● 06.04.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 04/06/2023: Wayland and the Old Computer Challenge

Posted in News Roundup at 8:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I’ve been working on my Hybrid Shadows – my Sci-fi, Transhuman story. I’ve actually had a couple people ask me about this story lately, and I really appreciate the interest! I love the story, and have much more written in a very, very rough form, including the ending. This one isn’t so light-hearted like Lantashi’s Dance, so takes more effort for me to write.

• I have a short scene ready to go (Scouting Mission), and will publish a much longer scene in a few days after I have a change to clean it up.

• This might seem a bit absurd or hyperbolic but I think that vacuum cleaners are the archetype for the over-engineering which we see in literally everything today it seems. It’s a simple problem really: floors get dusty and dirty and the grim has to be periodically removed, but it is not a fun task so we want a device that gets the job done quickly and effectively.

• Now, there are a few very simple devices that have existed since time immemorial. There’s the broom, the mop, and dustpan-and-brush. Brilliantly simple with no moving parts, no batteries nor power source needed, nothing that can really go wrong. The only caveat is that they only really work on smooth surfaces, and so, I hear you say, what about carpet! And its a very good point, vacuum cleaners are much better at cleaning carpet, and my answer that is simple: don’t have carpet. Just get a rug instead, which can be patted down outside, or cleaned like every other piece of fabric you own. Vacuum cleaners are a solution to a problem that does not need to exist! They’re temperamental, noisy, energy-intensive, and most of all wholly unnecessary.

• We play two games of Yahtzee a week with my in-laws. My mother-in-law won the second game today, but I absolutely cleaned up in the first game. Four Yahtzees, including one on the first roll. Everyone was cursing me. It was unbelievable, definitely the highest score I’ve ever had.

• I went through the Trash on Google Drive and pCloud, and I found heaps of old PDFs and .txt docs from the past 5+ years. I just made a big folder called “WRITE SHIT” and stored them on Proton Drive and my local machine.

• Some of it is ok, most isn’t. Some are 30K word “offline” journals, some are short “personal experience essays”. One reads like a small dissertation. And a few are poems, haikus.

• When I write something in English or think and dream in English, this is often a perplexing issue that confuses me and makes it challenging for me to fully immerse myself in the “Anglo Zone.” Or in the “Latin Zone,” for that matter.

• Say you’re a driver in F1. You get offered a seat at the front running team. But your team mate will be someone highly rated. Maybe it’s Hamilton or Verstappen. The sort of driver who breaks records. This is your chance to be in the best car, to finish ahead of everyone… except one person. You might win a few races here and there, but a lot of the time you’re going to be beaten, and even made to look a bit rubbish.

Technical

• It is believed that Wayland is going to be the future of display managers for Linux. So I recently tried it out and am happy to report that it may not only be the future, but is already very usable in many circumstances.

• Before discussing my switch to Wayland though, it is worth talking about what I have been using until now. In the last (at least) year I have been daily-driving Xmonad (which obviously uses the X11 display server). It is great, and I love it and I would certainly return to it if I didn’t think Wayland was already ready for me. Of course, I had my own Xmonad configuration (which is actually pretty minimal) including xmobar for the status bar. Though recently I had some issues with xmobar crashing (which was solved by switching away from xmobar obviously) and also longer startup times (30+ seconds) for some applications (which was actually the fault of xdg-desktop-portal-gnome and which was not fixed by switching to Wayland, but I found another fix for that in the meantime). So I decided to take a look at the future of Linux display system.

• Hi! It’s that time of the year when I announce a new Old Computer Challenge

• If you don’t know about it, it’s a weird challenge I’ve did twice in the past 3 years that consists into limiting my computer performance using old hardware, or by limiting Internet access to 60 minutes a day.

• I want this challenge to be accessible. The first one wasn’t easy for many because it required to use an old machine, but many readers didn’t have a spare old computer (weird right? :P). The second one with Internet time limitation was hard to setup.

• This one is a bit back to the roots: let’s use a SLOW computer for 7 days.

• One thing to note, Daniel Stenberg has explicitly stated several times that as long as the code is up to cURL’s coding standards, he’s more than willing to add Gemini support to cURL. I’m sure he also has more than his fair share of criticisms of HTTP and any other internet protocol cURL already supports too.

• Also, in this post I’m mostly just going to discuss Daniel Stenberg’s original post and not the responses to it. Shockingly, almost of the responses were measured, well-written, and acknowledged the real issues Daniel addressed, like I’m attempting to do here.

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