● 08.05.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 05/08/2023: The Guppy Protocol and Generating Calendar Events From E-mails

Posted in News Roundup at 12:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I listen to Arve Henriksen as I sit in the *Sala de Estar* in Frezzie. The house and its surroundings are brimming with various in-laws. There must be over a thousand here. I’m not sure what the food and / or water is laced with that allows them to breed in such a fashion. Now that I think of it, it may not be the food and / or water at all, but the over-exposure to radiation which is present in the Mediterranean environs. Whatever it is, in-laws sprout from every crevice. They don’t even have to pipe each other to create offspring. I suppose this is also an aftereffect of the radiation. Many of them breed by spores and / or budding. Perhaps they are evolved motile barnacles.

• Though I’ve waited until now to write about it, over the epochs I’ve considered what simplicities I need to stay content with life – to, as it were, keep the existential beast at bay. What is my metaphorical anti-depressant medication? Jesus and Allah and Ba’al help me were I ever to take the real things. They suck away individuality like a fat dude living in Myrtle Beach sucks away the meat of an oyster, leaving only its lustrous shell. Lustrous, maybe, but still a thing of pure surface aesthetic. Ah, but that is a subject for a future time, or, in fact, maybe for no time at all as I think I just summed up my opinion of anti-depressant medication. So!

• It was easily in the triple digits here yesterday and today. A ten minute walk down the street yesterday was brutal. It was only slightly better today. In the sun it’s terribly hot, in the shade it’s terribly humid. Take your pick.

• FINALLY a break in this monotonous weather: just before lunch time today the skies darkened and we had a thunderstorm. I had gotten a notification on my phone shortly before it started, that lightening may strike. Then I got rain warnings and then the skies opened up. It wasn’t a quick storm either: it was dark and thundered for several hours.

• Typhoon #6 has been in the news recently. It came up from the south and battered the Okinawan islands and then went west towards Taiwan. Then it made a u-turn and it is now heading back towards Okinawa again. The prediction for the 7th is that it’s going to hook a left and head north to Kyushu and then the Korean penninsula.

• The best humor/comedy/religion/philosophy/way hones in on the sorrowful hilarity of the ridiculousness of individuality.

• My condolences if you’re still taking that ‘lil mind-only monster seriously.

• By their victimhood shall ye know them, for surely victimhood is the Nth degree of individuality.

• Around 1990 I would often engage in heated discussions with my two close friends and fellow musicians about art and its revelatory potential. They both defended serious art and its truth content. I never quite got what that might mean, and still have some problems with the concept. One way to pose this thesis is that serious or high art is able to convey truth, but entertainment or light art is not. At the time, I wasn’t in favour of elitist conceptions of art that would debase popular expressions and entertainment. It definitely wasn’t about any kind of revulsion against “high art” – I enjoyed Tarkovskij, Boulez, and Joyce for good measure. The idea of truth in art seems to involve the romantic notion of the artist as visionary, as someone who is better equipped to see certain things clearly, which the rest of us would only be able to discover through the work of art.

Technology and Free Software

• And “just like that” you awaken as though it never happened!

• (Save “in mind only”, of course.)

• Wonderful leftovers transported from another dwelling on the heels of a super fun performance attended by people you love for the feeling being mutual.

• I am not the most innately organised person, so I am a fan of using a (digital) calendar to keep track of my personal life: when I am traveling, when I am meeting up with friends or going to the cinema, etc. It helps ensure I don’t miss appointments or double-book myself.

• But if you have a lot of bookings–for example, if you are planning a vacation and booking multiple flights, trains and hotels–it can be tedious to manually create calendar events for each booking with the correct times, location and other details. The problem is compounded when you are dealing with different timezones. Some service providers give you the option to add bookings to your calendar, but often they don’t, and even when they do, it doesn’t always work properly (for example, British Airways give you the option to add flights to a calendar, but in my experience they don’t get the timezones correct).

Internet/Gemini

• (I don’t know if anyone is interested in this, but let’s give it a try. It started as a thought experiment, when I looked for ‘lighter’ protocols I can implement on the Pico W. I see Spartan mentioned here and there, and I wonder if there’s any interest in going even more … spartan. If you find this interesting, useful or fun, and have ideas how to improve this protocol, I’d love to hear from you at my-first-name@dimakrasner.com!)

• [...]

• In Guppy, all URLs can be (theoretically) be accompanied by user-provided input. The client must provide the user with means for sending a request with user-provided input, to any link line.

• Server and content authors should inform users when input is required and describe what kind of input, using the link’s user-friendly description.

• If input is expected but not provided by the user, the server must respond with an error packet.

• Clients may cache the returned error and present it to the user on attempt to access the same page without providing input.

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