people didn't. I was a bit of a magpie, hosting at my two ISPs, at GeoCities, at altern.org and elsewhere, but a lot of my friends made pages at Angelfire and Tripod. They were easy enough. They were free. We didn't think hard about these things.

      And the remarkable thing is, those pages stayed up, long past the initial interest and maintenance. One of my friends kept his going for more than a decade, turning it into a repository for our group's tabletop roleplaying campaigns and homebrew systems. It would live on for almost twenty years after that. The content was updated semi-frequently, but the initial design stayed in place, frozen in amber like it was 1997. Solid background, tons of font and colour changes, all the expected design cues.

    • Aiming for a Googol How-Tos

      Of course, I’m joking. But I’ve added a new post about commenting to my Everything Gemini How-To, mainly focusing on “Re:” posts and emails.

    • I Launched a Simple Lobsters Mirror for Gemini

      If I remember correctly, there have been mirrors for Hacker News and Lobsters on Gemini before, but I cannot find them anymore, or they are broken.

      While I have subscribed to the Lobsters RSS feed, I don’t actually participate in submitting or voting on Lobsters, and I try to stay clear of Hacker News. On Gnome, I use Lobjur every once in a while instead of the RSS feed.

• Programming

  • Lua as a practical "soft-bedrock" language

    The folks behind the Lua programming language maintain a page detailing the release dates of all released versions of the language. My favourite thing about that page is that right at the top there is a graphical timeline, with years marked below the line and a little vertical marker above the line at the appropriate place for each release. This timeline makes it immediately obvious at a glance that Lua is doing something all software projects ought to aspire to but very few actually manage to achieve: it is slowing down.