Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 03, 2023,
updated Jan 03, 2023

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

• internet nostalgia - an incoherent rambling about how new internet culture sucks

  ay mates, lelkins here. this might be a pretty short post. i keep remembering memes that used to be the biggest things on the internet. like current ones that just fizzled out fast like ronaldinho soccer 64, megalovania (this one is still kind of popular), so many examples that i can't put them in (and cause i actually forgot most of them. reason why later). and more common in my head are ones that i used to see as a kid from the era of "fads", like hotel mario edits where every noun is replaced with a random clip, "the king has a new computer", one youtube poop where mario and luigi fight eachother in a pokemon battle and mario charges a pinesol bottle and luigi just uses za warudo from jojo. the internet was wild and quality always differed.

• emerging from darkness

  With the release of version 4 of Mastodon [1] there has been a problem of links to profile pages or conversation threads "going dark" within shell based browsers, such as Lynx [2]. In version 3.x you would get a text rendering of each page, but now you only get a terse *"To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript"* message.

  I had been following the philosophy of *"do the minimum thing that works"* with Epicyon [3], but after Mastodon 4, just linking directly to Mastodon web content was no longer sufficient to be universally legible. So I have now replaced those direct links with a *conversation view* and a different way of viewing Mastodon profiles in which the html is all rendered by Epicyon itself. This brings back the otherwise Javascript-shrouded fediverse content, and also has the added advantage that it fully supports *authorized fetch*, which in Mastodon is known as "secure mode". It also makes the user interface more consistent looking in shell browsers.

• Gemlog responses - bacardi55's concept without CGI

  Gemlog discussions are frequently happening, which is a good sign for an active community. Due to the simplistic nature of the gemini protocol these discussions happen with much less automation and more handwork than in the world wide web. The usual way is to publish a reply with the link to the original gemlog and inform the original author via email about the reply.

• PocketBook Basic 4 review

  I read lots of books, so I bought an e-reader for myself, the PocketBook Basic 4, also known as the PocketBook 606 in some regions. It was one of the cheapest options available, while not selling your data to Amazon or Kobo. This is a review after 2 months of usage.

  It has no touch screen, being navigable using a 4-way touch pad. That was one of the selling points for me, as I didn't want this to be a glorified phone, and besides, less screen wiping. It's made out of plastic, which makes it really light at around 140g, perfect for carrying around. The e-ink display is HD, perfect for reading any sorts of books. It supports all popular e-book formats and PDFs. Best of all, it runs Linux! More specifically, the kernel version is 3.0, I don't think the interface is FOSS though. It doesn't connect to the Internet whatsoever, which is a huge plus for me, it helps you stay disconnected. The battery is rated at around one month, although personally at my reading-rate, I see it lasts around 2 weeks. If you put an SD card in, then plug it into a computer, it'll act as an SD card reader which is really awesome! For example, on Linux it adds two new devices, the internal memory which is 8GB, and the SD card. This way you don't need a converter in order to load your favorite books.

• Booting Gentoo on a BTRFS from multiple LUKS devices

  This is mostly a reminder for myself. I installed Gentoo on a machine, but I reused the same BTRFS filesystem where NixOS is already installed, the trick is the BTRFS filesystem is composed of two partitions (a bit like raid 0) but they are from two different LUKS partitions.

• Cross compiling HitchHiker with Musl

  My little Linux distro HitchHiker may be getting a pretty dramatic makeover in the form of moving from Glibc to Musl. This is a change that I've been considering for a long time and had even done some work towards implementing, but until today had not been able to fully realize compiling the entire base system after swapping out the C library.

• Crash Course: How to solve a problem in J

  Every year I try to pick up a new programming language to increase the size of my development toolbox. Learning new and different paradigms, trying to pick a language based on the problem. In 20+ years of development I've probably got 15 different languages out in production in some shape or form.

  Last year my interest was peaked when YouTube started suggesting I watch some presentations on APL. This was my first Array programming language, and first language to use a very esoteric glyph syntax. Its interesting to look at, requires a special keyboard setup or a special IDE. To find all prime numbers up to R...

• What I don't Know 2022

  Constructing the Foundation was the name of my theme in 2022. A markdown file summarizing it can be found on my codeberg¹. In short, I wanted to focus on building positive aspects of myself rather than criticizing parts of myself I don't like. I would overall call this year a success with my theme, but I don't have another complete theme year to compare it to.

  That in general was an important goal for me, I was able to maintain my journaling, theme, and general mental health for the whole year. I haven't made progress in all the areas I wanted, but I haven't gone backwards anywhere, and I want to congratulate myself for that.

• so long, lelkins html page. you were good. maybe the best website of all time.

  ay mates, i'm back yet again! happy VERY LATE new year! i gotta try to be more comfortable with writing stuff, so expect more posts this time. no, not like 2022-07-11. there's gonna be some stuff going on here, i'm sure of it.

  i used to have an html page that hosted my drawings and stuff, wanted to have my gemini posts be turned into html pages (especially the megaman 8bit deathmatch one) but i just didn't do that. today i deleted that side of the lelkins page of altesq in favor for my gem capsule you are reading all of this from, as it's a better place for my stuff. i also remade the capsule and added the art from the www page. this is my home now, my castle, my whatever you'd like to call this gemini capsule.

• Living without a clock

  I'm a person who used to have lots of clocks, everywhere. Around the house, a watch, on my status bar, on my (un)smartphone, on my IRC client. Time was omnipresent. Not anymore. I've since removed all the clocks, everywhere. If I want to check the time, I do it manually via the $date utility, no more compulsive, unconscious, checking the time. This post will focus on how is it so far, I'll probably do multiple updates. There will be a technical follow-up post on how I removed the clocks.

• Announcing source.community

  In my last gemlog entry[1] I talked about the gemini server framework I created but hadn't yet made the code available. This wasn't because the code wasn't ready to publish but because I didn't yet know where I wanted to publish it.

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