● 07.14.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 14/07/2023: Retro and Comebacks

Posted in News Roundup at 5:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I failed the universe’s tenuous strands that hold its gauze together two days ago when I did not write about the dream I had which featured not Lucía herself, but a physical search for where she might be. I used to have tangible address books and there were essential to me. They were sacred. Tangible address books! Ones one could actually touch! Imagine that! And one of these tangible address books still exists and it is in a box in the closet in my bedroom in Seminole. When I was last there in March, I did not peruse it. Next time I shall.

• There’s more coming, but I expect to fill this gemlog with musings on food, society, culture, technology, and the intersection of all the above.

• Unforseen 99999 IQ mass brain fuckery will occur soon and the only thing slowing it potentially down is the friction of society.

• AI isn’t going to steal anything, people with energy & access will.

• so if you watch horror on tubitv you’re probably aware of this movie. it’s just 70 minutes, it’s a vampire movie, it’s gay, it’s TV-MA, i gave it a shot this week.

• so. if you don’t know me, hi, i’m sol, i like women and vampires. i watch and write about lesbian vampire movies (mostly 70s sexploitation) as a hobby.

• feeling persimmon-swelter-anxious. i’m on break. i’m putting it out there:

• day-month list:

• - watch two movies, three movies, two shows - dawn-walk

• I took these photos over a week ago (July 4th) but I haven’t had time to rename or label them. Rather than wait for that, I’ll just dump them here as they are. I might come back and label them later. These were taken with the S5300 — no post-processing.

Politics and World Events

• I used to be in IT, so I think a lot about systems. Modern life is full of systems. The size, depth, breadth and interconnectedness of them is so vast, but also somewhat obscured from the end-user. Not just technical ones, although those are probably the ones that most immediately come to mind for most people here. Beyond the systems and algorithms involved in serving content on the web, there’s logistics systems that get packages and products where they need to go. Our food environment is one such system; from farm to manufacturer to retailer, although that is a gross oversimplification. The scale of these systems cannot be understated, and it is only growing.

• I began crossdressing around the age of 10. That may sound scary to some people but there was something there that drew me to it inside myself.

Science

• This inequality implies that the value of 1-x is non-negative but less than the inverse of any positive integer. 0 is the only number to have this property: any possible nonzero value of 1-x could be written as 1/r for some real r, but by choosing n such that r<10^n, the inequality would fail to hold. Thus 1-x must be 0, and x must be 1. Thus 1 is the smallest number no less than 0.(9)_n for all n; extending this indefinitely, 0.999…=1.

Technology and Free Software

• Time for another mojito while navel gazing. /sip

• I’ve been thinking about my reading and keeping organized about it. It is less of a big deal with fiction where either I finish or drop it quickly. Then mark it accordingly on storygraph (https://app.thestorygraph.com/).

• But when I’m reading non-fiction, and I am reading more of it lately, its less of a one and done situation. I want to take notes, and then at a later date be able to add on further/linking discoveries, but where?

• [...]

• Digitally I suppose I can just use a website and make a webgarden kind of thing. Maybe on Neocities. While I like Storygraph in terms of keeping track of what I complete, I find keeping track of where I am/progress in it obnoxious.

• Today I’ve mostly been catching up on the OCC blogs and IRC chat. Basically a relaxed day as the rain hammers down outside. I should be doing some programming, maybe improving my scripts for Mastodon, but I haven’t been in the right mindset/mood.

• Today I got to see more family I haven’t seen for a while, including my cousin and her children. Also stumbled across a swarm of burnett moths amongst the lavendar.

• Being away, I haven’t done much computing yet. I’ve caught up on Mastodon notifications for my .social account via the scripts (I haven’t got my TopSpicy.social account set up with them yet) though.

• [...]

• Trying to connect to the #OldComputerChallenge IRC channel for the first time since my preparatory period and it just seems to be hanging for some reason? Not sure why.

