● 07.30.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 30/07/2023: Gemini’s Second Round of FAQ Updates

Posted in News Roundup at 10:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I’m in a little bit of a hobby crisis!

• I think it is great to have many hobbies and interests; after all, some might be seasonal, so we need other hobbies for other seasons, or we grow tired of one and find relief in the other. There are some that we can’t do while sick, and some we can do. There are mindless ones we can do on the side when we don’t have much energy or focus left or can’t come up with an idea, and some that demand our whole attention and planning. It’s great how versatile everything can be.

• However, I am frustrated about wanting to do all my hobbies at the same time, and committing to one is making me sad I am not doing the other. They’re all there to be picked up, and it’s really hard to decide most days. I know hobbies come and go, have more intense and less intense phases, but still.

Politics and World Events

• The roots of timebanking can be found in what early economists of the late 1700s like Adam Smith and David Ricardo described as the “Labor Theory of Value” (LTV); which proposes that all commodities produced in a market system originate their value in human labor.

• So I’ve been thinking about cities a lot lately, having moved into a new one.

• I look at Inverness, my new city, and I see it bustling with life. There’s a burgeoning queer community, an up-and-coming eco-friendly scene, and a few lovely small businesses soldiering on every day.

• Compared to my last city (Torquay, actually a town I believe) this is a breath of life.

Technology and Free Software

• Some games stand out in terms of popularity and critical appraisal, so it’s only natural that those are attracting more attention and this is what people might look for if they want to judge if an alternative operating system or platform can help satisfy their gaming preferences.

• Naturally, OpenBSD with its security focus and intentional absence of emulation/compatibility layers doesn’t make for a target for many high-budget/high profile games. Many of the engines used in those settings will possibly never run on OpenBSD: Unity, Unreal, CryEngine…

• So here’s the problem: Say you want to log some temperatures over the course of several hours, or even days at a time. You’ll need something to store all those data to; a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop will do the trick. A single temperature probe won’t cut it though, because you’re interested in several spots and the temperature difference between them. Whipping up a single analog sensor and the accompanying AD converter may be feasible, but doing that multiple times will get long in the tooth pretty soon, since you’ll have to calibrate each one somehow. The next best option is, of course, the now ubiquitous DS18B20 from Dallas/Maxim/Analog (whatever): It is cheap, reasonably precise and accurate, calibrated right out of the box, and you can easily put a bunch of them on a single 1-wire bus. In case you’re looking for something even more precise (and more accurate, too, as long as you can calibrate it that well yourself), I can highly recommend you the work of Ed Mallon over at The Cave Pearl Project!

• I recently got a Kobo Clara 2E e-book reader.

• I like it a lot, it’s really gotten me in to reading again. I don’t mind paying for the e-books, and though there are a lot of aspects of the system that I’m strictly against, such as mandatory logins for internet access, sync and updates (though this can be bypassed), tracking/telemetry and DRM on purchased books, I’m frankly too lazy to deal with all the issues that come with trying to bypass all these.

• Several days have been spent on the topic of the perforated pipe butt. The conversation concerned how to render a particular word in lojban, agglutinative word formation, the distressing details of how lojban weirds aggluting agglutes (aww man, I gotta learn rafsi too?! (no, not really)), that there is an algorithm for this, that grammar parsers can check that your forumlation isn’t totally terrible. Now from a marketing standpoint one would simply not advertise perforated pipe butts. The world is not ready for such logic. However, a showerhead is the end-business of a pipe, and has generally got holes in it, so I’m going with perforated pipe butt. Some may claim that a showerhead might look something like a head, maybe that of a snake wearing a hockey mask. “Water barfer” may also be a good term, especially if there are often air pockets in the line, or if your mental age is somewhere south of 12. Again, not so good on the marketing front, where the mantra “do not startle customers with accurate descriptions of reality” is doubtless in fashion.

Internet/Gemini

• I talked about self-hosting in my last post, but in the end I decided to use managed hosting instead.

• I had been going through the Mastodon install process on a new VPS when I made the decision. I wanted the flexibility to be able to scale the instance in the future and because of that was starting to setup object storage for media uploads. That’s when the complexity of what I was setting up started to hit me.

• If you were doing a pretty simple installation and knew you didn’t want to scale up the instance later, I’m sure installing and maintaining Mastodon wouldn’t be that bad. But there’s also other fediverse projects that are easier and more practical to self-host, like Gotosocial, if that’s your goal.

• Section 4 of the FAQ, “Protocol design”, has now been expanded and reworked, mostly to try to explain as clearly as possible how various aspects of Gemini’s design are in fact the deliberate consequences of leaning hard into some chosen principles. The FAQ as a whole is certainly still not perfect and I expect that I may continue to tweak it in the nearish future, but I don’t think there should be any more changes on the same scale as this recent overhaul for quite a while. If anybody would like to attempt updating the existing translations, or starting a new one, I think that work could safely begin now without fear of major disruption.

• Whereas the first big FAQ update made the whole document more than three times longer than it used to be, this update has “only” made the FAQ 20% longer. It’s gotten very long, I’m well aware. The whole thing is close to 27,000 words. Reading at 225 words per minute on average, which some very brief web research seems to suggest is typical for adult native speakers of English, the whole thing would take two hours. That’s a big time commitment, but then, actually reading the entire thing will leave somebody with a breadth of understanding of the protocol and things related to it which, previously, could only possibly be acquired by extensively studying the mailing list archives, which would take an awful lot longer and have a much lower signal to noise ratio. So this large FAQ does, in fact, represent substantial progress.

• It’s probably not gonna be that active as I don’t have much to write about and don’t really enjoy writing much.

• So I’m late to the party, Gemini started in June 2019 and apparently had some explosion of usage during the Covid-19 pandemic due to being posted on HackerNews with some success. Here we are in July 2023, nearly August and I’m finding out about Gemini. Better late then never though

• It’s not quite fair to say I was 100% in the dark, I knew something called Gemini existed and I had seen it vaguely mentioned in context, but never looked into it. I knew it was some kind of protocol, maybe I could have told you it was… something something… gopher? Yeah, so not exactly familiar.

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