Wed Apr 13 22:46:31 UTC 2022
What is it about Wednesdays?
Some older entries here have been mangled for some time now. I was originally
saving them as UTF-8, which may have something to do with it. Trivial enough
that I can't be arsed, but I did at least get rid of all the extraneous
linefeeds.
I still spend most of my time in a terminal, and for the most part remain
happy there. But even with my carefully crafted and curated collection of
config files, I'm noticing more and more of late how all the various tools and
environments are showing - not their age necessarily, but their crumbling
infrastructure and lack of general maintenance. Like the Linux framebuffer
that was the crown jewel of INX [0] but fell into squalor and disrepair, the
console in general has never gone away and in fact has recently seen a revival
of interest. But this is exposing more of the warts and quirks, from line
drawing characters to color management. Try as I might to get all my texttop
programs looking and working the same, I remain stymied by the multitude of
standards. Bad enough people insist on writing terminal programs in Go and
Rust. I know, I know. At least it's not node.js.
And it's not an isolated thing. Jumping around from tin to mutt to lynx is
already jarring enough before running into more annoying decisions and
frustrating tradeoffs. Lynx does Gopher but not Gemini, so I need a client
that does Gemini. Sure, I already have a million programs and one more isn't
going to cause the whole thing to come crashing down. But especially when I
have such trouble getting these tools to behave consistently in my hands, then
if possible I'd like to avoid cramming another into an already overflowing
tool chest. The more of them sitting around without an obvious cohesive
interface tying them all together, the more I tend to forget they even exist
until they pop up to annoy me in a random bash history search when I'm looking
for something else.
In the case of Gemini, I was trying bombadillo. Good idea in theory, but I
still have no idea how you actually go to a bookmark once you've saved it - I
can bring up the list of bookmarks, and tab back and forth between that and
the main window, but any numbers entered stubbornly insist on following links
from the main window. And if you enable the option to give you access to
the filthy plebian world of http, not just the rarefied exclusive cyber
neighborhoods of Gemini and Gopher, the inconsistencies become even more
apparent. Don't get me started on trying to maintain my Solarized color
settings in the face of all this cruft. And WTF wtfutil - over forty megabytes
for this program? To do what even in these decadent times any halfway decent
shell script and countless other programs can manage in a few hundred
kilobytes?
Of course there are plenty of gems. Despite the occasional annoyances, lynx
and mutt remain solid workhorses. epy turned out to be an excellent and
feature-packed ebook reader to replace the old epub.py I was using. btop is
visually appealing without going overboard on form over function. And bless
the folks who took over the abandoned newsbeuter and gave us newsboat.
I know half the problems I run into are probably due to my insisting on
accessing the host systems from all sorts of different client software, not
always on the same operating system. I think part of my malaise in this regard
stems from what I see as a similar balkanization of the people. Sure, there's
probably a good deal of crossover between those who read Gopher pages and
those who read Usenet. But in practice, those communities almost might as well
be walled gardens. SDF itself has two chat systems I'm aware of, an IRC and
some bizarre old CP/M looking thing I can't recall the name of. Part of this
is the prevailing attitudes of the people in question - it's like any attempt
at actual social networking is viewed with bemusement or even disdain, like
something only "normies" do. Here and there I do see people who seem to be
trying to blend the best of the old with the new. But too many are either
stuck in the mud of the past, or striking some steampunk pose that's more
about mimicry and fashion than finding the right tool for the job.
Pretty much every time someone tells me I need to create Yet Another Account
on Yet Another Site, I instantly nope out. And pretty much every time, it
turns out I don't need to. Just like I try to minimize the number of
"accounts" I have to deal with and be responsible for, I strive to keep my
toolbox uncluttered. That way I know what I have, and I can quickly lay hands
on whatever I need.
Imagine how opinionated I'd be if I actually had to work with this stuff for a
living.
[0]
http://www.inx.maincontent.net/