• It turns out that Oracle Cloud has recently introduced a bug that has broken IPv6 assignments for servers running Ubuntu. Any IPv6 assignments you’ve made in the management console will still be visible in the console, but won’t actually apply to your server after a reboot.

• [...]

• While investigating this I tried to use the gemini web proxy proxy.vulpes.one, which I had used in the past, only to find that it now redirects to some sort of German cannabis retailer. If you’ve linked to that site from anywhere previously, you might want to go back and edit those links!

• what are good computers? even the regular brands. i don’t know much about specs and stuff (im happy to listen to someone explain), and though this forum tends to the smaller-scale indie retro aesthetic stuff it is also the most nerdy (endearing) place i know. thank you thank you thank you.

• I updated openSUSE today. And, after launching the Vivaldi web browser, there was clear graphical corruption within the Vivaldi window immediately after launch.

• This issue can also be triggered by a Vivaldi update. I originally experienced this issue a month ago when I updated Vivaldi on a different system.

• The problem appears to be an underlying graphics upgrade which invalidates Vivaldi’s graphics cache.

• Here are my July answers to christyotwisty’s 5 monthly questions. Thank you for doing these, christyotwisty! You give me m0ar to write about aside from the usual computer geek stuff, even if my answers are dumb.

• LAB: 10:12 AM 76F/51% CONSUME: Parsing recent mastodon enteries in home timeline. CONSUME: Reading #oldcomputerchallenge entries in mastodon (toot) GOPHER: matto is also using eeepc. Follow: ENABLED!

• IRC: #opencomputerchallenge on libera.chat has much activity @1840UTC

• Of all machines I have used with the ratpoison window manager, this one has the most simple setup.

• My plan for this edition of the Challenge was to do as much as possible with Emacs. Before the challenge I was already using Emacs for email, use-net, RSS-feeds and following mailing lists, as well as browse the Gemini- and Gopher space.

• I knew that the big browsers like Firefox were not going to work, so expected to use eww, the web browser in Emacs.

• A couple of weeks before the Challenges, I played a bit with “rde”, which is a Linux distribution based on Guix, focused at developers and power user. It is developed by the brilliant Andrew Tropin.

Internet/Gemini

• I find myself occasionally smitten with the very tiny, very minimalist sites on the web. Websites found at the 1MB club, the well known “best motherfucking websites” out there, websites like starbreaker.org.

• It always makes me think: shouldn’t I be doing this too? Is there any way I can implement that on my existing sites? What would I lose and what would I gain?

• [...]

• The thing holding me back is the implications such a design has for me as a person compared to others. Others who may use such a minimalist, lightweight and focused design are different from me. They may be male, they may be older, they may have a portfolio full of amazing tech stuff they have built. They are cut-to-the-chase people, they may not be artistically creative but they are seen as very logical and good at tech things. I get the impression that when they do it, they have enough of their work, their personality and other markers such as gender or age working to ensure others are seeing it as the deliberate choice that it is, and not lack of skill.

• With the end of August, i plan a comeback to Geminispace.

• Okay, it’s weird publishing here and not getting that instant feedback dopamine hit you’d get elsewhere. I know that’s by design, and it’s part of the reason I signed up, but it’s still weird to actually experience. Everything here is slower and more deliberate. I have a feeling it’ll be good in the long term, just takes some getting used to.

Programming

• I threw these couple scripts together to quickly satisfy wondering what Wikipedia has per specified search/query terms.

• There are antiquity that feature bros at dice; Achilles always beats Ajax. There are storytelling reasons for this; Achilles is the best, so therefore cannot lose, except when the plot demands it. A continent over Shakuni used dice that always rolled the desired number. More examples can doubtless be had.

• Computer games sometimes feature not exactly random numbers that favor storytelling or skill over cold hard statistics; the rolls are fudged to be more in line with what a human expects, which is that a skill that activates 33 percent of the time will roughly follow the pattern of hit miss miss. A 95% skill that misses twice in a row? Fuggedaboutit!

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.