● 06.07.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 07/06/2023: Jukka Charting Geminispace

Posted in News Roundup at 12:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I really do miss writing. For whatever reason I’ve been in a major dry spell for the last several months, and it’s hard to understand. Self-doubt is likely contributing, but that’s always been there, and it doesn’t seem like it’s any worse these days than at any other point.

• There’s certainly a degree of “what” involved (as in, what I want to write about). On the one hand, I was bolstered recently by a quote from Alan Moore (he of many great comic books), that a writer’s job isn’t to tell people what to think, but rather to make them think. At the least, I’m encouraged by the idea that I don’t necessarily have to figure out a problem to talk about it, especially since so many solutions (that I can come up with, at least) boil down to “be less terrible.”

• Following is the next screen to Hybrid Shadows. With this one I wanted to bring out Kendra’s and Matthew’s personalities more, as well as to further develop their relationship.

• This scene took a while for me to write. It it supposed to be a fun scene before things start to get more serious in the story.

• This might happen with all authors, I don’t know, but as I write stories, I keep wanting to put in more and more character and relationship building, and I get the idea that after a while I need to cut things off. Otherwise, my story will be 90% relationship and 10% action. Which kinda sounds fun, but I do want the story to proceed, and not be a million words long

Technical

• I got an idea today (while taking a shower…) about _partially_ reusing Qubes OS design of using VMs to separate contexts and programs, but doing so on OpenBSD.

• To make explanations CLEAR, I won’t reimplement Qubes OS entirely on OpenBSD. Qubes OS is an interesting operating system with a very strong focus on security (from a very practical point of view ), but it’s in my opinion overkill for most users, and hence not always practical or usable.

• In the meantime, I think the core design could be reused and made it easy for users, like we are used to do in OpenBSD.

• Here is a short guide explaining how to install OpenBSD in Qubes OS, as an HVM VM (fully virtualized, not integrated).

• Yesterday I watched a bit of the Apple announcement and remembered a project I was working on in my last year of college. nowadays not just VR/AR but smartphones and other devices can just listen to spoken commands and accurately recognize the words, but in 2009 speech recognition was not good, specially with non native English speakers or people with non standard accents.

• Visually impaired users had a couple options: mobile devices with physical keyboards (but blackberry was going the other way, to all screen devices) or alternative input methods. I was developing a braille based software keyboard for touchscreen devices, but of course there were many approaches. Having the braille layout on top of the screen and tapping on it as if it were a chorded keyboard was one way.

• Since I’m using Qubes OS, I always faced an issue; I need a proper tracking of the configuration files for my systemthis can be done using Salt as I explained in a previous blog post. But what I really want is a version control system allowing me to synchronize changes to a remote repository (it’s absurd to backup dom0 for every change I make to a salt file). So far, git is too complicated to achieve that.

• I gave a try with fossil, a tool I like (I wrote about this one too ), and it was surprisingly easy to setup remote access leveraging Qubes’qvm-run.

• In this blog post, you will learn how to setup a remote fossil repository, and how to use it from your dom0.

Internet/Gemini

• Cosmos has been up and running since the start of 2022, collecting gemlog posts and other feed entries around Geminispace. I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at the data.

• [...]

• * The coverage may favor more distant past because sometimes aggregators will surface multiple past entries from a feed that haven’t previously been discovered (for instance, CAPCOM may do this). Does this account for the dip? Probably not, but one would have to compare the data against a more thoroughly crawled index to see if all entries from all known feeds are actually present.

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