● 08.01.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 01/08/2023: ClockworkPi and Splitting the Web

Posted in News Roundup at 5:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: BEHIVRO Wordo: AXONS

=> ↺ Jorge Sanz: July 2023

• July was mostly a month in between the conferences and summer holidays for me. Next week we will go out so July was a month at home, enjoying the local festivities of Valencia (Gran Fira de València) where the city was busy every weekend with many different activities. We had also national government and senate elections that as before, are leaving the country in a period of politics and very likely repeated elections.

=> ↺ Aestate summa

• According to the calendar it should be high summer outside, but the thermometer shows 17 degrees C and it has been raining all night and all day long.

• We are in a hotel near the Hessian-Bavarian border as after visiting family we needed some time for ourselves. Clearly we picked the worst week weatherwise. On the radio they are constantly babbling about the need for security measures on sizzling hot days as we’ll have plenty of those because of the climate “catastrophe”. Yeah, look outside you fools.

=> ↺ How to start cooking

• I think it’s hard to start from nothing. After all, I’m standing in my kitchen and want to cook something, so I start with the ingredients I have at hand and the ingredients I have at hand are based on vague notions of existing recipes. It is extremely rare for me to get a book with a recipe and shop for the ingredients.

=> ↺ Living under the shadow

• Recently I’ve been thinking more and more about life and stuff, and I realised I’ve been living under the shadow for my entire pre-18 life.

• I’ve been wanting to do things by myself, especially things that I’m interested in, but life tells me that I’m not allowed to do that because imagine seeing me looking at the screen and putting the books aside, that will make me “fail”, so because life doesn’t want me to fail even once, I’ve instead become a puppet of life.

• I’ve been trying to fail, find ways to do it my own way, so that I can understand what I should improve, but life always gets into my way and say “don’t you dare”, so the most that I did during these days were to grind out subjects like Math, because that’s what I was interested in, and at school, in which life doesn’t intefere me yet, it was my biggest motivation to actually make improvements, it was something that I was passionate about.

Politics and World Events

=> ↺ On Direct Democracy

• To defend direct democracy, to oppose it as ‘real democracy’ against the false political democracy of the State, is to believe that our true nature will at least be revealed if were to finally be freed from the constraints which the system imposes on us: but to free oneself of such constraints supposes a transformation which at end of we would no longer be ourselves, at the very least we would no longer be what we are under the civilization of Capital.”

=> ↺ On Democracy

• After a lifetime of thinking that I live in a democracy, I was horrified not long ago to see how it really works. In the US, people’s votes don’t really count to elect a leader (except to occasionally break a tie). People do not elect leaders – it is the mysterious ‘electoral college’ that elects presidents.

• It is the equivalent of the ‘dark web’ of politics. Do you know who the electors of your state are? Does anyone? How does one become an elector? Is it a paid position?

• These people are not responsible or accountable to anyone for anything. They can vote any f***ing way they feel like, for anyone they want. In some cases if they vote against the wishes of powerful people, they may be removed and replaced, repeatedly, until the desired vote is cast — which is even worse, because you see, someone in power has a way of getting the vote they want, regardless of what the elector wants, which is already decoupled from what people want.

Games

=> ↺ Mixed-level parties

• @andy@dice.camp asked me about playing with mixed level parties. I’d say that compared to my days as a D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder 1 referee running Adventure Paths I feel that old school games like B/X and AD&D running sandboxes like mega-dungeons and hex-crawls are more carefree for me.

• Players determine the difficulty level by deciding where to go. This is made possible because mega-dungeons and hex-crawls are sandboxes in the sense that there are multiple ways to traverse them with no clear progression in difficulty or plot requirements. All this requires is for the players to be able to make an informed decision. Rumours about monsters provide warnings, and the implied treasure provides enticement. Dungeon level depth provides both.

Technology and Free Software

=> ↺ zshbrev

• zshbrev allows you to mix zsh code and brev code. Not for polished li’l “eggs” but for your own duct tape and chewing gum hacking and automation. Quick and dirty♥.

• The default directory is .zshbrev/ but you can change it with the –dir flag to zshbrev.

=> ↺ Did anyone else get a Beepy, aka Beepberry?

• I just got one a few days ago and it’s pretty cool. Kind of like a smaller PocketCHIP. I’m using a Pi Zero W in it for now because I already had a few on hand but would like to try the RISC V MangoPi MQ Pro eventually. I wrote up some first impressions on my gemlog.

=> ↺ Internet speed, Media computer, File server: Setting up Samba, river Wayland updates

• Still needs a lamp or something. It’s too dark in the evenings. Other than that I think I like it here. Depends on what happens in the living room, I suppose, if we suddenly get a teen invasion or something when #3 brings friends that want to use the living room, but that has yet to happen.

• I also re-routed our home network a little to get rid of the cable salad I had made next to the fucking DOCSIS modem. Instead, I have connected a single Ethernet cable from it all the way behind our bookcases to this desk and keep the rest of our network equipment neatly on my desk. The cute and noiseless little PC Engines apu2 which works as our combined router and firewall is my favourite computer in the household and sits just under my monitor now.

• This also means the workstation now gets real Ethernet instead of the Powerline thing it had before. Yeah, I know, I should just give up on the Powerline things already and just wire real Ethernet to every room in the flat.

=> ↺ ClockworkPi DevTerm Thoughts

• At the end of March, I received a ClockworkPi DevTerm UMPC. I didn’t have much of a chance to play with it in April or May, but since about the end of June, I’ve been using it as my primary mobile PC. After about five weeks of consistent use, I have a number of thoughts about the platform.

• My model is the DevTerm Kit RPI-CM4. The kit itself is a set of computer components: screen, keyboard with integrated trackball, main board, and peripherals, along with a shell. The kit is very simple to build: no soldering or screws are required. Swapping and upgrading components is extremely easy. Best of all, the hardware is open-source, and schematics and 3D-printing files are available on ClockworkPi’s GitHub page. Assembly took only a few minutes.

• A Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 is not included inside the kit itself, but Clockwork does include one in the purchase. Two 18650 lithium-ion batteries are required for mobile use but are not included at all. Fortunately, I had a few left over from a much earlier project.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Splitting the Web

• There’s an increasing chasm dividing the modern web. On one side, the commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web. A web which has only one objective: making us click. It measures clicks, optimises clicks, generates clicks. It gathers as much information as it could about us and spams every second of our life with ads, beep, notifications, vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and fluorescent titles.

• A web which boils down to Idiocracy in a Blade Runner landscape, a complete cyberpunk dystopia.

• Then there’s the tech-savvy web. People who install adblockers or alternative browsers. People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages.

• Between those two extremes, the gap is widening. You have to choose your camp. When browsing on the “normal web”, it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content.

=> ↺ Append Write Corruption

• Someone on the #gemini IRC channel had guestbook code up for review; the results of malloc and fopen calls were not checked. These calls can and do fail, folks!

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