● 06.19.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 19/06/2023: “We Need More of Richard Stallman, Not Less”

Posted in News Roundup at 9:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I guess it depends a bit on what you consider an object? And whether I should limit it to things I have a realistic possibility of ever buying. Is a house an object? If so, I’d like a Victorian in a walkable neighborhood, please. If a house isn’t, but a car is, I’d like a Hyundai Ioniq or Kia EV6. I’m under no misapprehension that electric cars are a real solution to climate change; we need to aim at eliminating cars almost entirely, in favor of universal quality public transit. While I’m waiting on that dream, I hate my current car. It gets much worse in-town gas mileage than I expected it to, and has been unexpectedly expensive to maintain. I don’t have any foreseeable chance of buying either of those things, since electric cars are still priced as luxury items here in the US.

• “Music is my life” is a cliche, so I’ll refrain from saying it. Suffice it to say that my life has revolved significantly around music for a very long time.

• Starting from high school I was one of those kids who had headphones on at every possible second. While not quite so anti-social anymore, I have worked as a developer for more than 10 years at this point, and have spent every work day of all of those listening to music while coding. And that’s to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of miles driven, workouts worked, and dinners cooked while blasting tunes.

• What is a Documentation Generator?

• A documentation generator is a tool that automates the process of creating documentation for software projects, APIs, or other technical products.

Science

• I’ve been interested in Rubik’s Cubes and other twisty puzzles for almost twenty years, but the height of my obsession was around 2010. Most of the puzzles I own come from those days, including my two Rubik’s-brand 4x4x4 puzzles.

• The original mechanism in official Rubik’s 4x4x4 cubes consisted of a plastic ball with grooves just offset from each perpendicular equatorial ring. The offset allowed one half of the puzzle to slide along the groove, while notches on the other side of the offset held the other half in place. As the outer layers turned, pieces would be swapped in and out of the grooves.

• It’s been a busy month! New things going on at work world compounded with plenty to do around the house means I haven’t spent as much as I would doing side projects. In turn, nothing really notiable to phlog about as of late.

• Yes, you are qualified. You can tell whether -1 and 1 are the same number.

• And yes, as a programmer, you should care. Integers are the most basic atomic data type in a computer. As programmers we have to deal with integers and do integer arithmetic all the time. Both remainder and modulo are useful (the latter more so than the former, in my experience), and knowing which one we have in hands can be the difference between the program we just wrote doing what we expected or crashing.

Technology and Free Software

• So it turns out that amfora copies Bombadillo and only scrolls some of the page. Half-page scrolling can be problematic as the new content may be hard to find in the middle of the terminal. Half-page might be good if you’re quickly skimming the text; two impressions might help you spot something that was missed when it was elsewhere on the page, and in that case you’re glancing around and not following the prose. One option here is to patch amfora for full-page motion; probably these should be distinct commands like less, mutt, and vi have for full- or half-page motions.

• After chucking one of my only remaining Arch installations in favor of FreeBSD (now a dual boot with Void) I’ve been one by one massaging my dotfiles and fixing software compatibility issues to get my preferred environment up and running. Only yesterday I managed to get my multiplexer, Zellij, up and running by backporting a fix from upstream git to their current release. I’ve been having trouble getting my NeoVim config setup, in that it was reporting that it couldn’t set up language servers, and last night after work I began investigating.

• I’ve been using kickstart.nvim for a while as a jumping off point, as when I made the switch from an init.vim to init.lua I didn’t really feel like starting from scratch. But what I found bothered me enough that I chucked it all. About four months ago they switched from the Vim package manager they had always used, Packer, to a new one called Lazy. I’ve never experienced issues with Packer, but if that was the only change and things were working I’d probably just roll with it. They also switched from just using the NeoVim official lsp support package to a new plugin called Mason which is supposed to make installing new language servers easier. Crap, here we go.

• The Free Software movement has been mostly killed by the corporate Open Source. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and its founder, Richard Stallman (RMS), have been decried for the last twenty years, including by my 25-year-old self, as being outdated and inadequate.

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