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● 09.12.23

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● Gemini Links 12/09/2023: On Human Rights and One Year Without Windows

Posted in News Roundup at 6:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: CHKMYUO Wordo: GUANO

=> ↺ Garden Room

• In my last post, I talked about a straw bale course I went on, and a few projects I had in mind coming out of it. One of them was the idea of a “garden room”.

• [...]

• I got one hundred bales. It works out at about 16 cubic metres of straw (top tip – 1M³ of straw more or less equates to one linear metre of wall). not all of it fitted in the garage – I’ve got an overflow pile in the garden, and we had to sort and throw away / gift / recycle a whole bunch of stuff that was in the garage. If I can’t use it, things might get a bit strained at home ^^.

• The bales are barley straw, very similar to what we worked with at CAT; as there, most of the bales are ~900mm long, with a few much-longer outliers. I don’t have a suitable moisture meter, but they feel dry – the farmer’s son said they monitor moisture when baling, and stop if it goes above 15%, and then they’re stored up high and under cover, so I’m not worried by that. The strings are nice and tight, and their density is ~105kg/M³. That could be higher, but it’s certainly good enough. Best of all – no wasps.

=> ↺ Star Log 2023-09-10 (Fairbanks, AK, USA, publ. 2023-09-12)

• Last Sunday (Sept 10) I had a brief opportunity for stargazing early in the morning, about 3am. The clouds mostly cleared away early that morning, so I went out to the boat launch. The boat launch itself was stuffed with campers and assorted folk, but providentially I found an unoccupied pull-off area a little further down the highway, which I noticed when I accidentally missed my turn-off into the boat launch. The pull-off area had a decent view of the skies in most directions, though I occasionally had to deal with the bright lights of passing vehicles. And i had a view of the city lights, through some spruce trees:

• [...]

• It seems that the S5300 has no way to allow manually setting the exposure time of the camera, like a bulb mode, but I found out later that there is a “fireworks” mode with a larger exposure of four seconds, which I would like to try out some time.

• Something interesting right now is that Uranus is located in the sky about halfway between the Pleiades and Jupiter, making it pretty easy to find with binoculars: [...]

Politics and World Events

=> ↺ “On Education”

• “On Education” by Bertrand Russell opens with the “evils” of educational institutions. One perhaps should define what “evil” means. Homeschooling is noted as perhaps lacking in sufficient socialization, and could make an outcast of a child. Evil softens to “grave defects”, and then to “not satisfactory”.

• A noteworthy question is whether education should produce independent judgment, or instill particular beliefs. Or, what kind of individuals, and what kind of community do we hope to see?

=> ↺ Human Rights

• Last Sunday I was at a protest here in Stockholm against the world’s grossest and disgustingest snitch law, and I agree 100% that this law needs to be stopped. It’s a law mandating teachers, librarians, health personnel etc to turn in “illegal” refugees and immigrants. Others can and have written more eloquently & better against that law than I can.

• This (what I’m about to write about) is a much less important tangent, not at all meant to distract from the vital fight against the fascist law proposal.

• [...]

• “Eat the rich” is not gonna work but maybe we can starve ‘em by working for each other instead of for them. The coming mass automatization of centralized means of production via artifical learning models is an obstacle to that but maybe not an insurmountable one.

Technology and Free Software

=> ↺ The Opaque Corpus

• I came of age in the dot com boom: Pentium chips, Herman Miller chairs, the first wave of media darling startups (who remembers pets.com?). It was a era before massive computational power was easily available, and long before “compute” entered the lexicon as a noun. AI was still not in a particularly good place – after the promises of the 1970s failed to deliver the general AI its practitioners were sure was on the horizon, funding dried up. For a long, long time.

• The state of the art in the 1970s was neural networks; after that, there were researchers involved in investigating other ideas, such as Bayesian networks, which work off probability and priors.

