● 08.01.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 01/08/2023: Gitea on Void and Unleashing Your Inner Mapper (OSM)

Posted in News Roundup at 2:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I’ve been making bread for a long time now. Since I currently don’t have a real oven (only a small electric mini-oven and an electric pizza oven), my options are pretty limited. I have a breadmaker I use largely to mix and knead the dough. I then either make a round loaf for the oven or some kind of rolls, flatbread or pizza for the pizza oven.

• Lately I’ve been concentrating on bread that can be used for sandwiches (tomato mostly). That means that the dough has to rise enough to passably fit stuff. Since I am not equipped to keep a running yeast culture I use instant yeast which tends to go fast and collapse. So I’ve been experimenting with various ways of slowing things down so the bread can rise and remain firm enough. Lowering the moisture helps currently 290mL water for 500g flour. This results in a heavy lump of dough which keeps its shape as it rises. Punching it down a couple of times and letting it rise slowly for the final time in a moist environment helps. I put it right into the little oven with a wet paper towel draped along the door to keep the air moist.

• a little late this week but who cares

• [...]

• i found this artist this week, and his work is so dreamy. earthy tones aren’t the colors i usually associate with surrealism, and they work beautifully. the background is so delicately colored too.

Technology and Free Software

• My local Gitea instance runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 running Void Linux. I’m quite happy with Void itself. It’s been totally rock solid and reliable since I got all of the kinks worked out about a week after the initial install. Gitea, however, has been a bit of a PITA on a few occasions prior to moving to Void, and the latest package upgrade I ran managed to break a few things. It’s all back up and running now, but not without some frustration.

• After some troubleshooting, I found an obsolete setting in the config file, which once removed at least allowed the daemon to start.

• OpenSteetMap is a community made map of the entire world. It’s not just a map of roads, although it does have roads, paths, and other types of thoroughfares, but it has lots of other attributes including businesses, hiking trails, land usage, solar panels, bridges, bins, water fountains, camping grounds, and much much more. If it exists physically there’s probably some combination of tags it can be described with on OSM.

• One of the great things about OSM is that since it’s made entirely by the community, everyone gets to pick what kinds of things there are interested in mapping, which can make OSM far better than commercial maps. Many people have probably used OSM through the OSM website, OSMAnd or another similar app, but if not directly, indirectly through social networks, government maps or other apps which use OSM data like mapy.cz.

• It got to the point where the leads calling me up every day to ask, “Why are you still having trouble with this? You’ve been on the project three months.” Never mind that I’m the only team member in my time zone, nothing is documented unless *I* document it myself, and I can’t get help because everybody else is busy with their shit.

• The Beepy, formerly known as the Beepberry, is a little pocket-size computer handheld with the distinguishing features being the 1-bit monochrome (non-backlit) Sharp Memory LCD and the Blackberry thumb keyboard. The other key feature to this device is that it accepts a Pi Zero form factor computer board of your choice. A few other nice details are the physical power switch, one user-programmable button on the right side and quite a few GPIO pins broken out around the display. Here is what it looks like. Isn’t it neat?

• My view of errors is built upon my view of encapsulation in general. A program is built from components, each having clearly defined concerns and boundaries, with each depending on other components. Each component defines an interface of methods which can be used by “upstream” components to interact with it. These interfaces are opaque, meaning they expose the bare-minimum information which is required to be useful to the caller. If the caller doesn’t need to know something, the interface doesn’t provide it, either in the types it uses, the documentation it provides, or the actual functionality it exposes. Whether an interface takes the form of a network API or a language-specific abstract interface is irrelevant to this discussion.

Internet/Gemini

• It’s my second year on Fediverse. I got to know the key concepts. I’ve tried several clients. I am used to its pros and cons. I had been thinking that there aren’t anything that could surprise me. Then I started to use a client which supports several servers (don’t be confused with several accounts which are also supported).

• [Toot! for Mastodon] is a mobile client which looks a bit too colorful for a serious user. But it has two functionalities that are dedicated to this client and I haven’t spotted in other ones.

• The first is pinning a hashtag (don’t be confused with hashtag following added in the latest Mastodon specs) which is good for users who don’t want to pollute their home timeline with random users’ posts. A pinned hashtag is accessible from a special menu, without being visible on the home timeline.

• I’ve spent the last few days traipsing back and forth through Gemspace and Gopherspace looking at what’s available. It’s a pretty mixed bag, as is to be expected. Many people started their phlog or gemlog then abandoned it quickly, many more kept theirs running for years and I’m just visiting a monument to that moment in time. It’s in equal parts fascinating and saddening, partly because I arrived too late and partly because these things were written (presumably) with no other goal than to share something. This can be contrasted with the modern WWW, on which even simple blogs are often laden with trackers and ads as a way to monetize content.

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