● 09.17.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 17/09/2023: The Rehearsal and AuraGem Music Bugfix

Posted in News Roundup at 8:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• For years we’ve been hearing about one of our friends’ infamous former roommate. They became roommates, the story goes, when our friend answered a classified ad for a roommate that ended, “must like beer.” He responded back with, “Hey, I’m looking for a place to live, and I like to drink beer.” And this is how he became roommates with the guy that became known as Spaghetti Pete.

• Spaghetti Pete is the sort of guy who likes to have a good time: when he’s not working, he’s either at a party, or throwing a party. You’ll always be offered a beer. And every now and then Spaghetti Pete gets ideas about something that sounds like fun.

• I’ve ordered a tea 6 months ago and still didn’t get it. Have you seen ~bartender recently? Is he doing okay? If he’s on a vacation, then we need to urgently find a replacement. What kind of pub is it without the most important person, without whom people cannot get drunk?

• The “mockumentary” has held a place in my heart since “Borat” (2006).

• A mockumentary is a humorous production in the style of a documentary; “real life” participants interact with, usually, a very smart comedian playing a character.

• As a format it goes places nobody else can go, gently—or sometimes not so gently—poking fun at life with deadpan humour that I find immensely entertaining.

• More recently the UK series “Cunk on Earth” took a few episodes for me to get into, but left me convinced that the production is a work of genius. It’s worth watching the whole thing just for one scene about nuclear weapons—and ABBA.

Politics and World Events

• The trick here is to make something old sound like a modern political scandal. Anyways, the foundation of modern Western mathematics is (or was) wrapped up with a number of, uh, strange views. The rational mind may put these rules down as “woo” or “humbug”, but here we are. Here’s a sample.

Science

• i think there is something important even though it seems like there’s not. it seems like everything is either important or unimportant, but if everything is equally important, then it also feels like every thing must be unimportant. I think there is a lot of beauty in the subtlety of sometimes adding line breaks and capital letters at interesting times and places to tweets and like that things. I think it matters to every character. every char. characters as people as letters and numbers and symbols inside of strings. what beauty what love what mystery is encoded in the strings of us our DNA or our actions logged in coordinate maps through all time through all places.

Technology and Free Software

• I’ve been thinking about smol.pub all day so figured I’d give it a go. “For the price of a cup of coffee,” and cetera. I’ve spent the bulk of my life, adult and otherwise, On Line and sweet peaches does it suck for the most part these days, a few small circles of community notwithstanding (1). I’m enamored with the idea of a simple posting platform, and have experimented a little bit with markdown-generated static sites (2) for accessible text-first tabletop role play adventure writing, which I’ve enjoyed, but I want to go simpler. This dovetails with a vague plan to Raspberry Pi Zero myself a markdown editor hobby PC, one which should really sputter under modern web conditions by design.

• The new algorithm for shuffling gamebooks that I implemented yesterday caused all sorts of bugs in Pangamebook. It also revealed one or two old bugs I just had not noticed before.

• Once a month or three I do Fediverse. Tried to-day. Within 7 minutes, I was physically ill, my gut contorted, my shoulders tense. And this, not from reading bad news or uncouth disagreement. No, sick just from the biotic effect of the technology, even with pleasant pictures of pixelated kittens and amiable company. Within 20, I was writing irate re-replies to autie reply guys. 25 minutes later, I shut it all down with a sigh of relief.

• … to say today. It’s been a great weekend after a couple of quite crunchy weeks, but now I’m staring down the barrel of another few weeks of serious knuckle-down. All good, can’t complain, I love my job! But I’m looking forward to things easing off a bit at some point.

• In the spirit of directionless rambling, I noticed just this afternoon that I’d received an email from the FSF advertising the upcoming 40th birthday of the GNU project. Amazing that it’s been that long! Amazing also, that one of the two events they’re hosting will be in Switzerland, and just a bit over an hour’s train journey from where I live. There’s even to be an RMS keynote!

Internet/Gemini

• The bandwidth throttling of music files was on a global basis by accident, which meant that it was throttling bandwidth for the sum of the bandwidth of all connections. Now bandwidth throttling happens per connection, which means there can be concurrent connections of 320 kbps streams running.

• A list of articles documenting claims that some language has some amount of words for some concept.

• I’ve been thinking it’s painful to update the main page and I’m pretty slow to push updates. I’m imagining I can solve this with a new tag, that when present, will automatically get added to the index and I can grab all the files that match this year. Or maybe the last N posts… I’ll try for the current year to begin with.

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