• These investigations yielded success in some very early-internet ways, with Naive Bayesian classifiers showing incredible promise in spam filtering. Before Google clogged up the web with SEO spam (whether written by underpaid writers, or now wholesale by AI), spam was a real plague

=> ↺ Jumbled thoughts on using pinyin instead of characters

• For the most part i believe that switching to pinyin would not have any detrimental consequences. My reasoning for this is:

• (A) for a long time many people in china were illiterate and did not have trouble communicating without resorting to characters. (B) today in general speech people can have conversations without needing to resort to writing. (C) i have converted many wikipedia articles to pinyin and asked native speakers to read them. The consensus is that doing so is slow, but the content is understandable.

=> ↺ Locust cider thoughts

• I love Locust ciders, and I’ve tried enough of the flavors to make a semi-substantial post commenting on them.

=> ↺ This week — I Welcome My New Pixel Overlords

• TL;DR: I jumped down the rabbit hole of click-based pixel art virtual pets. I also grinded hard in GBF’s Exo Cocytus Crucible event, answered some surveys, and discovered some interesting websites.

• This is a late, brief update because I had to do some heavy chores last weekend.

• (For anyone curious on what I’ve done at work this week: I’ve made several preparations for my upcoming training program, while finishing other tasks here and there. Nothing exciting, really.)

=> ↺ One year without a PC

• I swapped my Windows 10 desktop machine for a Raspberry Pi 4 around a year ago. Time for a resume and asking “would I do it again”?

• Let’s start with the big question: Would I do it again, knowing what I know today?

• Well, yes and no. I’m much more happy with the streamlined, terminal UI based workflow that I have now. I feel more focussed and way less distracted. I spend less time procrastinating and I’m not really missing much. So that way it was totally worth it.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ AuraGem Relaunch

• I have just announced the relaunch of AuraGem! The address has changed to auragem.letz.dev. Most of the capsule should be as it was in 2022, aside from various updates and some things which I have taken down until they can be fixed (the music service and the starwars database). I was planning on waiting until I can pay for the original auragem domain, but I went with FreeDNS instead, which should mean that there should be no more DNS mishaps in the future.

• I have also made some updates to the search engine (AuraGem Search) which I am excited about, and will continue to make updates to it. One can read more about this on the search engine’s new About and Features page.

=> ↺ More Updates to AuraGem

• Over the past two days I have made some more updates to AuraGem, particularly the Search Engine. These are mostly stability and QoL updates.

=> ↺ Celebrating the small web, too

• Recently Kagi’s announcement that they’d gone and done something to highlight small-web sites crossed my desk.

• I’m in favor of this. While the small not-web is nice — if you’re reading this, it’s probably on the small not-web — it doesn’t fit everything. If you’ve got a blog with a lot of pictures on every single post, things will probably be nicer for your audience if they don’t have to click on every single picture.

• Then there’s gwern.net, which does all sorts of fancy things with what I am told is completely optional JavaScript. Turning footnotes into sidenotes, that sort of thing. It has an entire Design page describing all the fancy stuff that goes into it, as well as an entire separate page that went into things that ended up not working out.

=> ↺ linkhut2outdoors

• This is a posix shell script for converting linkhut bookmarks to Solderpunk’s Smol Earth Compendium.

• You’ll get a text file; it’s up to you to then place that textfile on Gemini or Gopher.

• I’m not telling you to go use linkhut—the Smol Earth Compendium’s own format is much simpler, just use it straight up; this script is only good for people already using linkhut.

• It’ll only grab ones with the ‘outdoors’ tag (and remove that tag), and only bookmarks to pages on Gemini or Gopher, and not if they contain a tag that starts with the string “expires-2”. I want to submit more permanent entries.

Games

=> ↺ Dragons of Stormwreck Isle

• I finally got a chance to look at Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. This is a “capsule review” as opposed to a “playtest review” since I haven’t played it, only quickly thumbed through it! That’s right, I didn’t even read every room, just some of the intros.

• The original starter set, The Lost Mine of Phandelver, I’ve whole-heartedly recommended to new groups or people who wanna get started with D&D.

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