Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 19, 2023

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

• Technology and Free Software

  • Old Computer Challenge V3

    I only learn about the challenge on the first day. Hopefully I have the perfect challenger for this task: my trusty Acer Aspire One from 2009. Equipped with an Intel Atom clocking at 1.6GHz, 1Gib of RAM and a 250Gb hard drive, it barely needed any limitation to fit in the challenge.

    I grab it from the shelf, blow the dust out of it and powers it. Without much surprise, it boots into the 5 years old Void Linux I had setup and forgot about.

    I plug it in to reflow it with some juice, and ends the day.

  • Melody Chop Shop

    "Composing with Constraints" exercise 9 has one chop a given melody into segments of equal length and presumably to reorder those segments as you see fit, possibly randomly. Musikalisches Würfelspiel was popular a few years ago. With a computer one might imagine software that splits music into suitable segments, and now you have two problems: the original exercise, and new software to write.

    Worse, not all MIDI is suitable to segmentation; there may be zero "dtime" events associated with either a previous or the next note, and the next note event could appear before the previous note event. Perhaps there is a control change for the next note, and then a "note_off" event for some prior "note_on" event. Most MIDI is not like this, though tracks that have long sustains ("note_on" without a corresponding or very late "note_off") will also be a problem for a simple segmentation process that only considers "note_on" events. Still, you can try arbitrary MIDI files or normalize them first so that shuffled stray events do not cause problems.

  • How-to install Alpine Linux in full ram with persistency

    In this guide, I'd like to share with you how to install Alpine Linux, so it runs entirely from RAM, but using its built-in tool to handle persistency. Perfect setup for a NAS or router, so you don't waste a disk for the system, and this can even be used for a workstation.

  • Tech illiteracy

    My parents were born around the 60s. They were fortunate enough to witness some of the most revolutionary technological miracles, and remember living without them. For example, did you know before mircowave popcorn was invented people just took the kernels and put them in brown paper lunch bags and put that in microwaves. Anyways, a story my mom likes to tell me about regarding computers is this:

    "When I was a kid they brought in a computer to my school and gathered everyone around to see it. An old terminal style with a keyboard. It probably weighed a hundred pounds. The presenter said "In the future everything will be done with one of these!" And the entire classroom laughed at them, "Yeah right!" we all said in disbelief".

  • How Much Space Is Saved By Using Tabs In Code?

    One of the arguments for using tabs over spaces as a coding style is that tabs use less disc space than, well… spaces.

    It's obvious that it does use less space. One tab character can represent what multiple space characters do, and the size of a tab and space character are identical. People argue about the degree of difference it makes. Most people just guess. Either saying "it's too small of a degree to matter" or "I guess it would be this much smaller".

    I could not find any actual tests outside of a few toy examples. So today I decided to do my own test and get a real estimate.

  • Old Computer Challenge 2023 retrospective

    I didn't manage to write up my experiences every day, so I'm going to do a recap today. Overall, there's not much to say; going to the smol computer made me postpone some things that weren't urgent, but had to be done on the web of *B▲b𝑦ƚøn*, but didn't otherwise affect my computing very much. I used my phone more than I expected or intended to.

  • What's on My Phone 2023

    It's been a while since I've done something like this. Here's a list of Android apps I use often on my Pixel 4 running GrapheneOS. It's not a complete list at all, instead I've tried to focus on unique apps that you're less likely to have heard of before. Hopefully you find something useful!

  • Sliding under the door before ew0k slams it temporarily shut

    Maybe my faculties are failing, but Bubble seems too "link busy" to me. I stare at a page there, and it feels as though I have too much screen scanning to do to accomplish what I want. But I suppose practice would perfect that.

  • Changing How I Consume Visual Content

    Something I've been thinking a lot about lately is how I can be a more conscientious and ethical consumer of visual content, specifically movies and television.

    This isn't my first foray into trying to be a more ethical consumer. I recently quit using Spotify for music consumption, and so far it's been a rather rewarding and transformative experience. My consumption habits were completely changed by dropping Spotify and all for the better.

    Television and movies will be more difficult though. I watch a lot of TV and it's almost all through streamers. I figure I would lay out some of my thoughts as I try and put together a plan to wean myself off the big streamers almost entirely.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: Re: Free Speech

      I have been sitting on this post, unwritten, stewing around in my head for a while now. Given the recent woke gemidrama, I thought now as good a time as any to finally write this up.

    • My Gemini Retrospective

      In my mind, browsing Geminispace or Gopherspace is the internet equivalent of de Certeau's idea of walking in the city. The veteran geminaut knows the best way from capsule A to capsule B, gems like a games and shortcuts like aggregators. The veteran geminaut navigates deliberately and mindfully, and this is an empowering experience that allows people to pursue their interests, find adjucent topics of interest and exchange ideas with like-minded people, without fear of tracking or ads that gently bend and push one's stream of consciousness. Gemini allows people to talk to the void without FOMO and without expecting "coins" such as "likes" in return, and that is very liberating once you get used to it.

      Gemini is a good lesson for people who believe that work is never "done" and deny the "perma" in "permacomputing". My most influential and inspiring teachers taught me that there's always something I can do when I'm done with my current task: if you don't see anything to do or improve, you're probably not looking: you're a lazy bum, incompetent, or both. When I was younger, confidence in my ability to fix and improve things made me a calm and productive person. Gemini helped me realize that this hunt for problems and solution made me stressed: my attempt to restore what I preceived as lost harmony in the world, helped me find peace and win this silly zero sum game. Writing my own Gemini client taught me that the work can be "done" if you decide so, and I feel more peaceful knowing that my primary content retrieval tool won't change.

    • Help! The antenna on my textie talkie is broke!

      Fortunately I've been sufficiently busy of late for Antenna's downtime to make me too impoli.. I mean despondent. ;-)

      I also went cold turkey on alcohol and pot, not to mention not having any cigarettes after a weekend smoking a lot with my brother (basically the only time I ever do anymore).

    • the internet feels like it's dying

      I am grateful today that I have access to some smaller, more niche parts of the web. I am glad that I have a computer and feel comfortable using it. I think if I was raised on smartphones and tablets alone and just used to a few specific apps (and at worst, a functioning and optimized mobile browser view), I would feel very, very lonely and locked out right now without an account on the big socials. They'd be all I know and used to have access to. Now, they don't have to be, but it still sucks to be anyone online right now.

      A few days ago, and again today, I wanted to check up on a music artist I enjoy. I don't have any accounts at Twitter, Instagram, or Tiktok. I try to check their Twitter on my phone - login screen. I close it. It presents me with viral tweets, but not the profile I wanted to see. I try it on my laptop. Sometimes, they make a difference between desktop and smartphone. Not this time.

  • Software Releases/Announcements

    • ANTENNA DOWNTIME TOMORROW AS WELL

      Renovating takes more time than it should…

  • Programming

    • Web API Articles

      From time to time I need to work with web APIs. These normally allow computers to communicate online. But, it might be necessary for people to work with APIs to connect a business to a new service or to automate tasks.

      Below are some articles that I found helpful while learning about APIs.

    • Reading log

      Added [Gila2023], which presents “zip-zip trees”, which claim to offer the balanced depth of a treap or binary search tree that has been constructed with uniform random insertions, while being strongly history independent.

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