---------------------------------------- | |
Some replies from Iceland | |
July 05th, 2019 | |
---------------------------------------- | |
Hi everybody! I'm in Iceland now. We moved this past weekend and | |
we're settled in an airbnb for July getting everything in place. | |
If you're interested in my expat adventures, that's something I'm | |
writing over in web-land so my parents and wife's friends can | |
follow. Check it out [0]. | |
[0] tomasino blog | |
Tonight I thought it would be fun to take stock of recent things | |
happening on gopher and send some feedback. So, here goes: | |
moji, over on circumlunar, has detailed their efforts to cut back | |
on the caffeine [1]. It's a solid post and raises some good | |
thoughts on what it means to be reliant on something like coffee. | |
Addictions, even relatively benign ones, have some hold on you. | |
I can totally respect the effort. More power too you. | |
[1] moji - caffeine | |
pkotrcka, whose name I have to be very careful typing out, wrote | |
a neat phlog about cameras that put my head in weird places [2]. | |
Mainly it made me sad that photography is pretty much dead. | |
I mean, not really at all, but as a profession it's gone from this | |
highly technical artform with super expensive equipment, years of | |
training required and it's been overrun by quick snaps with your | |
phone and bottled filters. There's little spots left for the art, | |
like wedding photos and... is that it? Really though it's a "dead" | |
technology in the same way gopher is. | |
There's the part where my mind turned happy again. When we say | |
it's dead that just means that capitalism stopped seeing monetary | |
value. That's not the same thing at all. Why is there no money in | |
gopher? Well, not enough people to be worth the effort investing. | |
Photography? Same thing. Niche stuff sure, but other than than | |
just let it return to the afficianados. Let the pkotrckas of the | |
world have their fun, right? Keep on keeping on, pkotrcka. | |
[2] pkotrcka - cameras | |
The amazing, incredible visiblink did some hard work recently | |
cleaning up insulation and maybe asbestos [3]. Well done. That's | |
not what I wanted to comment on at all, though. At the very end of | |
the phlog they mention that the gopher hole switched over to a pi | |
zero w, saving more power. I love this ultra-low power stuff. | |
I have some basic notes on how I stripped my pi zero down to the | |
minimum draw for the little free library project. I recommend | |
checking it out in my archives for tidbits. | |
[3] visiblink - asbestos | |
Ubergeek kayaking with son | |
ubergeek got his son out kayaking and that's so awesome [4]. | |
I adore kayaking. It was really sad having to sell my kayak when | |
we moved. There's something really ... perfect about being out on | |
the water. I can close my eyes and feel myself relax just thinking | |
about it. | |
I learned to kayak in Alaska in Resurrection Bay, near Seward. It | |
was cold and beautiful. I saw bears and salmon and eagles and was | |
forever in love. I love lakes now. They're so smooth and you can | |
just pull yourself a bit with the paddles and drift away. | |
Anyway, I can see why his son is connecting with it. I wish you | |
both the best. It's some special stuff, there. Good dad-ing. | |
[4] ubergeek - kayaking | |
Our pal heavysquare sent me an email the other day asking me to | |
point his phlog roll post to the root directory where he's added | |
a really killer gophermap. There's so much more to see than just | |
the "noise" phlog I had there before. Check him out [5]. | |
[5] heavysquare | |
Finally, there was a lot of talk this past week about Gemini's | |
link syntax [6,7,8]. Out goes the [|] and in comes the =>. I'm | |
into it, guys. It's cool as heck. Here's my 2-cents: | |
1. Spaces optional. You can split on whitespace easy enough with | |
regex alone and not care if it's one space, zero, or | |
a tab-space-tab-space salsa. | |
2. Link first. We're talking about clients doing some magic in the | |
gemini world, but how much should we rely on the client's | |
display choices to fulfill that important note that a URL | |
should always be shown. If we have it at the end it could get | |
cropped off screen or hidden in a wrap or any number of things. | |
Link first is more likely to be seen, easier to parse across | |
languages, and MOST importantly, means that the label can be | |
optional. | |
You see how I'm linking to things paragraph by paragraph in | |
this post? I have numbers referencing things with the square | |
bracket syntax because it's my convention, but the position of | |
the links in context to the copy says enough about what they | |
are. In many cases I just described the link in a paragraph and | |
the label on the link is redundant. If the label in gemini is | |
optional then you can just do something like: | |
=> gemini://cosmic.voyage | |
And let it live on its own. | |
[6] solderpunk - quick update on link syntax | |
[7] ascraeus - peter frampton reference | |
[8] sloum - commentary on link syntax | |
Thanks gophers. Keep gophin' around. |