Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 10, 2023

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

• Invidious: Make Youtube cool again

  I have a complicated relationship with Youtube like, I imagine, a lot of people.

  While I really dislike everything that Google is doing with the platform and their idiotic algorithm, there are tons of exceptionnaly good content on the platform.

  You can find everything regarding computer science, 3d printing, physics talks, video games, history and so much more. It's full of dedicated people talking about their passion. I used to only use the "Subscriptions" page of Youtube. The default home page has always been irrelevant, and the Popular tab is just plain cancer.

• Collect traffic data for your Capsule

  As everyone else around here, I love a good tracking of visitors.

  Kidding... screw that.

  However, I feel it's pretty good to know if your capsule gets any traffic at all and which part of it people find it more interesting. Some may not care, some may.

• Running molly-brown in a container

  In order to do that, I just need a gemini server (I choose molly-brown), docker and my content (that's my *.gmi files).

• Creating slim container images for rust

  This is the Dockerfile that I'm currently using when I need to create some proof of concepts with rust.

  In this case, I'm building a simple rust application using the rocket framework as dependency.

• On Gemini mentions

  I didn't take too much time reading everything in detail, but "Why though?" is also my thought.

  I certainly won't be using it. For one, my capsule is hosted on SourceHut, so I couldn't use it even if I wanted. But most of all, I don't see the point. I know that if I had something like that, something others could use to let me know they'd linked to a post of mine, I would get FOMO and that's not cool. I understand this is very individual, maybe you get peace of mind by having this system giving you the latest mentions and whatnot, that's alright. For me, "what if someone replied but didn't let me know?" would be at the back of my mind too frequently, I can smell it. And that's another reason to ask "why though?" If your RFC, that you wrote for yourself, requires others to adopt it to be useful to you, then it's not much use, I don't think.

• Why did I work on gemini mention

  After publishing yesterday an idea of gemini mention kind of "standard" and a couple of implementations, I realized I haven't explained why I decided to "work" on this proposal.

• Have one's cake and eat it - likes, comments, backlinks and so on

  Inspired by [My take on gemlog responses] by Bacardi55. On the one side is so convenient and tempting to have the whole achievements of the modern web. It's not that I oppose it, or I don't want it at all, and I renounce it. On the other hand, are we not creating mechanisms for small-net whose distorted operation drives the big-net in the opposite direction to what is expected?

• Re: Gemlog responses

  To me these proposals feel like Web technology. They are (relatively) complex technical solutions that are difficult to apply universally to everyone, and require (relatively) costly commitment from both gemlog authors and readers.

  Gemlogs are not meant for interaction, per se. It's a bit like having a discussion with someone by publishing open letters in a newspaper. It's a many-to-many, open ended forum.

• My take on gemlog responses

  The Gemini community is globally very nice and I've really been enjoying the different interaction I had with fellow geminauts over station¹, tinylogs², gemlog entries or via email (keep emails coming!). I really like those interactions, but I feel like interacting with each other over gemlog entries remains difficult. At least to ensure the author see all the responses to their posts. It's very common to see a gemlog entry being a response to another author entry, but we don't have yet a simple way to notify each other.

• My RE:log experiment (RE: "Introducing the Re:log concept" by Freezr)

  Freezr made an interesting proposal about having a "Re:log" for replies in the geminispace, separate from the gemlog...

• January

  I finally killed my Twitter account. Once the in the open nazis started coming back, the Musk shitshow stopped being fun. And while I miss having access to certain people, I haven't missed Twitter in the least.

• CET 2023

  Games with amazing, strange or skilled sound design are rarer than I wish they would be, and there is no good way to find the games that could meet these criteria due to the lack of useful categorizations in the game space.

• Ancient Domains Of Mystery (ADOM)

  I have two text UI games which I love. I had played them once, then I was playing them many times through time, and I can always play them again. It doesn't matter if I haven't played them for some time, because I'm feeling always like I am at home. One of that games I described almost a year ago in [Dwarf Fortress]. The second one is [ADOM].

  I don't remember how I started to play. ADOM is so old that in my memories it's convergent with the beginning of the PC's gaming era. I must read about it in one Roguelike-games article. Why did I start to play the text UI game? Probably because I'm writing many simple text games of life in BASIC. With colorful ASCII characters. So the ADOM must had been looking very familiar to me. But all of this is unclear now. Especially that there were many games, with hi-res graphics mode, which I also want to play then. For unknown reasons, however, I played in ADOM.

• Gemini mention, an update to the RFC (final, at least for now)

  Last post regarding gemini mention for a while (probably another year if like last time :p), but after reading constructive comments and remarks via gemlog responses, emails or the fediverse, I had a final thought about what /I/ want to implement on /my/ capsule at this stage. I'll let it run for the 2023 year and revisit.

• Building Minesweeper for Gemini

  Over vacation I built a complete Minesweeper game on my capsule. I implemented flags, chording, different difficulties, and even custom games. You can play it here!

• Offline-first approach

  I've taken an offline-first approach to computing. I find it benefits me greatly, by using more resilient utilities, having technological sovereignty, and nonetheless spending less time on the Internet, more offline, even if it's on a computer.

  I don't recommend data hoarding, I think each should keep how much data they consider to be useful, if they have the space required for it. Keeping offline wikis, dictionaries, translators, backups, passwords, can always prove to be helpful, relying less on hosted services, and more on yourself (Argos translate comes to mind as an offline translator).

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