Practical Gemini use case: giving an Ignite Talk

Last night I gave a talk at LandTalks, using Gemini for my script.

Gemini Just Works. I use it for uploading notes and text documents because it's simply less hassle than HTML, Markdown and so on. Save the file, and sync it to the server.

During the talk, I was reading a single Gemini document off my phone; I would never normally speak so closely from notes, but the talk format required exactly fifteen seconds per slide, so I did this to keep to time. The prep for the talk consisted in getting some slides together, then adapting a script to them, and timing the script to make it sure each stanza was about 13 seconds long.

In practice, the slides were written in Emacs org-mode, and the script was just a text file. A few hours before the talk I imagined I'd print out a copy of the script and take it with me, but then realised I could just load it up in Lagrange on my phone. Since the headers of my slides were org-mode headers, they could trivially be exported as Gemini headers and folded into the script, so the header in the script would match what was on the header of the slide, even if the detail were different.

The only hiccough was that the phone is vanilla Android and is apt to put itself in screenlock mode, and Lagrange sometimes blanks the screen on regaining focus. There was less danger of the browser attempting to reload some part of the page and trigger some captive portal "Sign in to the Wi-Fi Network" nonsense, but it was still hair-raising for the Gemini page to be briefly blank as the talk started.