● 09.14.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 14/09/2023: Distrohopping to Fedora Silverblue and When GemText Can Become Worse Than Plain Text

Posted in News Roundup at 4:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Yes, the difficulty of experimenting with innovative or otherwise different teaching methods within a conservative environment is difficult, and we’ve talked about this before. I’m very lucky that my teachers were willing to engage in different ways of teaching us, unlike some other classes i have heard about. The lack of resources for pinyin-first teaching, and the difficulty in splitting classes more finely based on skill than one class per general level make this likely not to change for some time.

• In our high school days, my friends and I went on walks almost every day. It didn’t matter where: the corner gas station was just as viable a trip as a hill five miles away overlooking the city.

• A favorite route of mine took us to a nearby park with a trail running through it. The trail followed a small creek that cut through the dense forestry and meandered behind immaculate suburban lawns. We’d often stop along the creek wherever we could find a straight stretch, and we’d skip stones together.

Politics and World Events

• The well-being of a civilization’s individuals should be their right, according to the abilities and resources of the civilization. I believe that. Therefore the (or at least a) goal of a civilization should be the well-being of its individuals. Alas, the purpose of civilization is not well-being but survival. If not of the individual, then of the group. And there’s no lower limit to the shit scale… as long as survival is ensured.

Technology and Free Software

• Tabs should be a part of the window manager, not the application. This is a hill i have been on for a long time (before i changed the direction of celeste, it was one of the things that was around for the longest). There is no reason why all things shouldn’t be able to be tabbed together rather than segregated by application.

• There are a few instances of this around. Haiku gets mentioned a lot, but partly i think due to the design happening before tabs were really a big thing, the implementation isn’t great due to a lack of quality of life features, like being easy to use.

• The way I’ve been using my computer, the laptop that got me all the way through school, has changed a lot since I graduated. Between classes and homework sessions I’d often have downtime, and I used to fill this with things like tweaking my setups, random internet browsing, watching videos, you get the idea. Managing my Arch system was something I kind of enjoyed doing, and it was different enough from my school assignments that I’d still have energy to do it even when I didn’t have energy for other things I wanted to do like personal programming projects.

• The past couple weeks though I’ve started to notice I really only take out my computer when I have something specific I want to accomplish, like writing a post or working on a project idea. And in this case Arch was starting to feel like a hassle. Updating every couple of weeks was annoying even when it went smoothly, which it didn’t always. I also was running Hyprland and the pace of development on it is still really fast with the developers not being afraid to make breaking changes between updates. I just didn’t have the patience to keep up anymore, which isn’t to say anything bad about the project but rather that my computer usage has changed.

• GNOME Terminal, Alacritty, Kitty, XTERM, Terminator, Guake Terminal, Tilix, Hyper, Tilda, eDEX-UI, Konsole, Yakuake, and many more. I hadn’t even heard of many of these before searching for terminal emulators to add to this list. Which terminal emulators have you used and why?

• I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like spending a lot of time with configurations. I don’t have a dot files repo. I don’t even have a personal vimrc file. I tend to just use whatever comes with my Linux installation.

• This is a lie these days, actually, because I just realised that I copy over my home directory to the new computer. And I always install tmux.

Internet/Gemini

• Recently I was thinking about the limitations of gemtext, and how to work around those. For inspiration, I started thinking about how those issues were handled in other limited formats. I thought back to what’s often considered the most limited format: plaintext files.

• Plaintext is limiting because it has no formatting at all. There are no semantic elements. That’s also part of it’s strength, allowing it the most universal support.

• This is a test that emerges from @Zelena’s [frustration] with whitespace handling in Gemtext, and her [request] that browsers “Do not strip whitespace.” Her claim that “Gemtext can be worse than plaintext” is worth considering. It is also an experiment that feeds into my essay “Between Two Chairs: The Problem With Gemtext”. If you don’t like a lot of blah-blah, consider this post to be the Cliff’s Notes version of that essay.

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