● 06.10.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 10/06/2023: Wordle for Gemini

Posted in News Roundup at 8:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Last year I managed to download my entire LiveJournal archives. My last post there was over a decade ago, and for at least five years my posting had slowed to every few months (at best), but all in all I wrote there for eleven years. Kind of incredible. Everything I said, and others, dumped to text and XML. Hard to read, so often I explore by means of grepping a name, or a phrase.

• In addition to this, I’ve got an almost-complete archive of my old HTML journal, the handwritten kind, gathered in pieces from the Wayback across three or four of my old sites whose robots.txt allowed crawling.

• [...]

• But then there are the handful of places that did stick, or click, or however you want to look at it. For me those include dialup BBSs, online journals, the forum for fucked up teens when I was 18 (and whew, that last one’s complicated). But also: the people of the poetry community on Twitter, something good in the sludge of that site. Then, geminispace.

• Think of stuff. Write it down. If blogging, hit “Publish”, too.

• Do this with no time compartmentalization nor boundaries (either time-wise or word-wise) every day. Seven days a week, most weeks. Birthdays/Xmas: optional (for me, the holidays themselves are optional, and now the writing part, too, but…)

• This is how I see writing.

• On my way home from running some errands I decide to take a detour via The Midnight Pub. Its hot, there is no need to hurry. I scan the messages on the board. Uh, ~jack has been “redacted”. Hmmm. Digital suicide? I wonder. And there is some mention of plausible looking word frequencies. Sigh. “Is there still some place without the new shiny technology …” I ask myself.

Technology and Free Software

• One of the things I find annoying about Ubuntu Desktop defaults is that when I open a new application it opens in the upper left corner. I then drag it to the center screen and start working. It’s amazing how a small inconvenience can grind on you over time. When I’ve search the net for changing this behavior the usual suggestions are “install gnome-tweaks”. This seems ham-handed. I think continue searching and eventually find the command below. So I am making a note of the command here in my blog so I can find it latter.

• Me and my partner are in the process of buying our first house. In Scotland, property transactions are subject to Land Tax[1]. Land Tax is calculated based on the property price and is based on tiers. The first 145k is free, then 145-250k is subject to 2% tax, 250-325k is 5% and so on. For first time buyers the tax free amount is raised to 175k.

Internet/Gemini

• First, pardon my english but I want to get the word out. Since I saw winter’s comments about how NYT was transforming Wordle’s experience into a crappy one, I remembered I still have in this capsule my own clone that works over Gemini and it is simple enough to have anyone put it on their own. Mine works with a spanish word dictionary, but you can have it generate the database with *any* word list. It will take care of the client certificates to keep a way of a session and track if you’ve already solved or not the current word and pick a new one when 16 minutes have passed.

• Gemini tries to avoid the worst of the web, and for most people ads and tracking are high on that list.

• But, there is a lot about how ads work that is not common knowledge.

• You almost certainly know what online ads look like; you may even have clicked on them from time to time—possibly by mistake. You might have considered what information is flying around in the cloud to support those ads. You’re less likely, I think, to have considered how much money changed hands, and between whom.

Programming

• Is an educational document, good to work through to better understand compiling and linking shared libraries. To recap, and using C instead of C++ one needs a program that uses a library, plus a few supporting script…

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