● 08.19.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 19/08/2023: Missing Physical Buttons on Electronics

Posted in News Roundup at 5:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• It’s 11pm on a Friday, the kids are in bed and the wife is playing video games. All caught up on TV shows and MST3k on Pluto is playing an episode I don’t really care for. So I start digging around their on-demand selection. Score, classic MacGyver. I was always a fan of 80′s shows like that. MacGyver, Magnum PI, Murder She Wrote. But boy were their setups crazy.

• One thing I never quite got about Murder, She Wrote was that the protagonist, Jessica Fletcher, was constantly getting involved in murders. Everywhere she went some cousin or nephew was doing some interesting thing she had to go see and boom, someone was killed. Not just once or twice. Over 264 murders (assuming at least one murder per episode). And yet in over a decade with a death toll of a small town no one ever called the FBI. Every once in a while a detective objected to her helping due to her just being an author, and even fewer thought twice about the fact death followed her around. No one really stopped and said it was ridiculous to assume she just happened to stumble upon so many murders. Cases for serial killers started with less of a trail.

• I was glad to get my physical copy a while ago. Having now looked over it, I think it did exactly what it set out to do, gather the various Monster Seeds for the original Dungeon Fantasy Monsters developed and published in various places during the Kickstarter for Dungeon Fantasy 2 in one place, something that hadn’t been done before. So far, so good.

• Oftentimes, if you watch a lot of anime or manga, you may see references or outright cameos of objects (including living things) from another story or a media franchise.

• Consider, for example, this series of tweets about the strangest school in the world in terms of the proclivities for the teachers (and the head teacher!) seemingly bursting into cosplay at a moment’s notice.

• I was once sitting in a nice, comfy position and thought: Heck yeah, let’s do an internet radio station that only plays numbers that are spoken with espeak! Yeah, that’s a great idea! Anyway, this was also an experiment on how many radio directory sites I could get into.

• do you ever want to learn something but your brain is just NOT playing ball?

• i sat down to learn the ropes of Dwarf Fortress earlier. i did the tiny little interactive tutorial but there’s so much more i gotta learn about in the help section. i could just dive in and try to learn it from scratch but i know i’m not gonna enjoy that lmao

• it’s dumb coz it is ABSOLUTELY a game i know i’m gonna enjoy when i eventually do learn how to play. i might just take it baby steps, just go through a new help section every day or so?

Technology and Free Software

• I started thinking I was depressed when I had “suicidal ideation” at railway stations. Among my responses was to want to know how bad things were, and so I started to gather stats. Every day, at about bed time, a thing pops up on my laptop to ask me to rate my day on a scale from -10 to +10. I don’t have a clear idea what the numbers mean, but it feels like I use them fairly consistently. And I’m not doing science, so I can be as arbitrary as I like.

• It feels like a positive, sensible thing to consider how I am. Emotional state can seem overwhelming, but assigning a number requires a moment of contemplative calmness. I noticed that there was a lot of fluctuation. Some of the time life was grim, but some of the time I was ok. Good – I found out something from doing this. The badness always ends. Seems trite, but it’s backed up with stats!

• I just snagged a Sony PRS-650 ereader off Kijiji for $20 and I’m over the damn moon. It’s in incredible condition, works like a dream, and the battery is still rock solid. It’s an older device (released around 2011 I believe), yet it has all the functionality I need from an ereader in 2023. There is one feature of this incredible device that I would like to focus on. Along the bottom of the screen there are physical buttons for page turning, home, zoom, and options.

• I bought a new Japanese 3DS LL off ebay so I could resume playing my various Japanese 3DS games. In large part, this is so I can play Fantasy Life to tide me over until the Nintendo Switch release of Fantasy Life i. But it’s also so that I’ll have a working console as they become less and less easily obtained over the coming years.

• I have had two USA 3DS XL. An original 3DS XL with a bad motherboard and a New 3DS XL with glitchy shoulder buttons. I didn’t want to do surgery on the USA one until I better understood the situation with the eShop and whether all of my downloaded titles were going to disappear. I can put up with being able to play most of them in a diminished capacity, but if I could play none of them with a fully working unit I would have been sad.

• I’ve had drones for a long time—maybe ten years.

• Along with VR and 3D printing, drones fall for me into the “living in the future” category—they’re tech that was fun to imagine, and now you can actually buy it.

• So I did: I had a few Nano QX drones from Horizon. They were cheap even back then, around 120CHF if I remember correctly, and they now seem to sell for about 80CHF. They were fun: reasonably easy to control, very nimble, a lot of fun to fly. I used to take them into the office and we’d take turns to fly them in a basement corridor adjacent to the underground parking lot.

• ### gnu/linux of the debian 12 variety

• I just tagged the current version of my Inkscape Countersheets Extension on GitHub as release 3.1, since I recently got some help to make it not crash in recent versions of Inkscape and I thought it was good to make an official release at this point even if there has not been many major other changes. It is sad that the state of software “engineering” is such that backwards compatibility is a dying concept and that we keep inflicting “software rot” on each other like this, but in the ~15 years history of my Inkscape extensions most of the time I spent on it has basically been this kind of wasted work just to keep up with Inkscape API changes. There are a few neat new features though, mostly also contributed by others, so it is not all wasted.

Internet/Gemini

• And same can be said for Station, Geddit etc.

• And I’m not into it.

• I just don’t like making silo accounts all over the place.

• I’ve had a few Reddit accounts, and accounts on Discourse or Vanilla sites like Story-Games, and the big bad evil elephant in the room called BoardGameGeek, but I’m not happy about it.

• Ever since it was first launched, I’ve hosted Rob’s Gemini Capsule on a local machine from my home Internet connection. Yesterday, almost two and a half years later, I decided to move the capsule to AWS.

• It was a tough decision, primarily because of my stance on digital autonomy. I believe in the right to establish one’s own presence in cyberspace however one wishes, including entirely on one’s own terms. I’ve exercised that right for years by insisting on a static IP address for my home Internet connection and hosting my own services from there. However, at our new house, we have to subscribe to a business Internet plan to get a static IP and CPE bridging in our ISP’s infrastructure for opening ports. That increased our monthly Internet by $50, and since I only host a Gemini capsule right now, I was essentially paying $50 a month just for Gemini hosting. I was willing to pay the extra cost for future flexibility, but in recent weeks we’ve entered a period of tight finances, and it became necessary to migrate the capsule in order to save money.

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