Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 07, 2023

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

• Personal

  • Duolingo Progress

    Finished the first section in my Irish course on Duolingo. I'm still woeful, but I can read a bit of Irish. To a lesser extent, understand it when spoken. I'm a long ways from being able to read stuff outside the application, but, I'm getting there? It feels like progress, and it feels good to make progress on something which, if I'm being honest, is kind of a useless goal. Would it be better for my career to grind the rust off my French? Absolutely. Am I doing something else instead? Absolutely. I can talk about owls and beer (ulchabhan agus beoir). Say "I like Irish" (Is maith leom an Gaeilge). Important things.

  • Tanana River Trail Photos 2023-06-06 (Fairbanks, AK, USA)

    I took these photos yesterday during my lunch-break walk.

  • The Laundry Asymmetry

    When preparing for a longish trip I packed six sets of socks, underwear and t-shirts, so I could do the laundry weekly (six plus the clothes I was wearing). Sadly, I miscalculated.

  • Going to the Psycho Ward

    A married man with children goes and visits his wife's family. He tells the people there about the trip in the south of the country to which he goes by his car in the morning. Old Gruffandgrim*, his father in law, reminds him that he needs to work so he can make a living and have enough money for his trips.

  • Dory progress and Misfin thoughts

    I guess I'd call this a milestone achieved. I've successfully sent a couple of Misfin messages to the reference server with a small binary that uses Dory under the hood. Getting there was a little more difficult than I expected, as these things often go.

  • Taking the Measure of the Place

    A weary and dusty traveler shuffles into the bar, slips a business card back into his jacket pocket, and takes a look around to get the measure of the place. A motley crew of vagabonds, salesmen, entertainers, writers, and freethinkers fill the Midnight, chatting in small groups over lukewarm beer. Among the various patrons of the bar, one particularly odd creature stands out, balancing upright on long tentacles with constantly moving eyestalks scanning the scene.

  • Contextual Pizza

    I've been finally losing weight after years of simply refusing to deal with the problem. It was nothing too terrible--just an extra 40 pounds and change, but it definitely made itself felt in my feet and knees when running or doing tai chi. After about 4 months I'm finally getting close to the target weight I set, which upon reaching I promised myself a single piece of pizza. I shouldn't have done that.

    [...]

    Conflating the symbolic representation with the actual is fraught in so many unexpected ways.

• Technical

  • OpenKuBSD design document

    I got an idea today (while taking a shower...) about _partially_ reusing Qubes OS design of using VMs to separate contexts and programs, but doing so on OpenBSD.

    To make explanations CLEAR, I won't reimplement Qubes OS entirely on OpenBSD. Qubes OS is an interesting operating system with a very strong focus on security (from a very practical point of view ), but it's in my opinion overkill for most users, and hence not always practical or usable.

    In the meantime, I think the core design could be reused and made it easy for users, like we are used to do in OpenBSD.

  • Pixel 7a & GrapheneOS

    I'm testing a phone for work, and it's an Android, which is new to me. I swapped the OS for GrapheneOS, which is a security-focused minimalist Android distribution, and the phone hardware is a Pixel 7a. Here's how someone fairly familiar with iPhones views a current-generation Android phone as their daily driver...

  • New order in /dev/pts

    Previously, I had one global session of terminal multiplexer, and that was where everything lived -- plain text accounting, news, blogging, different personal and $dayjob projects. Since you can have only so much tabs before it turns into complete mess, context switching meant closing them all and opening ones relevant to task at hand.

    [...]

    Actually, it is even more than that. Ever saw "normies" to struggling to put two browser windows side-by-side? Well, I can't do any better on their soil. But I can use tiling window managers, and they don't. The same satisfying feeling. I found my highground.

  • Striking mods

    First Reddit, now Stack Overflow; moderators are fed up with the admins of the sites they dedicate their labor to. Unpaid labor, to be exact. After decades of witnessing social media platforms rise and "fall" – some underwent a significant revamp and shrank to a healthy size, others shut down permanently, few just became plain irrelevant to former users, yet still exist – and how people react to such things, the latter in particular has become ridiculously predictable, for the sole reason that too many people merely decide to be vocal, rather than vote with their feet in a quiet manner.

  • The Search For An OSR System

    NOTE: I started writing this around New Years not long before the whole WotC OGL situation got started. I was holding off on publishing it because I wanted to find a happier ending to send it off with. The longer I wait, the more certain parts are going to make less sense, so I'm going to get it out faster.

  • Programming

    • The Urge

      One of the unhelpful things that I commonly experience when I read things about software (and very occasionally other things, but usually software) is the urge to make my own version of whatever the thing is.

    • things i wanna do (in no order)

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