Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 26, 2022

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

• WEBGATE www->gemini proxy upgraded. Please read if you operate a crawler.

  Webgate (gemini://webgate.geminet.org/web.sh) has been updated to rewrite all in-document href links to webgate gemini:// links [1].

  This means you can now browse the entire web over gemini, given that the requested webpages behave decently, which most smolweb pages should[2].

• Interactive Rubik's Cube Over Gemini

  I first learned how to solve Rubik's Cube back in 2005, and in the intervening years I've collected and learned to solve dozens of different twisty puzzles. Since I launched my capsule last year, I've wanted to collect information about twisty puzzles there, especially pertaining to my own collection, but I always seem to get distracted with some other pet project.

  A few days ago I decided to kill two birds with one stone: add some interesting interactive content to my capsule, and put together a puzzle-related page. The result, I am proud to announce, is an interactive Rubik's Cube page.

• Vim Menu for Tab Completion

  When you are working on the Vim command line, you can press the Tab key to complete the current command. Vim will fill in a complete file name or option depending on what letters you've typed so far. Then, each press of Tab will cycle through the possible completions. Each time the command will be fully typed. And each possible completion is based on only what the user typed.

  One way to preview possible completions is by using Ctrl-D. To see this, type as much of your command as you want. Then press Ctrl-D. This prints all the options above the command line. But none of these can be selected. They're just visual aids for you.

• Thinking About Pratical Web3.0 and GNUNet as Infrastructure

  The title is gonna make people reading this from Gemini mad. Saw that a mile away. But hear me out.

  I just came back from g0v hackathon and decentralizing and Web3 has been a huge topic there. Heck even the Ministry of Digital Affairs joined discussion. That got me thinking. What can Web3 really do better than existing architectures? What is the value proposition? That led me thinking about my recent dive into GNUNet and rethinking about it's capabilities.

  [...]

  Being general, GNUNet is like Tor. It's another kind of darknet. But to be very specific, GNUNet is special. It's not just another anonymization layer for TCP. GNUNet comes with a lot of decentralized subsystems that one can take advantage of to build applications - an all-in-one package. GNUNet has it's own distributed hash table, file sharing, network messaging, etc.. I want to put up a idea of how we developers can use GNUNet to build decentralized applications. Under all the practical limitations we face today. Be aware that I'll be using Web3 and decentralized services interchangeably. I understand the the difference between the Web and the Internet. But everyone uses them the same these days..

• enabling-gemlog-comments-over-email

  From what I gather, the most common ways to enable easy replies/comments on gemini is by encoding the reply in a url and making a request, or using http.

  The space in a url is very limited; something like 1024 characters, and using http works, but it sort of defeats the point.

  So I was thinking about a solution. Gemini is mostly a write-only medium, but a little more interaction when so desired would be nice.

• About mandating tools to developers

  The point I am trying to make is this: for me, computer screens are 80x24 characters, monospace font, shell interface (I'm using the i3/sway window managers on Linux systems). That's how I got raised. That's how my pattern recognition works. I can find interesting things in logfiles, just by scrolling through them. Of course I rely on "search" a lot. By the way: "less" got me to change from "more" literally in seconds, because it could move "backwards".

  I understand, that people socalized in another epoch find other things normal. But please leave me alone, if you would please be so kind as to. I do learn new tools if I need them, e.g. git wasn't always there. Someone remember RCS? It was quite capable at its time.

  To explain, what I'm doing at dayjob: I'm not a computer science major, but one of physics. I work in a role as a systems integrator. I receive hardware, I use serial interfaces and very awkward things to build a first stage boot loader, I use C and make to build a second stage boot loader (u-boot) matching the board. I build a linux kernel and a minimal userland. In other words: I write shell scripts to automate all this. Emacs shell-mode and flycheck work faster and further than my brain does. If I did a good job, then copying "the image" onto said hardware will make it boot up, come to live, talk to it's hardware environment and do its job. Hardware does not have a screen, so no GUI! :)

  [...]

  Another long time ago in some psycho team booting whatever bullshit event, I found a nice gem. The lady running the event asked us to find a profession, the connotations of which would describe, how we actually worked.

  I chose a seaman/skipper.

  Why? I want to understand the operation to be carried out. I want to choose the tools, resources and if possible people to run the operation. Then we would set sail. And I do not want to be bothered until we return. Especially, I don't want to learn, that the thing was canceled, or that the goal is moved every week. If we run into trouble exceeding our capacities or knowledge, I'm going to ask for help.

  Guess what. It never works like this. But it has helped me understand, why I would quit on the spot.

  Never forget that the super fancy white collar manager can not make a release or fix a bug. Literally. They are totally dependant on all the other people, not only the developers. If I am not making the release, because I know, it is not ready for primetime, there is no release. This might cost your job, so use it wisely.

• Modern Wonders 6: Programming Microcontrollers at Home

  Isn't "Programming Microcontrollers at Home" a modern wonder of our time as well, that many just take for granted? Especially after the appearance of the Arduino hw/sw system, seemingly out of the blue?

  [...]

  I would like to get the point across, how unbelievably high this pile of individual wonders is to create another, greater wonder. And I would like to encourage anyone, who has not travelled this road, to feel a bit more humble about all the technological wonders we move through our hands maybe daily, and without paying much attention. I would like get the point across, that the CPU in your smart phone is a very big brother of the humble microcontroller mentioned, and the magic incantations are a lot more involved to get this big brother to life.

  I tend to understand "paying by credit card" as an experiment, and I tend to cheer at the cashier, when the experiment works. I don't take it for granted.

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