● 05.25.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 25/05/2023: On Profit and Desire for Gemini

Posted in News Roundup at 12:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Fell a bit behind with updating this journal, so I thought I should write up a small entry. There’s been some good things and some bad this past month.

• I should probably start with the bad news. I mentioned a few months ago that one of our beloved family cats was very ill. She was finally put down last week. I’m still processing the whole thing, so I don’t think I’m quite ready to talk too much about it just yet. I think I will be writing something up about her soon, and perhaps making a page on the site for her.

• I keep coming back here. Daily. Odd. I <3 M.p, and the folks here, but I keep coming back to say this and that when I don’t have “a lot” to say. Even life updates – for those I keep up with through e-mail, they know what’s going on with me, my future move to another part of Missouri, etc., and even that is a “wait on the USPS” game right now (until tomorrow? Or Friday?).

• I asked the Webmaster of W.a to delete my old blogs from there, on Discuss.write.as, and I doubt he’ll comply. I doubt he’ll acknowledge such a request, because I am not a fire hydrant in NYC to snap a photo of with a vintage camera.

• I also opened/closed a Mastodon acct today. The toxicity of the Mastodon TL “feed” (it’s layout, some statuses there) flooded into my brain as if I had taken a half-step back from the firehose of debauchery of Twitter, proving to me that; yes, when one walks away from a true addiction, every step away is only as good as the next step further away from it.

• Chalmers begins by making an important distinction between awareness and experience as different things which are both often referred to as consciousness. He calls awareness and related aspects of consciousness the “easy problems:” the ability to control our behavior, observe, react, and focus our attention. These are all things which we might not understand fully right now, but which we can reasonably expect to eventually understand through the empirical methods already available to us.

Technical

• Others may experience that megacorps are unprofitable–too much stress, and not worshiping money may find that which remains–a paycheck, or the fearful climbing–isn’t much a draw.

• Worse, megacorps create work in IT even if you avoid their wares–oh, yeah, Microsoft does that, you need to twiddle these options so Excel is less likely to corrupt your data; or, oh, yeah, Chrome does that, they WONTFIX, try another browser when you see that error. Splash damage, as it were. Perhaps with appropriate regulatory scrutiny or some actual competition for a change there would be remedies for or more alternatives to such?

• Today I saw @gherhartd@ludosphere.fr working on an anti-violence manifesto for games. He said he intended it for the people he played with or for the imaginary designers of the games he’d like to play.

• I am conflicted.

• I used to be firmly in the camp of violence is fun precisely because my life and the lives of the people are around me appears practically free violence.

• I made a short z-shell script to apply dithering to input pictures.

• The whole thing started when Skyjake on geminispace.org pointed me to the low-tech magazine the other day. The low-tech magazine operates a solar powered server to host a version of the magazine, fully willing to let it go offline when there is a longer spell of bad weather. One of the many things they do to preserve energy is to convert their pictures to four gray values, dither it for more pleasant looks and apply a tint.

• What I do in my script is inspired by, but different to their final results. I started out to see for myself how big the file size difference actually is but then thought I might one day turn this into something useful.

Internet/Gemini

• Recently there has been a big stir about a new service on Gemini called Geminispace^. Almost everything that can be said about the service can be said, so while I do have some thoughts about it, I won’t belabor any points here. Instead, I found myself reflecting this evening on the protocol and what it means to me.

• My attraction to Gemini largely stems from its ease of deployment relative to Web sites and other Internet services. Provisioning public access is usually the hardest part: otherwise, all one needs is a certificate, a ready-to-run server package, and an open port. I know Gopher is even easier to set up and manage, but Gemini’s ability to provide user authentication gives it enough power for my use cases.

• okay so i’ve got a lot of stuff to talk about but I know i’m going to have trouble elaborating on concepts if I just braindump here. So i’ll just wrote about one thing, and then I can write about the other stuff tomorrow. That way I can also get the satisfaction of publishing more frequent logs!

Programming

• I’m intrigued enough by the spec that I started working on a Rust crate which implements the spec. It’s early days, but the goal is to implement the spec in such a way that it can be used either by a standalone Misfin server or as part of a larger Gemini (or other smallweb) application.

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