Gemini Articles of Interest
A Gemini client* is needed for the following links.
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Permacomputing II
Today I was looking for a terminal font which could display various esoteric Unicode blocks, and stumbled upon the UNSCII fontset. Reading the webpage, I noticed that the domain, viznut.fi, was strangely familiar. I went to the homepage, and, yes, indeed! These fonts are by the same person who coined the term "Permacomputing". As if that weren't serendipitous enough, the *same* person is responsible for the "Robotic Liberation" VIC-20 demoscene production that I enjoyed watching ten years ago or so! A prolific fellow, to be sure.
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The term permacomputing is coined in analogy to permaculture. Permaculture is, in turn, a portmanteau from "permanent agriculture". It's been retconned to mean "permanent culture", but I think it still retains a strong connotation of being concerned with food production (which, sure, is not the exclusive domain of agriculture). I have no beef with permaculture at all (ha ha). It is basically the question of "how do we feed ourselves long term without destroying the planet". Human beings need to eat. Always have, always will. It's a question of existential importance. And we managed to successfully stop ourselves from starving out of existence for hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of intensive mechanised agriculture. So there's very good reason to believe the question can be solved.
But computing is not existentially important. Not even close. I still believe the quote below, which I wrote in late 2020 in my "radically sustainable computing" post. And not only is computing not existentially important, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that anything like what most people today would recognise as computing can be made sustainable on a timescale measured in millennia. Sure, some kind of hand-cranked Babbage engine might fit the bill, but that's not the kind of thing the permacomputing community is, for the most part, talking about.
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Pangamebook 1.5.1
Another minor Pangamebook update. Shuffling sections in the gamebook now uses a fixed random seed (that can be configured using the gamebook-randomseed metadata, although I can't think of a use-case for that). This mostly happened because I saw Pandoc 3.0 was released yesterday, and when I ran some tests to see if pangamebook still works it was annoying that the section numbers were different each time. It should probably always have been like this anyway.
It seems like Pangamebook works as expected in both Pandoc 3.0 and 2.9.2.1. Those are the only two versions I have installed right now. There is something new in Pandoc 3.0 about Lua-support being split out into its own Haskell package, making it possible to have Pandoc installed without Lua. Running without the Lua support would break Pangamebook. Hopefully very few installations will be like that. The binary DEB I downloaded to try 3.0 had Lua included anyway.
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A weird framework is not itself a compelling mystery
Many of the best works of fiction, like Groundhog Day, use a weird framework to tell compelling stories.
These stories can use the weirdness to tell stories of themes that are difficult to get at otherwise, like infinity or effervescence, or how different choices or different behavior in a situation can cause different outcomes, or the weirdness can be a metaphor for something else, or it can be just a backdrop for introducing interrelated sub-stories of compelling characters.
All those usages of weirdness are different from each other but can all be great. Pretty much all my favorite fiction is on the “weird” shelf. Love it. The human experience made hyper-clear by going beyond the real.
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The finger protocol support really is universal.
On Windows and macOS the finger command is already installed by default. Just fire up a terminal and you are good to go. It is also present on many (most?) Linux distros in the default setup and even when that isn't true, it's typically a simple install command away. But actually, you may not even need to install it, since it is such a basic protocol it is easily simulated with other common networking tools.
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In Which I Rant About the Most User Hostile Piece of Tech I Own
I don't use it as a "smart" TV any more. For that I use a Fire TV stick which definitely isn't better from a privacy standpoint, but it's way faster, supports more codecs, and is much friendlier towards advanced users.
I wanted to disconnect the Roku from my wifi since I have no use for it being on the network and I'd rather it not spy on everything I watch. Turns out they really don't want you doing that.
First of all, the option to clear your network settings is buried several menus deep in advanced system settings, nowhere near the rest of the network settings. Annoying, but nothing you can't figure out after an internet search.
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Build scripts for non-code projects
Build scripts are super helpful. By "build scripts" I mean Makefiles, a publish.sh shell script, really anything that automates building or creating something. Usually that's a program, but I find them helpful even for things that are not strictly speaking development work.
For example, I have been porting the content from some Apple history projects to Markdown. I also am publishing them as gemtext on my capsule. This is an iterative process, so generating the gemtext is something I do as I add more content.
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When your problem is perpendicular to your project
At work one of our new devs has been working on a problem we originally assigned a day or two worth of points to resolve. The issue itself is not that interesting, we run on top of a commonly used web framework with a shadow DOM and need an event to trigger when the page is done loading. But as the page fills in dynamically and data is pulled asynchronously all solutions for this problem are hit or miss if they work and none work 100% of the time. It is a common issue, one of those where no one has a good Stack Exchange solution in spite of the fact there are many duplicate questions posted.
What I found interesting about this problem is why it exists and why no one has a good solution. Our specific problem is that the framework doesn't really have the concept of a page load being "complete." Components are connected with properties, async calls for data will modify these properties and the page is always in a state of agitation. We can't use timers because of the drastic difference in time to load from a desktop on a 1Gbps connection compared to a super slow 3G cell connection. We can't use event handlers in the page because when component life cycle claim it exist the page may still be changing and the event fires too soon.
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Reply to Sandra from idiomdrottning.org: You don't have to!
Sorry for making you feel uncomfortable. But guess what: You don't have to fiddle with my proposal anyway.
You sound like I made a proposal for changing and extending the gemini protocol specification. No I didn't. I just proposed an optional mechanism on top of it to solve a specific problem. Nothing breaks if you don't implement it. In your case it is even better: It makes no difference whether you implement it or not, even if search engines would adapt my proposed mechanism one day
To be a little bit more specific: Your capsule is compliant with the default assumption, that a capsule is equal to a domain. Therefore, it wouldn't change anything if you added a .dock.gmi to your site. It would be relevant for the use cases I mentioned in my article.
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re: A response to jecxjo (a response to wholesomedonut)
Something that's plagued me for my entire career has been the idea of the hobby project, and helping friends with theirs.
In college, a group of friends ran a fork of an OSS application for our campus. And they asked me for help. My roommate who was involved in it heavily, was a math major with an IT minor. Programming was a very minor aspect of their classwork. For me, a CS major, was the bulk of my time. If not directly writing code, all the heavy lifting that comes with it.
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A response to jecxjo
Above is the post for those that want to read what prompted this.
I guess my response to it will be pretty short and to the point, in stating this little idea I've come up with.
Laws, in terms of the sciences, are loosely defined as mathematically provable and consistent statements of our reality.
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Telegram Terminal Client
Over the last few weeks my obsession with text based applications has really ramped up! I'd always loved them of course. Even as far back as the late 80s when I'd call BBSs on my Amstrad DOS machine with its 2400 baud modem. These days its a terminal window running on my desktop MacPro.
Today I discovered a Python based app called "tg". It has a brew tap which makes it easy to install on MacOS X. Connecting with my existing telegram account was a breeze. I supplied my number and then an authorisation code was sent to my phone. Reasonably secure.
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md2gemini and Images
Why convert the source to Markdown instead of all the way to gemtext? For these projects, yes I'm taking amazing content that is slowly rotting in the web available to gemini, but I'm also trying to preserve that content in a more portable form. So I need a good canonical "content-at-rest" format for the source material I'm converting.