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● 09.16.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 16/09/2023: Practicing Counting in Chinese and Hashnix Radio

Posted in News Roundup at 4:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

=> ↺ Practicing counting in chinese

• When i was in china and surrounded by people speaking all sorts of different languages, i started a cruel experiment whenever anyone started counting in english, by saying unrelated numbers at the same time. The point of this experiment was to confirm that people will always fall back to counting in their native language. It was very unscientific but happened every time.

• My friend recently said that they might consider maths a sort of language of its own. In some ways i agree, but i think at least that something about the way that we develop mathematical or counting ability ties itself more firmly to our native language than other things.

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: ACKYTWR Wordo: BEADS

=> ↺ D&D at the drop of a hat

• I can drop ‘em right into my ongoing campaign, plenty of stuff for them to do and explore there, and I have many ways of making characters that are all compatible up with the big 5e game down the line. From pregens or the Essentials Kit to something in the middle like Dungeonesque and if they’re really non-nerdy and just wanna dip their toes, I have my own “Searcher” class. I don’t use it if I think they are serious about getting into full D&D but it’s nice because it only has two stats and those are both derived straight up from level. So in short, if I think they’re future nerds I’ll use the Essentials Kit and if I think they’re pretty set in their non-nerd ways I’ll use my searcher class, and it’s no big deal if I guess wrong because it’s easy to switch over.

Technology and Free Software

=> ↺ Ansible no more, moved all services to containers.

• As the title, I have abandoned Ansible in favor of containers. My setup still uses Terraform to deploy and configure Hetzner Cloud as always, but I have updated the cloud-init bootstrap to install Docker instead. I then deploy my infrastructure via Docker Compose.

=> ↺ New dumb phone at last, it cost £11.50 but came with £10 credit.

• I have been on the search for a true dumbphone for a long time now [0], the best I could achieve, without spending a small fortune, was running a Nokia 2.3 smartphone with a minimal launcher which I paid £60 for.

=> ↺ Of Unity, childhood and making games

• As a child from the 90s living in a small city in Mexico, playing video games was something out of this world… from the future. Having an Arcade machine in the neighborhood, paying a few quarters, and enjoying 15 minutes of the latest game was amazing. I remember the release of Nintendo 64 with stunning 3D graphics, and having change to play for a few minutes in every store. Also, sound cards and 3D graphic cards were more accessible, so we could play in our family computers.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Hashnix Radio

• Hashnix Radio open mic is now available to gemini! You can find the announcement post in the link below, as well as the link to the radio stream + details.

=> ↺ Hashnix.club Open Mic

• Hashnix Radio Open Mic streaming is now available to the geminispace! There’s a gemini-compatible stream + the icecast details made availble via the links below.

• Feel free to use this subspace as a way to coordinate when you stream in, or take turns trading off with someone else requesting to stream, or even to see if anyone else is streaming or might want to join in on listening and broadcasting.

Programming

=> ↺ TDD in C (make is all you need)

• There are a few things I used to think I’d miss going back to C from a more “modern” programming language. Lately I’ve been writing a lot of C again and finding that not to be the case, either because I just don’t actually miss the language feature or because it’s nowhere near as hard to simulate or manually implement as I thought it would be. Take sum types (tagged unions) for instance. At it’s heart all that’s required to add some type safety to a union is to associate it with an enum tag. In C this can be as simple as stuffing an enum and a union into struct fields and providing functions to access them only after checking the tag field.

• One thing that I think languages like Rust, Go and Zig have put to the fore is including a nice test framework right at language level. Going back to C, I thought it might be even more beneficial to do test driven development than in “safer” languages, but the tooling doesn’t really exist out of the box. So on one of my recent scribbles I set out to see how hard it would be to do some TDD using just what you might have on any POSIX system – namely the compiler and POSIX make.

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