Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 05, 2022,
updated Sep 05, 2022

A Gemini client^* is needed for the following links.

• A brief tour of Rust's GUI frameworks

  I went on a bit of an impromptu tour of Rust's gui landscape this week, trying to see if it was any better than Erlang's (which...sucks).

  Note that when I say "Rust's GUI frameworks" I mean just that. I am totally uninterested in bindings and even less interested in anything which pulls in HTML or JavaScript. There is no Rust implementation of libxcb yet, so virtually all available Rust-only GUI frameworks target wgpu or glow or just have a runtime dependency on SDL. This means very poor integration with native desktop look-and-feel on any platform, but comes with the upside of being more cross-platform by default.

• Rabbithole: KolibriOS

  Over a few decades of observing my mental activity I see some patterns. There is ebb and flow with various projects and systems. After getting sick of complexity of current systems, I always retreat to something simpler - be it Forth or building some FPGA hardware (with complexities of their own, but)...

• What is the point of a 0.3MP camera?

  I do not carry smart phone in my daily life. Most importantly because I am someone that is easily addicted to technology and it would consume my life! There is also too much tracking and telemetry going on with (most) smartphones, along with a requirement for a Google or Apple account.

  I do own a few (modern) feature phones however, from higher end Punkt (MP01 and MP02), Lightphone (II) and Mudita Pure, through to various cheaper Nokias. The reason for the range of phones is that I have never quite found the combination that works right for me. Indeed I have almost given up looking. The market for people like me is a pretty small niche. Thus all my phones have multiple, strong compromises. One of the things I would really like and cannot find at all on modern feature phones is a decent camera. The "fancier" phones like the Punkt or Lightphone¹ have no camera at all, and most of the Nokias have a paltry 2MP camera, with several of them are equipped with 0.3MP cameras!

• —God damn, the Google Play Store is so frustrating…

  God damn, the Google Play Store is so frustrating at times. The other day I wrote about how fast our (Vivaldi browser's) turn around was for getting out a new build with a critical security fix from upstream. Well to be clear we have a build out for desktop but not Android. Why? … because our build, which was ready at the same time as desktop, is stuck in "review" in the Play Store and hence cannot be made live. This is despite the fact that it has a single fix (for the security issue). A fix I might add that was written by a Google dev and is included in Chrome, which they immediately updated.

• Managing a fleet of NixOS Part 3 - Welcome to Bento

  I finally wrote an implementation for the NixOS fleet management, it's called Bento.

• The Viability of Sneakernets

  ew0k pondered yesterday whether a sneakernet is useful in free, developed countries.^ It seems a modern sneakernet is a solution to a non-existent problem, assuming the activities it supports are not illegal or socially unacceptable.

  Is this actually the case? I think the issue is not so black and white. The degree to which a society is free and a nation is developed is a major factor in my opinion.

  First, a point of pedantry. The title of ew0k's post refers to free and developed societies, but in the article, the phrase "democratic countries in the developed world" is used. I don't see free countries and democratic countries as being synonymous. It's certainly possible for democratic countries not to be free: the majority may choose to give up freedoms for the sake of safety or civil order, or may strip freedoms from the minority for profit or to enforce societal norms. Conversely, free societies may not be democratic: a hypothetical anarchist society has almost unlimited freedom at the level of the individual, but does not have a central government, democratic or otherwise.

• limiting the connection

  Continuing on the theme of the ideal Internet experience*, I contemplated the possibility of periodically unplugging the Internet from the computer, perhaps using an offpunk browser**, but most importantly, experiencing that disconnection. The feeling of stepping away from the hustle and bustle, of hiding in a cave instead of staying non-stop in the center of a big city. I even wrote recently in my tinylog that I miss the limited access to the net from the days when every minute cost money.

• Setting a Gopher hole

  As the beginning of the 2021 came through as setting a Gemini capsule, the beginning of the 2022 is coming through as setting a Gopher hole. I've decided to sign up for sdf.org account, because there is a big gopher community and I didn't want to stuck in as some pioneer somewhere else. So it should be easy thing to set up Gopher hole there. No it wasn't so obvious.

^* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.