● 08.14.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 14/08/2023: Movie Showcase and Digital Detox

Posted in News Roundup at 7:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• When I first watched “Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse (2018)” I was expecting a solid eight, or maybe a nine; how good could another spiderman movie be, anyway?

• So it was an unexpected surprise when the movie not only hit “ten” on my personal scale; it redefined it.

• “Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse” is a fantastic super hero movie, succeeding as it does in playing the story completely straight while simultaneously making fun of it and injecting a healthy dose of new ideas; but far more than that: it redefined what an animated movie can do, visually.

• Since the last entry I’ve been to Colorado, Kansas, Alberta, Texas, Arizona, Illinois, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and likely some other states that do not immediately spring to mind. I am going to try and be more regular with the updates moving forward.

• “…If our work does not support our soul, then the soul will exact its butcher’s bill elsewhere. Wherever the soul’s agenda is not served, some pathology will service in the arena of daily life.

• We may choose careers, but we do not choose vocation. Vocation chooses us. *To choose what chooses us* is a freedom the by-product of which will be a sense of rightness and a harmony within, even if lived out in the world of conflict, absent validation, and at considerable personal cost.

Technology and Free Software

• This whole place keeps gnawing at my brain. The wires. The circuitry. The unorganized cables. Castles made of discarded junk, soldered together by slaves and fools working for the opportunity to get their hands on antique tech. All under the watchful lense of glistening bi-pedal semi-sentients. The loud screech of jury-rigged cooling fans, the clacking of the drum drives that were never allowed to die.

• Every morning I am reminded of my sub-serviency, as a metallic arm squeezes 1/3rd of the daily protein ration inside a paper cup, before I am walked to the stripery. The monochrome walls of my discomfort. “The wheel of the market must turn!”

Internet/Gemini

• The last few years (the last decade? when was the starting point?) have seen things get decidedly worse. Weather is hotter, more variable. In 2021, Lytton, British Columbia burned after a wildfire got out of control. The area had record setting temperatures, peaking at over 49C. I was born in BC, and the Interior gets warm, but not like that. There are lots of similar stories. Spain is supposed to get ground temperatures above 50 degrees. People are dying from heat and it’s only going to get worse. The last few years we’ve all been learning about wet bulb temperatures. Everyone’s wondering what’s going to happen 10, 20, 40 years down the line, but climate change is hitting what feels like exponentially quicker than we expected. Now I’m wondering what next year will be like. Should I start a little light hoarding? I just opened a new sack of rice – should I get another, just in case?

• I have registered the domain geminiprotocol.net. There is nothing there yet, but in the near future this will become the domain for the official Project Gemini capsule. Fear not, the familiar gemini.circumlunar.space hostname won’t disappear. Instead, I plan to split the official capsule in two. The CAPCOM aggregator, the SFTP user capsules, and the SSH kiosk will all remain at their current gemini.circumlunar.space URLs. The official news feed, documentation like the FAQ, and the protocol specifications will move to the new geminiprotocol.net.

• This is a big change! I will do all that I can to make it as smooth as possible. I’ll put redirects in place to ensure that no links or bookmarks break, and my hope is that SFTP users will not even notice anything has changed aside from a very brief window of downtime. The change will probably happen in late August or very early September. I will make announcements here at every relevant stage to keep people abreast of the transition.

• I was going to point out an error in the URL, but now that I’m writing this up it has already been fixed. Since I have already read the book by now, I was able to kinda fix the broken link by myself – and it was totally worth it! The book is a rather short one, it took me less than two hours straight to read it through, but I really enjoyed it. Now I have to admit that it didn’t bring anything new for me to the table, but it is really well written and to the point, and probably much easier to digest at first than other, more comprehensive works.

• I can totally recommend it to anyone using Gemini, even to those who won’t want to become a vegan!

• It can be, in which case you’ll have “gemini://example.org:80″ links instead of the shorter “gemini://example.org”. Downsides include the need to deal with the usual “only root can listen on ports <1024″ restriction, or more problematic that lots of web scanners will be poking at your gemini service. This may fill the logs and will waste CPU.

• Also client software will tend to expect HTTP at TCP/80, and will probably throw weird errors if a client ever points their normie browser to your http://example.org:80 that runs gemini. Probably not the best experience. Good luck getting the browser company to support Gemini?

• Another round of removing online accounts.

• Due to some completely unforseen wiggle in the delicate fabric of space time it occured to me that I could get rid of three more accounts since I last wrote about it.

• [...]

• And by now, my job life is nearing its end rather than the next exciting position with demanding challenges. So, why keep it? I could cancel the premium thing online. But I had to request a service ticket to get the whole thing deleted. With a bit of luck it should be gone in a few days.

Programming

• KL1 is a programming language from the 1980s Japanese 5th Generation project. It’s a committed-choice logic programming language derived from Prolog, but (perhaps fatally) not particularly compatible with Prolog.

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