● 06.27.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 27/06/2023: The Gemini PDA, Leadership and Management

Posted in News Roundup at 8:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Personal/Opinions

• There’s summer, and then there’s _summer_ – that point at which, regardless of what the season says, regardless of what the weather’s been, it feels like something’s changed, and a new season begins. For me, that’s always been July. My partner is a teacher, and has the summer months off. So for her, summer is Summer Vacation, July and August, and for me it’s taken on that meaning as well. In school, and then in university, I kept this schedule too, so as I met my partner in university and have been with her since, I’ve never really known anything different. I can’t really defend it in any meaningful way, but summer begins in July.

• Yesterday (2023-06-26) this little (shrub? tree?) caught my eye.

Technology and Free Software

• With the friendly help of my local electronic waste disposal service i got a new mainboard for my old Thinkpad R60 that has died a while ago (i wrote about it in another post)… so, its back in the land of the living and it comes near the point where we have to ask the “Ship of Theseus” question

• Now i am at the point where i have not only one but TWO usable fairly (for my circumstances) daily driver capable computers, so what to do with the Thinkpad? I could simply go back and install OpenBSD on it like i had for the most time of having it in my posession, but that somehow feels a bit too… “normal”

• I write this log on a Planet Computers Gemini PDA. Released in 2018, the Gemini PDA is a small UMPC aesthetically based on the Psion Series 5 from the late 1990s. It was the first PDA released by Planet Computers and came in WiFi and 4G models–the latter can make telephone calls and use cellular data to connect to the Internet. The PDA was primarily designed to run Android and is based on an SoC for Android phones, but it can also run Debian, Kali Linux or Sailfish. It can also dual-boot between any of these.

• I’m in my 40s and a good majority of my life has revolved around being or becoming a technical expert. In school I was the nerdy kid in the 90s that just kept my head down, had a few friends, and grew to love computers. I took my computer to LAN parties, and usually did my work to the best of my abilities. I wasn’t the top of my class, I was in the middle, and I wasn’t an outcast, I was just there. I blended in, and I wasn’t part of any popular crowds. I was kind and friendly, and of course joked with my friends and was angsty just like the rest of the teenagers there, but most of all, my primary focus in school was to learn, and so that’s what I did. Whether I was learning the things my teachers needed me to was another story, but I was driven to learn because I didn’t like not knowing things and above all, failing.

• “Baba is you” is a sliding blocks puzzle game—yawn. Where the rules are encoded as blocks on the board—wait, what?

• If you have virtual workspaces on macOS and you use the emacs function display-pixel-width it will give the combined with of ALL the monitors you are using. You are better off using (caddr (frame-monitor-attribute ‘geometry)), since frame-monitor-attribute gets the specified attribute from the monitor which the current frame is actually on. BTW: The function frame-monitor-attributes returns all the monitor attributes. The function display-monitor-attributes-list returns the attributes for ALL the monitors you are using.

Internet/Gemini

• A while back I wrote a Lua script called ‘gemlink’ leveraging ‘gemget’ to fetch the content of a given argument-specified Gemini URL, processing/formatting links so they stand out a bit more to me. I then created another called “gemlink-all” that reads all lines of stdin, running “gemlink” against all such links, facilitating getting the content of numerous Gemini documents into a single file, should I feel like having a bit of a quote-and-comment fest.

Programming

• I like making software things that may not quite be useless, but only get used by me. I like making whatever I have a whim to make. I don’t have to care about what anyone else wants or needs.

• I am always curious about structure editors, and ways to represent structured data, especially code. So I was pretty curious about this post and the provided links to the pdf file and a web IDE. However, I think this is one is totally pointless (like most attempts at 2d/graphical programming paradigms).

• The beauty of concatenative languages such as Forth is that the arguments precede the operation dynamically/temporally, and can therefore be decoupled. Arguments can come from anywhere as long as they get pushed onto the stack — at any time prior to the execution of this particular instruction! This is crucial, as that is how we concatenate.

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