Gemini Links 05/02/2024: Shadowy Figure, Beepy PDA Experiment, and FOSDEM 2024
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Up too late, too many thoughts
So, even though I didn't drink a lot of coffee yesterday, I'm up super late again. Maybe it's because I woke up late and then didn't really eat all that much. I figured out (partially) why my connection has been so slow: system daemons have been trying to pull very large wallpaper files from the Internet all day every day for a while now, which has completely saturated the 2010-era bandwidth I have here (thanks Tim Apple). So, I found a way to limit them and things are going a little more smoothly.
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A shadowy figure
A shadowy figure sidles quietly into the pub. They go up to the bar and signal the ~Bartender with a subtle nod, whispering, "Two shots of tequila and a cup of tea, please."
The figure wears a big waterproof coat which is wet from the rain outside, but doesn't take it off as they sit down in a dark corner despite it being warm and dry inside.
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Technology and Free Software
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Computing in 2023
Logout asked on his Czech blog (he does it every year) about current computing environment of people.
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The Beepy PDA Experiment
A little while back I acquired this little handheld device kit called the Beepy. If you want to read a little bit more about what it is I'll link my initial post about it below. It is a little handheld that uses a blackberry keyboard, a monochrome reflective lcd and accepts a Pi Zero form factor board as the brains.
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Interesting things I saw at FOSDEM 2024 (day 2)
I only caught half of that presentation on bootstrapping RISC-V, and it mostly went over my head. But I was interested to know that at some point they have to recompile tinyCC five or six times with itself, adding feature flags each time to build towards a fully featured version of the compiler. Once the fully feature version compiles itself one last time to check for an exact bitwise match, they can use tinyCC to compile GCC and start the process all over again.
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Some things I found while resurrecting a Void installation
My more powerful laptop is a 2017 Dell gaming rig with an i5 and Nvidia graphics. I got the thing used when my daughter, who at the time was attending a posh private school on scholarship, snagged it from being thrown in the trash by a friend because it was too old and beat up. I've since added ram, bringing it up from 8 to 32GB, making it my goto device when I need to compile something beefy or want to do some gaming (rare, but sometimes). I set up this machine as a dual boot, with Void Linux (musl libc edition) and FreeBSD.
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New here, this place seems nice.
"Hello bartender, I'm new here, pour something light for now, your pick"
I think this site is the culmination of what I feel is the best way to represent simplicity, this site isn't flashy, with tons of animations, popups, or anything like that. This site is a passion project which looks as nice and cozy as it can get.
Dunno what it is but, places like this one look and feel the best, they have the nicest atmosphere, and they generally just feel like a breath of fresh air from everything else. I wish more would strive to be as simple and relaxing like this one.
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Me and Rhythm Games
I played a *lot* of DDR in my 20s, starting in late 2002. My usual routine was to play one song after another on heavy (hard), with no breaks except long enough to select a song, for 30-60 minutes straight 3-4 times a week. This was at home, mind you, where I had a soft pad mounted onto a piece of plywood with some of those clear vinyl floor coverings on top and some non-slip stuff on the back. So yeah, I played a *lot* of DDR, and though I was never one of those insanely good players, I was far from a bad player. I could easily pass the 9-foot songs, and could occasionally pass a small number of 10-foot songs (桜 (Sakura) specifically). And on those rare occasions I went to an arcade, I would do all of this without ever touching the bar, and while also kinda halfway sorta _dancing_, which I guess is why I sometimes would draw a small crowd around me. So yeah, not insanely good, but good enough that I was entertaining. Of course, I didn't do it for the attention. 90% of my DDR was done at home as my way of exercising - well, along with bike riding and aikido. It was also a way for me to connect to music, which has always been a hugely important part of my life. DDR was something I did because I absolutely LOVED it.
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Internet/Gemini
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Response to Gopher.icu on the State of Gopher
Gopher.icu talks about bad gopher practices, mainly revolving around trying to make gopher more web-like, such as gophermap content [0].
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Matrix and Discord
First and foremost: I'm only looking at these two protocols here. XMPP is awesome, and I used to use it, but it's not what I use now. And yes I know there are protocol issues with Matrix. This post is just my own experience, so settle down 😅
So I used to be on Discord. A lot. I had my own server that had a good number of members, which was mainly based around my Doom projects, but not exclusively. I also was a moderator in a handful of other servers, and generally spent most of my day with a Discord window open nearby. The servers I was on were where I socialized, streamed videos of me playing games, posted updates on my Doom/Quake/Programming projects, and shared music. It was fun.
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January 2024: Gemini
As said above and before, I haven't been active in the gemini space lately. I barely looked into cosmos / antenna between september and December last year and while I've been browsing the space more since the new year, I'm only looking at cosmos 2 or 3 times a week. The Good news with the smolweb and gemini is that it is slow, meaning that 2 or 3 times a week is enough to stay up to date with most gemlog entries (thanks to cosmos aggregating most of them). At the same time, I know I "miss" some by not going to places like bbs or station (my TLS cert for station has expired and didn't bother to re-creacte an account), but I'm at "peace" with that as of now.
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Alive
At least sort of. It seems January 2024 is the first month without any post since I have use the gopher.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.