Gemini Links 22/01/2024: 30th Birthday Surprise and Gnome Deemed Useless
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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E-Prime
E-Prime is a variant of English where you can’t use “is”, “am”, “are”, “was”, or “be”. The name E-Prime means "a language derived from English".
The point isn’t to [filter out] certain words, the point is to ban absolute statements about other predicates. “E-Prime is good”, “E-Prime is boring”, “E-Prime is Orwellian newspeak that erodes the free thought”, “the sky is blue”. Contractions and synonyms for “is” are also banned, and forms like “I’m” or “isn’t” are also gone, or “would” and “will”, even “has” can be bad; the point again isn’t to filter out specific words, it’s to learn to think in a way that isn’t absolute about the properties of things.
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30th birthday
Yesterday my husband pulled off the most incredible, thoughtful, beautiful surprise for my 30th birthday. He created a 35-minute short film documenting my life, including professional interviews of my family, kind testimonies from many of my friends, photos & home videos from my childhood and beyond, and secret footage he had taken of me with my baby daughter. AND he created an original soundtrack to score the movie as well. He rented out a private screen at our local independent movie theater and invited all my family and friends to surprise me and watch the film together. It was… out of this world.
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My obsession
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Reflection on choosing the battles in a relationship
I just got through with an exhausting argument with my girlfriend, the details of which I will air out here. Skip to the next heading if you just want the reflection part and not the boring context.
She told me she was looking at old photos of herself and she found a really bad one where she looked like Tom Hanks. I found that fascinating, so I asked her to send it to me. She said no, which I didn't like because I don't want her to feel uncomfortable about me seeing her when she doesn't think she looks good, so I thought I'd give her a push to overcome this by hanging up and saying I'd pick up the phone once she sent me the photo.
In hindsight, this was a very bad strategy. It immediately backfired, and she immediately found a new reason to not send me the photo: to avoid letting me have my way and winning the power struggle. Once I realized that this was the issue, I gave up, and agreed to talk to her, but explained why I really cared about her not hiding photos she doesn't like from me.
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Politics and World Events
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A Tale of Two Nations
This (long) podcast points out various issues with the railway industry in America, notably an emphasis on "number go up", getting screwed by a lack of federal funds in the 1950s and 1960s, and tossing market share instead of trying to complete with (subsidized) trucking. A quirk here is that the "number go up" golfs, in that a lower operating ratio is better, regardless of whether the super long trains actually fit the yards, whether the modern system performs better than something devised more than a century ago, how terrible the system is for shippers, buyers, the poor saps trying to crew those trains, trivial things like safety, the public interest, etc. (but, profits!!)
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Technology and Free Software
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caution: elder millenial rant ahead. you have been warned!
What the hell happened to laptop docks? We used to have these nice solid docks that we could put our business/workstation laptops into and hear a nice satisfying click or chunk. Once you heard your laptop snap into a dock you knew it was time for business!
I know I know, we are all supposed to be living in USB3/USB-C utopia now. Yes the proprietary connectors are bad and USB-C is universal...yeah yeah yeah, I get it.
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Self-hosting and planned outages
The obvious choice when hosting a personal or professional blog is Amazon AWS. Use one of many static site generators, upload the files to S3, create a CloudFront distribution, and get high speeds and stellar uptime.
With this site (and my personal Gemini capsule) I've gone a different route. I'm self-hosting, originally on a Raspberry Pi in my home server cabinet, and now in a FreeBSD VM running in on my home server. I run Caddy in another VM as a reverse proxy, routing Web traffic between a couple of different servers.
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Why Is Gnome So Annoyingly Useless?
The Gnome desktop seems to be removing more and more functionality, apparently in the name of “aesthetics” and simplicity. Unfortunately, they constantly make choices that are completely WRONG for the way I use computers. It's gotten so bad that in 2023 I switched to using KDE Plasma for my desktop on all my computers, after having gotten used to it on my Pinebook Pro, which comes with Manjaro ARM Linux with KDE Plasma. This improved my aggravation factor tremendously.
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Sudden Interest in Wargames?
I've always had an interest in mass combat in tabletop games, but previously it's mostly been limited to abstract systems like GURPS Mass Combat, or mass combat in Savage Worlds. Recently, probably due to playing Melee and Wizard, and buying the Metagaming board/hex and chits wargame The Lords of Underearth, I've gotten interest in actual wargames of both the board/hex-and-chits and miniatures varieties.
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Programming
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Putting all your emacs backups and autosaves in two directories has security implications
Recently, I noticed someone talking about putting all their emacs backups and autosaves in two directories, no matter where the file they are editing is located.
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