● 06.09.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 09/06/2023: Thoughts on Flatpak and Apple Cultists

Posted in News Roundup at 7:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I have a confession to make: I’m ashamed of my penmanship.

• My handwriting isn’t particularly bad: on the contrary, it’s quite legible. I dislike it not because it’s unreadable, but because it’s so utterly generic.

• I grew up in the last few decades that cursive and other forms of advanced penmanship were still widely taught in schools. Of course I was first taught how to write in print, and to this day I still form letters using the exact same movements taught to me in my preschool spelling books. We learned a standardized form of cursive around my second year of elementary school.

• A few more pictures for the collection, from the trails near the Tanana River. This was from last Wednesday.

• The springtime had finally come to the little forested valley in Vermont where the young ash tree stood. After another long winter and a rather surprisingly short and uneventful mud season, the slender tree was starting to unfurl its new leaves in the pleasant warm rays of sunshine beaming down over the hills that rimmed it on all sides. For a few days…maybe even as long as a week, the sparsely branching tree let its tiny feather-like leaves grow and spread like the wings of exotic birds. It was a good time in the valley.

Technology and Free Software

• I have been chatting about this with people who know more than I ever will about Flatpak.

• Soo I have added few edits here and there.

• If I seem frustrated, most of my frustration is aimed at the unnecessary shit slinging over packaging formats.

• *We all want the good stuff, why the hell are we fighting?!*

• So, I had dinner with other people in my company today (as of when I started this post). One of them are absolute Apple fan boys. He knows that I piratically a VR resident. And the topic of Apple’s new Vision Pro headset showed up. I expressed my view that I don’t like it and it does nothing what current VR users want. And that I’m not their target audience. Also what Apple is doing is nothing new. We have it for ages. The Quest 2 have vision hand tracking. Quest Pro/Vive Pro eye/Pico 4 Pro have eye tracking. There’s external mouth tracking addons have existed for a long time. And talking through an avatar is what the entire game of VRChat is about. Go get a VR headset and hop into VRChat for even an hour. See what the frontier is like. That’s where innovation and new ideas are. Guess the reply “I don’t care about innovation. It’s not Apple and it’s not a convinent package”.

• I wanted to facepalm myself immediately. I asked myself. Seriously, this man wants to wait for a 3500 dollars headset that does nothing new. Just.. argh!.

Internet/Gemini

• I am a microblogger now! Decided to finally try out Mastodon, even though I still rather dislike the involved technologies. But to avoid interacting with them too much directly, as well as to setup a separate communication channel, I registered at emacs.ch and tried to use an Emacs Mastodon client, mastodon.el. Quickly discovered that there is a memory leak in my Emacs version, related to images, so now using the usual Mastodon’s web interface. It is okay: somewhat buggy and awkward, but there are many worse ones.

• Another day, another proof-of-concept server.

• [...]

• I’ve no idea if this works in practice, let’s see. I plan on adding aggregators and otherwise tweaking the output until it matches what I like to read, then trying reading everything this way for a while to see if I prefer the forced slow cadence to the “live” versions.

Programming

• Critics will point out that this script will not run forever due to e.g. the heat death of the universe, the hardware running the script failing, the human getting bored, etc. However given a running system this script will (probably) run forever, the lite version of forever that ignores our daystar going all red giant.

• The script does need a bit of help to run “forever”. One lever is that shell scripts take pains to operate line-by-line, to ape an ape at a terminal. Either shells read single bytes to find where the next line is, or they read chunks and use lseek(2) to scoot the file pointer back to the start of the current line. This can be observed under ktrace(1) or similar, which is a great way to learn what system calls a process makes while going about its business. Especially if there are too many lines of code to easily follow what some too complicated shell is doing.

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