gemini://gemini.techrights.org/2023/05/22/titan-uploads-and-inn/

I have quit reading columns about street foods recommended by a can driver who tells the readers about places where you can find cheap affordable food. I haven’t quit because the column is not interesting but because of anonymous comments people leave there. There are always those people who tell you that they’ve got diarrhea. Wow! Interesting! Now I’ve got a good idea: go to those places without the people who tell you that they’ve got diarrhea there!

I have been a bit inactive here. There are several reasons: work (it is not going to improve, unfortunately), some personal stuff (we have been replacing the old heating system with a bit more modern one) and some illness.

This week I did a Pebble battery replacement. It was fortunate, one could say, that the battery had swollen in my Pebble Time Round as it had, because it separated the display from the body, which saved me a lot of work trying to pry the watch open with a spudger. Once it’s open, there are two connectors and three small screws and there’s the battery in the middle.

Thursday morning at 04:16 there was a 5.2 earthquake in Chiba, which rattled us in Tokyo as well. It woke me up and while the shaking wasn’t really bad, it wasn’t much fun, either. There is an alert that goes off on mobile phones a few seconds before an earthquake strikes – woop woop woop earthquake! woop woop woop earthquake! woop woop woop earthquake! – and it can be terrifying if it goes off early in the morning and wakes one from a deep sleep (I know from experience.) I keep my phone in a different room though, so this time just the shaking woke me up.

I wrote a few months ago about how I was moving in with my partner[2] and how I wanted to pick up a copy of The Beatles’ Rubber Soul (1969) to mark the occasion – done [1].

We’ve been living together for a little over four months now and I think we’re both really happy with the situation. As it was her place for a while before the both of us, we didn’t want it to stay feeling like hers and not ours, so we’ve redecorated some parts and shuffled some things around. I bought the motorised legs component for a standing desk and mounted this on an old IKEA wooden desktop I had to build an optional standing desk in the second bedroom that doubles up as a home office.

A more humane, less profit driven, more family-oriented system would look very different. My co-workers wouldn’t be burning out, calling in, and falling ill like falling dominoes.

About a year ago, my Sony MZ-R700 MiniDisc player which I bought in 2020 abruptly stopped working. It still powers up just fine, the motor spins, but inevitably the little LCD display proclaims “DISC ERROR”. It does this with absolutely every MD I own, blank, recorded, standard play, long play, the works. No idea why. There’s nothing visually obviously wrong when I look inside the open door. Maybe the laser diode is dead, I dunno. Anyway, bit of a bummer after approximately two years of ownership by me.

Seeing the handle ‘JeanG3nie’ on a regular basis in these parts (and they actually replied to me once, oh my!) has me remembering an online system from General Electric Corporation in the late 1980s (maybe early 1990s) called “GEnie”. Wish I could remember more of what it was like, what my username was, etc.

We had a friend get married in the next state over, so my wife and I made a trip out of it. Five hours out, a couple hours spent at the reception, and five hours back all in the same day. It was super nice to see our friend again, especially since the last time I had seen her was a couple years ago at my wife and I’s wedding when she had made an even longer trip out to see us. This gave us a nice chance to reciprocate. The reception was nice and the drive was fun, even if we didn’t get back home until almost 3 AM. We’re night owls anyway.

I had an email reply to one of my posts this morning which pointed out a spelling error. Well, there was more to the reply, but for the sake of this post that’s the important bit. Anyway, what’s funny is that I was just last night looking at the possibility of adding spellcheck to my NeoVim configuration.

I also implemented the bare minimum in diohsc to allow it to use titan links which require a client certificate, by setting appropriate environment variables when using the ‘browse’ command to call external commands (like the above script).

All this prompted by the use of titan in Bubble, the first titan links I’ve actually been tempted to follow. Implementing explicit titan support in diohsc would cross a clear line, so I’m glad that calling an external command turned out to be sufficient.

A year ago, I tried setting up INN because I wanted to use NNCP to exchange net news. Like Usenet. Like UUCP. But it didn’t quite work: 2022-02-06 Struggling with INN.

Preface, sorry if self-promote-y, but Ctrl-ZINE (^Z) is by/for all on the Smol Web, and there’s no profit/monetary incentive here, so I just want to bring attn to something real fast.

In IRC me and another ^C member were discussing topics for the zine, and we thought someone should write up a post (from any perspective, from any “approach”) about old “away” messages on old services. So, like a MySpace away message/status, an AOL auto-response/away message, MSN Messenger, whatever.

I recently read this very nice post by JeanG3nie, and I share their viewpoints and believe that the Gemini community should establish a federation specification. I believe simplicity should be our guiding principle, and attempting to replicate ActivityPub would be both unproductive and unpopular. I’ve formulated a concept that is basically a public mailing list with some additional elements.

I’ve discovered the world of print-and-play board games. Oh my god, it is full of stars.

This might very well be the next step in simplifying our lives. Already we’ve returned to board- and card games, rather than computer games, as part of our entertainment.

One of the things I often think about as a software developer is that much of what I make does not last very long. I am lucky if the product of my labour lasts more than a few years. I am not alone in these thoughts: there was a recent thread on HackerNews along much the same lines[1], categorising all developed software that lasts long enough as tech debt.

It is quite fashionable, as many do in that thread, to believe that this is entirely due to failings of the industry. Be it because of a preference for trendy technologies that come ago, or from poor design choices that prioritise short-term solutions over long-term planning, and no-doubt those are significant factors. However, I think there is another factor at play that is a far more optimistic one: simply the fact that there is genuine innovation in the world of software development and much of the need to replace working systems is driven by us wanting to replace systems that just weren’t as well built as what we build today.

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● 05.22.23

● Gemini Links 22/05/2023: Titan Uploads and INN

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