Links 21/03/2024: Bullet Journal, Facebook 'Censors' Fediverse Now
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Where things stand, March 2024
If you were to ask me two years ago where I thought I'd be in 2024 the answer would have been pretty far from the mark. But that's not a negative thing really. I'm happy with how life is going.
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European integration avant la lettre
I have recently had the pleasure of reading William Pickles' 1950 article "The Strasbourg Illusion" in the Political Quarterly (Vol 21). Pickles writes in a humourous prose style that went out with bakelite and the zeppelin, reminding me of F M Cornford, and like Cornford was slightly overshadowed in literary terms by his own wife.
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Low expectations 🎞️
In the 1990s I went to see a film at my local cinema. Whatever it was, it must have been popular because there were no tickets left. The box office person said they did have tickets for Super Mario Bros instead. Oh well, we're here. So we saw that, and I kind of enjoyed it. It had two advantages. I had very, very low expectations, and it easily surpassed them. And I wasn't that interested in video games, so I was pleased that they did something non-game-y with it. But I can't explain why they chose an English actor to play Mario.
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Should black kittens go to heaven?
AJJ is a folk punk band that I like. They're kind of popular as far as folk punk bands go. One of their old albums, "only God can judge me and more," features the song quoted above.
It's not my favourite song by AJJ, but it is my favourite to think about.
It presents a kind of absurd moral problem: there is this person who's gestating both cats and mice, and it seems to be taken as a given that eating mice is intrinsic to being a cat. So, the cats eat the mice, and immediately after being born, they're punished for their misdeeds.
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P04 Lifeline Pilot
Passengers, ready for take-off.
It's going to be a bumpy flight,
over childhood and then kickoff.
Your life will have some fights.
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Science
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Celestial Calculations (publ. 2024-03-21)
Astronomy season is basically over for me now due to our seasonal weather patterns in Fairbanks. As soon as spring approaches, and the weather starts to warm up, we get overcast skies nearly every night for months. So even though there is still decent amounts of darkness, I can't see anything at night. I have aspirations to do some solar observing projects but am not sure what progress I will make. It is a nice excuse, though, to refocus attention onto my botany interests, which mainly involves walk along the Tanana River and studying the flora there, and reading a few books about plants and plant biology.
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Technology and Free Software
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A new Bullet Journal
Since 2018, I've been using the bullet journal method. I won't go into the story behind it (search for Ryder Caroll), but I've been doing it for 5 years in my own way. It's a mixture of professional needs and personal ideas. I've tried a lot of things and the first idea was to replace some of the notes I had on my smartphone, and to be able to draw or write something I had in mind. As I was never in my office, I chose an A6 notebook: I can put it in my work trouser pocket. I can also put it in a bag or just on my small desk. It's perfect for taking notes when I'm trying out a new bench or creating a new method. I added a pen holder for a mechanical pencil and simply reinforced the edge of the book with woven tape. If you're not familiar with the method, it's a very personalized agenda and notebook with your own page numbering, your index, your categories, your legends, etc... Every bullet journal is different and I'm not a big fan of self-development or mental health check-ups. I've tried doing monthly trackers, a kind of chart with goals... Not very efficient for me.
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After a month of the new version, I have made drawings between the page of notes and trackers, goals or important data. The ideas for the blog are rare and are sent to my email or in a markdown file created with Markor and sent to the server as a draft. I have a new pit pen to add color.
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Internet/Gemini
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That Threads Federation is Going About How You'd Expect
That didn't take long. On my Mastodon feed this morning, I see that Threads appears to be blocking mentions of Pixelfed, an ostensible competitor to Instagram. This is a little rude of me, but let's be real: people use what's easy, and the Fediverse has the appearance of friction, even if, in my experience anyway, that's nowhere near the case. People know that Instagram's easy. Instagram's what your friends use, but also Kim Kardashian and also more than a billion others. Pixelfed has ordinary people, not celebrities, not influencers. The UI is similar, but the purposes are miles apart.
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Gopher's Uncontextualized Directories vs. Gemini's Contextualized Directories
A few things from Gopher+ jumped out at me, particularly the new Gopher+ requests, which I will be calling "metadata requests". Gopher+'s approach to these requests and abstracts has, to me, made a greater case for the choice Gemini took in having gemtext directories rather than simple menus (like what Gopher had originally intended). One might call Gemini's approach Document Directories, but I argue that the distinction between Gopher and Gemini is the distinction between Uncontextualized Directories and Contextualized Directories.
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Programming
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Basic shell with job control
I decided to create a simple shell with job control because most of the simple shells on the internet don't have job control. I don't consider shells without job control to be usable, I want to start a program and press ctrl+z to suspend the process and go back to the shell.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.