Gemini Links 02/04/2024: Fate of Free Software, Gemtext Experimental Update
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Sanshoshima Swamp and New Enterprise
In my faith, we are very gentle in propagating the practice. As long as people are doing well and are resiliently happy, we have no need to "convert" them—it's more important that they live well and self-actualize. If our faith will help them, they will choose to adopt it of their own accord.
For a while, this was not so. The old practice was to destroy resistance to the faith by knowing it so well that you could defeat any argument against it. This was known as "shakubuku". It was phased out of the practice by Daisaku Ikeda, the 3rd president of the Soka Gakkai, and the one who grew the organization internationally.
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🔤SpellBinding — AEVILUF Wordo: ALOHA
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Season
A claim was made that during Spring everyone can experience all four seasons in a single day. There are problems with this claim, most prominent the leap from "lots of people" to "everyone". This error also appears in "everyone drives a car" or "everyone owns a smartphone". Lots of people do live in temperate zones and may experience some number of seasons in a single day: perhaps there are some negligent leaves finally brought down by a spring breeze, then a sudden snow, followed by warm sunshine, etc. Another problem is with the number of seasons. I recall Pakistan having a distinctive Monsoon, but otherwise the change was from "not very cold and more wet" to "hot and pretty dry". At the American English School meanwhile we were taught the American temperate system narrative. Nor do all hold to four seasons; an ecologist of the realist bent might use six (prevernal, vernal, estival, serotinal, autumnal, hibernal) while a reverent Indian uses a different six (Ritu).
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Isaiah 25:9: Let Us Rejoice (publ. 2024-04-01)
In this hymn of praise to ʏʜᴡʜ, the prophet carries us to a time, yet future, when God's people enjoy peace, security, happiness, and vindication. Due to God's miraculous power and his faithfulness to his promises (verse 1) the great evil powers of the earth have been destroyed (verse 2) and violence and hostility has been removed (vv. 2, 4, 5, 10-12). At that time, all the nations rejoice and feast together in the holy land (verse 6). All death and sorrow are removed (vv. 7-8). God's people will enjoy vindication and honor, in contrast to the stigma and mockery they received while violent, wicked nations held power in the world (vv. 8).
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2024 Week 13: Status and Photos
The end of March was no less busy than the rest of the month. We undertook many projects that had fallen by the wayside, from simply cleaning the house and catching up on laundry to buying supplies for a raised-bed garden. We re-potted plants, cleaned and rearranged out ferrets' playroom, hosted a family dinner, and even attended a play together.
I received a soroban, a type of Japanese abacus, in the post yesterday. The soroban has 17 split rods representing decimal places, with four beads (representing units) on one side of the split and a single bead (representing fives) on the other side. The beads use five's-complement arithmetic to perform calculations quickly, and less mental math is required to produce values on the board than to calculate with paper and pencil. The soroban can utilize addition and subtraction tricks to perform multiplication, division, and even square and cube roots.
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stream a
shadow self realm think again. anger tired tired tired so tired. mired. desire. not desired. so much so much but so hard. just so tired and unenthused and overly enthused and bursting and flatlining. shame shame shame. alone alone alone. fear fear fear. pressure pressure pressure. expectation. some comfort but mostly simple addlement. sometimes there are good times. sometimes times are hard times. sometimes this us really wonderful. just tired. I think im just so tired.
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April 1, 2024 - Monday of Easter Week (W)
The Lord hath brought you into a land flowing with milk and honey, alleluia: that the law of the Lord may be ever in your mouth, alleluia, alleluia.
Psalm - Give glory to the Lord, and call upon His name: make known His deeds among the nations.
Glory be to the Father. The Lord hath brought you into a land flowing with milk and honey, alleluia: that the law of the Lord may be ever in your mouth, alleluia, alleluia.
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Definitions of drylands
I've read a few papers that refer to "drylands" and "semi-arid" ecosystems, and I became interested in the definitions of these terms, so here I've gathered together some notes on my reading, with the aim of tracing back the definitions through the literature.
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1/3
With the start of April, we're now 1/3rd through 2024.
This weekend in Tokyo it was like Summer: upper 70s F on Saturday, and lower 80s F on Sunday. It was one for the record books (really.) It will cool off again this week, but Spring is right around the corner.
April in Japan is when the new fiscal year starts, and the new school year starts, but I'm ready for retirement already. Although I haven't reached the half century mark yet, if I could retire tomorrow, I would. My new year's resolution to just laugh and shrug everything off at work has not been successful.
