Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 11, 2023

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

• Technology and Free Software

  • BESM Multiverse and Uresia: Grave of Heavan arrived!

    My physical copies of the BESM Multiverse Maps, BESM Multiverse, BESM Uresia: Grave of Heavan, and Ikarion Gate, the BESM Multiverse LitRPG novel arrived today. I really like having physical books for things that are information dense: settings or rules; I find it helps my comprehension when learning the material. (I'm this way about technical material as well: I try to get computer books in print as well.)

  • Having fun with NixOS

    I decided to run NixOS on my personal laptop, replacing an Arch Linux installation that I've had for years. The idea of a declarative OS has a strong appeal to me, since I'm a big fan of declarative languages — SQL probably being the main one.

    [...]

    On the other hand, I realized I don't have to install pyenv in order to create isolated Python environments for development. I can just use a Nix shell to spawn a new Python version where I do my development.

  • Software and services I use

  • Day 1

    First day of the Old Computer Challenge. I've spent most of the day at work so I've been using new computers for that. For travel, I'm trying to reduce the amount I use my phone as it's more powerful than the limit. I've now booted up the old computer and the WiFi is failing to connect. Not sure why. I may have to reboot.

  • Getting into Flash

    So I'm slightly younger and I got into flash in two ways. Firstly, I """"obtained"""" a copy of Macromedia Flash 5 on CD. But more importantly, secondly, I only got into it because of Newgrounds. It was the early 2000s and Newgrounds was where it was at. Watching videos playing games I loved it.

    So yeah. It's 2000 and somehow a CD ended up on my desk with a marker scribbling of "Flash 5" on it. The interface for flash was a paint canvas and it primarily was an animation platform (I guess). You had a timeline where you could drop in different pieces of art and even animate using keyframes. You could type into the web "stock sound library" or something of that nature and find just an archive of stock, royalty free: punches, gunshots, etc. It was glorious.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Japanese

      Anyone interested in forming a study group to go through the Genki books for learning Japanese? I'm interested in meeting weekly, perhaps via Discord or another client, if you prefer.

    • Retiring geomaticblog.net

      Vicente[2], Pedro-Juan[3], and me started this blog in 2006[4]. Back then blogs were the best way to create content and share knowledge. It was the times of RSS, Google Reader, social bookmarking through `del.icio.us`, and pictures on `Flickr`. Very different from these days of micro-blogging, quick videos, influencers moving from one platform to another chasing their viewers' attention and money, newsletters under paywalls, etc.

      [...]

      I will keep the blog code and content on a GitHub repository at https://github.com/jsanz/geomaticblog/[9] where we have posts in Markdown since 2007, and everything is hopefully for ever available in the web archive at https://web.archive.org/web/20130801000000*/http://geomaticblog.net/[10]. I will probably copy my posts to my website[11].

    • We Can't Go Back to What We Had: Olia Lialina's "From My to Me" and the Loss of the Personal Web

      Despite being active on the web for more than twenty-five years, I had never heard of Olia Lialina. A net artist, professor, and archivist, Lialina has written extensively about the web-that-was. In the mid to late 1990s, she created the art piece "My Boyfriend Came Back From the War". Stark, high contrast white-and-black images and text playing out across frames, the art piece (to me) echoes the sorts of ideas and techniques I'd see in twine-based hypertext years later.

      [...]

      As a researcher with the One Terabyte of Kylobyte Age archive (which holds GeoCities sites "built and abandoned by amateur webmasters between 1995 and 2009), Lialina is in a unique position, sitting on what could well be the largest archive of GeoCities sites outside of the Wayback. And as an artist and amateur webpage creator herself, Lialina has seen designs coalesce, colours harmonize, and the enthusiasm associated with those days, with the creation of something innately personal, slowly fade away.

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