Gemini Articles of Interest
A Gemini client* is needed for the following links.
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Itanium History Roundup
Last week was the birthday of the final[1] Itanium chip released - the Poulson microarchitecture. I remember its release on 8 Nov 2012. I also remember reading the manual a few months prior and being underwhelmed. Some of the early materials released about the Poulson microarchitecture - and heavily boosted by a certain someone on RWT's forums, as well as by David Kanter himself - caused me to expect a significant boost in across-the-board performance that would finally propel IPF into competitiveness with Power, and earn its place at the top of Intel's product lineup while ensuring a long future.
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Almost an Embedded Itanium: ST200
During the period immediately before and immediately after the release of the "Merced" Itanium, HP and ST Micro had a close partnership around a new, programmer-friendly embedded CPU called ST200. While neither party ever emphasized the connection, ST200 has an undeniable similarity to Itanium, and one could probably make a strong case for it being an EPIC processor.
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introduction to uxn programming book
introduction to uxn programming is a beginner's, slow-paced and comprehensive guide of the uxntal programming language and the varvara computer.
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Gemini and the Golden Age of Air Travel
In the 1970 archetypical disaster movie "Airport", a Boeing 707 undertakes an international flight from Chicago to Rome. One scene shows a passenger on the flight complaining to a stewardess about a stale snack, and he comments bitterly that his ticket cost him $474 US dollars. That amount is equivalent to approximately $3500 in 2022 dollars. Today, even in our inflation-ridden economy, a flight from Chicago to Rome can be purchased for under $500--an 85% drop in price.
In 1939, Pan American World Airways offered a comparable service from New York to Marseilles, France, via Azores and Portugal. That trip cost $675 in those days, or a staggering $13000 in today's dollars. Iberia and Lufthansa now offer the same flight for $700.
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Disussing FOSS copying proprietary alternatives
In order for FOSS to garner market share, it needs to provide the end users with mostly the same features as their proprietary competitors. This can end up in libre software adding "anti-features", such as typing indicators.
A more recent example is Signal adding stories. They mentioned it was one of the most requested features, many refusing to move from WhatsApp because the lack of the aforementioned feature. Signal ended up in adding them, you can easily disable them in settings if you dislike them, like I. It's debatable whether they could've spent their resources better.
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Imv - a neat image viewer
I've been a long time user of both Sxiv and Feh, great image viewers for tiling window managers.
Sxiv has been discontinued, its development is resumed in a fork called Nsxiv, while Feh is actively maintained and packs more features such as wallpaper setting. I've recently found out about Imv[1], it's similar to both of the aforementioned programs, but it works on both X11 and Wayland, while having similar features such as keybinding and supporting animated GIFs, SVGs, RAW formats and proprietary formats such as PSD (use a FOSS alternative if you can). If you switch in between an X11 instance and Wayland, it can be useful to have a program that does the job in both environments.
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Offpunk 1.7 : Offpunk and Sourcehut
Releasing Offpunk 1.7 today which fixes a handful of crashes and brings some nice features:
1. Autocompletion on your list names with "add", "move" and "list" command. This is really useful if, like me, you are playing with 20 different lists. 2. In Gemini and Gopher, plain text links are added to the list of links of the page. This is really useful with Gopher posts where the culture is to add a bunch of links at the end of the post with a number. After reading a post, simply press "enter" (keep the command empty) to see the list of links in that post, including in Gopher. 3. Added a configurable "search" command which, by default, uses kennedy.gemi.dev. 4. Added a configurable "wikipedia" (or "w") command which, by default, uses vault.transjovian.org. Also added shortcuts for English, French and Spanish: "wen", "wfr" and "wes".
* Gemini links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.