Gemini Links 20/01/2024: Capsule as EPUB and Complicating Code
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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“My Precious Encounter” — Boss Fights vs Trash Mobs
I learned a lesson early on, when running LMoP back in 2014, and though it stung at the time, it’s been something that has served me well over the years.
Some of the monsters that looked kind of like “boss monsters” (the Nothic and later, in a separate fight, the Wizard) were pretty much one-shotted by the party, while there were many character deaths and even near-TPKs from pretty much just random forest stirges, goblins or closet owlbears.
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🔤SpellBinding: CIOYTVR Wordo: TIDES
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P01 The Man in the cold
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Finished Reading The Hero System Basic Rulebook for Hero System Sixth Edition
Yay! Finally. That's not a knock on The Hero System — all technical books, whether computer science or RPG rule systems, take me so much more time to read compared to fiction, that I always feel making it to the end is a real accomplishment. That may have something to do with my absurd reading speed when it comes to fiction: in 2023 my books-per-day average over the whole year was .931 books per day, a sad drop from 2022 when it was 1.556 books per day.
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Eamon
Ah, nostalgia. Being able to play the game at all was something, as software generally showed up in shoeboxes from a suitcase (5.25 inch floppies fit pretty well into a shoebox) and the copies sometimes even worked. The computer was an Apple IIe that every so often we would need to take an eraser to the contacts on the cards to clean off corrosion. "Dungeons & Dragons" was more or less forbidden, which "The Pulling Report" (Michael A. Stackpole, 1990) may help suggest as to why, but then one had these computer games showing up with swords and whatnot.
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Ain't no snow bank high enough
More snow last night. Light stuff. Too light, really, as attempting to use the "shovel blower" led to most of the snow being blown back at me or to other undesirable locations. Only the good 'ole shovel would work.
I was actually looking forward to the next snow removal effort, including this morning when I first saw the fresh coating out the bathroom window.
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Politics and World Events
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Gemini Radio/Gemini Podcast Episode 59: Trip to Afghanistan, Part 3
00:00:00 Introduction
00:05:10 Correction
00:17:17 Chocolate and Bribery
00:28:22 Leaving Kunduz
00:56:37 The Road to Kabul
01:38:33 Approaching Kabul
02:25:24 Arriving in Kabul
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Poetry/Prose
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Frames Of Reference- Chapter 3
“You know I hate oat milk,” she says. “You keep getting it. Please stop.” She holds it on the counter, looking at the label, turning it over in feigned disbelief.
“There’s not much variety here,” I say, straightening my tie, “But I’ll take what I can get.” Sheila is clearly going through a lot but doing her best to maintain an optimistic outlook. Stars going off behind her eyes, I can tell, moving her tongue back and forth, as if even her own mouth has become alien terrain, the familiar has departed and all we’re left with are new substances in place of the previous ones. I grab the oat milk and put it into the fridge alongside the bargain sour cream and the avocado dip.
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Technology and Free Software
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Tidying up my home server cabinet
My children are having a school friend over for a sleepover, so I'm taking advantage of some free time to ensure all the cables in my home server cabinet are labelled.
My approach is pretty low-fi - my wife's Dymo labeller, plus a bag of zip-ties that have integral labels. I only discovered those a few years ago and they've made a significant improvement to the quality of my cabling in general.
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Puzzling Multiplayer Epics
For example, Uno is fine because it’s not that brainburny, and The Resistance is fine because there’s only two teams. No Thanks is fine because it’s not that long. All coop games are fine if they only have one team, and two-player games are also all fine. Cosmic Encounter was a big fave because it was not that thinky.
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“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
I'm a bit reluctant to write this, as I'll come across as an old man yelling at the clouds to get off his lawn, but the whole “update treadmill” the Computer Industry has foisted on us is getting tiresome.
[...]
It was working fine the previous night. What updates were required? And why drop support for older operating systems? Oh yeah … right … it's hard to support systems older than 20 minutes.
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Building a (Linux) time machine to escape reality
In their post, winter writes about the nostalgia, simplicity, and escapism of text-based interfaces and tells the story of how they used an old secondhand server as a dedicated text-based FreeBSD machine.
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Internet/Gemini
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Lost ast Vath updates
Been feeling a bit burnt out, so I haven’t touched either FFXIV or this capsule for a while. But I’ve added some lore stuff here and there.
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Announcing VTT Embed — Add Captions To Embedded YouTube Videos (And Others)
I frequently want to embed external videos at work, but can’t because they’re uncaptioned or only have auto-captions. I also occasionally want to embed one on my site, but don’t because I don’t want to serve JavaScript or trackers.
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Now this capsule/blog is available as EPUB
My idea is to convert all the blog entries into a single file, easy to read by most devices. I read a lot in my phone (using Lithium) and my Kindle, so I was thinking again of EPUB, the ebook format.
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My first Gemlog
So I've only been using and browsing Gemini for a bit now, and i love it ,though in my opinion i PERSONALLY thing that a little more support for different media might be cool, but no one is gonna add that, i don't even know if i really would want that, so blehhh. And i think the current status of no we're not adding features is good, cuz you avoid it being a case of "oh what if we added a little bit of cool styling! and images... oh and javascript can add some little interactivity and oh cookies and wow and yeah and oh wait this is just the web...". Soooo yeah... Gemini is pretty cool.
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Programming
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Making Things Sortable
Several times recently, I've had reason to make my own data types sortable in Rust projects. In my archiver, Haggis, I wanted to be able to not only list the files contained in an archive but also to provide a long listing format, such as what you get when you type `ls -l` in a terminal on Unix.
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“… and water is wet! Film at 11!”
I then viewed the site on my desktop computer and … why? Why do I need a less-than-20-minute old browser to view seven images and some text? Why does it take 193 requests to even show the page? At a minimum, you have the HTML (HyperText Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and seven images, so … nine requests? Okay, maybe some Javascript to do the animations designers are so fond of.
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Complicating code
I recently added an `.OPT` directive to my 6809 assembler [1]. This allows me to add options to a source file instead of having to always specify them on the command line. I originally did this to support unit testing [2] and I feel it's a nice addition.
When the test backend is enable, all the memory of the emulated 6809 is marked as non-readable, non-writable, non-executable. As the code is assembled, memory used by instructions are switched to “readable, executable” and memory used by data becomes “readable, writable” (easy, because of an early decision to have separate functions to write instructions vs. data). If you reference memory outside of the addresses used by the source code being assembled, you have to specify the permissions of said addresses.
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Doubling by Reversing
Given a fixed number of digits d, we could use this analytical approach to create an equation with d unknowns and examine a finite number of solutions to that equation. However, it doesn't give us a general rule for all numbers, regardless of how many digits they have. We need a different approach--and in this case, we turn to simple arithmetic.
For ease, we denote the first (greatest-value) digit of a positive integer a as a_first. Similarly, we denote the last (least-value) digit of a as a_last. We also define rev(a_b) as the positive integer c_b whose digits are the reverse of the digits of a, ignoring leading zeroes. (When b is omitted, we assume base 10.)
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agrajag dev log 3
I'm now calling the book format edf: the embedded document format. I pulled the code I'd written out of the agrajag sandbox and cleaned it up. It's now shareable between std and no_std environments so that it can power a CLI tool for converting documents from Markdown to edf as well as do onboard parsing for agrajag. Still no formal tests, but have at it:
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Kind of Blue
the dependencies list might be a bit steep. Granted, the script will need a bit more complexity if you have multiple monitors or want to automate the changes, but that's not too much of an ask.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.