Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 08, 2022

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

• Switched to Emacs in Mutt

  Early 2021 I started to learn using Emacs, with the vanilla key bindings.

  I started actually doing things in Emacs, like my professional writing. Compared to converting Markdown to ODT with Pandoc, Org mode export to ODT is so much faster.

• Capsule Housekeeping

  While the gemlog improvements are nice when sharing posts on the web/Mastodon, these changes also enhance the Lagrange home page that is perhaps the most prominent part of the capsule on the web: => /lagrange/ Lagrange home page

• Checking out Void Linux

  Void Linux is a Linux distribution that is built completely from scratch, so it's not based on some other distribution like Debian GNU/Linux or Arch Linux. I'm testing the "musl libc" edition here because this is one of the more outstanding features of the distro among others. It utilizes the runit init system instead of systemd, which is fast and simple. The update strategy is the "stable rolling release" model. The packages are more well tested and a little behind the bleeding edge packages you get with something like Arch Linux.

• This Great Xerox Machine

  This is not just some rant from an angry (former) student. This is a feeble attempt at a manifest to save knowledge from the vulture-like claws of the universities and publications. The universities have turned themselves into a great xerox machine; publishing one research after the other and printing the degrees much the same and handing them out to those who help sustain this unhealthy cycle of academic regurgitation. This foul cult of submission. This regime of scholar workers of the machine has poisoned and violated the chronicles of critical thinking and academic innovation.

• Floppinux - An Embedded 🐧Linux on a Single 💾Floppy

  Short story why I decided to make my own one floppy distribution. An extensive yet simple tutorial/workshop on how to make embedded Linux distribution under 1.44MB.

• Embracing Vanilla Emacs as a Vim user

  I started using Vim somewhere around 1997~1998, and arranged my working habits so that I could use Vim for almost everything. Like using Markdown and Latex at work, Mutt for email, and so on.

  In the past I have tried to use Emacs before, but never with success.

• Our responsibility as software engineers

  On Twitter, an ex-Twitter engineer called Steve Krenzel talk about his job and we can infer that it’s not different from Google/Facebook/Microsoft.

  While we have no confirmation that this is true, there’s no particular reason to doubt what is said. There’s no huge secret. But this serves as a reminder.

  A reminder that it is normal that any application on your phone is registering every single action you are doing, every single location and beaming those info back.

  A reminder that companies are buying those data and, no, they don’t care about privacy. They want hard data on individuals. And they got them.

  A reminder that this is the world we are currently living in with phones recording position and sound everywhere. For one story where the engineer refused to do it, how many times was it done silently?

  As software engineers, we have a huge moral responsibility. We are not only implementing it, we are ourselves using those tools and letting our family and children using them.

• Our responsibility as software engineers

• Mental Barrier and Culture of Gemini

  I've saw may posts on Cosmos replying to the "Mayan and Gemini priests" post in the past week. And I want to add a points to the discussion. Hopefully not disrupting the flow of the conversation. I mostly want to add points from a (non-tech) user and user support perspective.

  Also, to avoid further claims of this is us Gemini user's bubble. My capsule has a HTML renderer (that I wrote my self, I'm proud of that). So this post is also accessible from the common Web. There's a link on the home page that will take you there. With that out of the way..

• Pro Tip: Easy optimizing PDF files

  I'm buyng the 2600 Magazine in a digital format. It's a simple PDF with few images and fancy frames. But for some reasons it is super heavy to render for slow devices.

  I tried to convert it to diffrent formats like ePUB and MOBI. But due to the hacky way that PDF is created makes it impossible to convert. The text is all mixed.

  Searching online got me nowhere in terms of a simple application. All I wanted was a big button to push and get smaller file. And in some way I found the solution!

• Mayan priests and slapping trouts

  The only reasonable response to someone questioning the accessibility and inclusiveness of the Gemini network is to ignore them. Even though that might be rude (and probably considered an example of the detractor's point), it's still far less rude than replying with: "How dumb and lazy do you want it to be?"

  In case "slapping trouts" doesn't ring a bell: "/slap" was a mIRC feature that resulted in the program printing "USER slaps USER around a bit with a large trout" in an irc room.

  mIRC was a popular MS Windows IRC client and was the preferred client of teenagers when the world started getting online and interacting.

• Thank you rawtext.club (and the whole Gemini sphere)!

  For years, I’ve been planning to migrate my blog from Wordpress to a more minimalistic solution. I did multiple experiments, worked hard with providers, even contributed to writefreely but nothing managed to stick.

  Problem was, like always, the customer: myself. I didn’t exactly know what I wanted. I even wrote huge requirements and discussed them with potential providers. I wanted a minimalistic blog but I wanted lots of features. When I discovered Gemini, it was only one more feature to add to my minimalistic blog.

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