On top of that, there are some challenges coming up this year that I am really not looking forward to, but that I cannot avoid. So it's onward and upwards, I guess. Or onwards, anyway.
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March 2024
March is over, it's time for the monthly update! As I couldn't finish it on the 31st, I decided to post this on the 2nd of April and not the 1st because I don't like posting on "fake news day" (aka April fool). So here we are 2 days late :)
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Plantin and Birdin
This weekend we went to a native plant nursery. Now that we have a nice patio in the backyard we are planning to plant some natives along the alley to add a little privacy. So we went to just look and find some options to accomplish that when we're ready to plant. We were on bikes and so not prepared to buy anything substantial. We did end up with a few native ground cover plants and took home a couple seed packets. They had a very cool little free library but instead of books it is for native seeds to share!
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One slice of life in March
And let's talk about what I did last week... I thought that the dragon might have killed the smolweb? I was trying to read new posts on the Gemlog I follow and ... nothing since the end of last year. What happened to the authors? I don't know. Is it because I started following them? ... And when I look at the aggregators, there's not much to read except for 3 or 4 authors. Is the smolweb dead or is there a problem with the aggregator? When I look at some capsule hosters, I see new blogs and authors... for 2 or 3 posts and then nothing more. Oh, I forgot: I'm no longer listed in the Gemini aggregators or quite not listed. I don't know why and I don't care. I've read an excellent post (1) about this problem. I don't care about aggregators because this blog is not made to be "famous", just to live a discreet life. I just have it automatically posted on mastodon.social and that's it. I thought I might have been deleted from the aggregators because of my post questioning the reasons for Hamas doing what they did in October 2023. I know it's difficult to talk about this in the US with a lot of censorship or auto-censorship. I haven't received any news about that, so it's just an hypothesis. I'm not going to talk about some IT things and it's quite rare in the smolweb. Too rare for me because I like to read the posts about everything else, like, for example, the guy/girl who works in China or Japan and tries to get us to travel with him/her.
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Technology and Free Software
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Gemtext Experimental Update
I am very excited to try the new experimental mock-up draft update to gemtext! This adds new features and expands old ones to make the markup language more usable. It is of course very early in development, but quite usable as is.
To use it, simply rename your file extensions from `.gmi` (gemini) to `.md` (mock-up draft). This hints to browsers to unlock the proposed features.
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OFFLFIRSOCH 2024 round up
It's the first of April, which means two things! One, you should believe even fewer things you read online than usual. And two, the historic first ever OFFLine FIRst SOftware CHallenge has now drawn to a close. I had no idea what sort of uptake to expect for this new challenge, given that it necessarily targets a smaller audience (not everybody who phlogs/gemlogs also codes), but I am happy to report that OFFLFIRSOCH was welcomed with enthusiasm despite the awful name! I am aware of a total of twelve submisions. If I have missed or forgotten your submission, please reach out to me!
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Upgrading to debian 12 bookworm
It is so ironic always saying that I do not want to post the same stuff both on my blog and on my phlog. But here I am again finding myself not exactly crossposting but talking about the same thing on both.
The difference perhaps is that here I feel more free to talk about the technical part of the matter. Often only to remind myself of how to do things.
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Is Free software becoming commonplace or forgotten ?
I looked at the evolution of the membership of the APRIL association, a French association for the promotion of Free Software and a kind of French Free Software Foundation (the FSF for France was closed in 2022). There are fewer members than before, with 30% less than the maximum. I have seen many blogs and websites about Free Software disappear. In France, there are not many websites about it, very few people making videos and podcasts. So it seems to me that free software is being forgotten. But when I talk to other people, I see that many of them use at least one free software. Of course, there are some famous software like VLC, GIMP, LibreOffice.... They're not perfect, but they're so powerful compared to their paid and privatised models, especially if you compare them to the online versions with subscriptions. The difference is that these paid online versions have strong marketing teams, not the free software. Imagine if the associations were to advertise for them everywhere, there would be some criticism in the free software world. Firefox and other softwares defending a different vision of the tech world now have less than 4% market share...or worse in the mobile world.
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Internet/Gemini
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Long-Term Trends
Looking over the entries in this gemlog I notice that my interests stay constant for a particular era, then change to a new language/technology/paradigm. The overall aim is to try make programming simpler/higher quality by using (often old) research that industry has bypassed for whatever reason (usually the non-technical reasons of marketing budget & backing by a multinational company).
[...]
* The Concurrent Logic Programming era. Started with KLIC but then switched to FLENG which has been much smoother for me.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.