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smolZINE - Issue 21

2022-03-01

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Excited to bring you some lovely gems in this issue as well as bring your attention to a neat gemini browser I've been enjoying down in the Emanations section. Lets go.

Hidden (and not so hidden) Gems

Nomadpenguin's Cozy Antilibrary

Nomad Penguin self-describes as "...a lapsed programmer, aspiring brain scientist, theory enthusiast, and music tinkerer." Their capsule is personal and includes thoughts, essays and a gemlog.

Nomadpenguin's Cozy Antilibrary

binarycat's capsule

This charming young capsule is home to binarycat, a toki pona and plan 9 enthusiast.

binarycat's capsule

l-3.space

A lovely random discovery when I stumbled on the neat gemini implementation of a board game called Tak. Other topics you'll find here include mathematics, computers and electronics.

l-3.space

malinfreeborn.com

Some recipes, linux and FOSS talk, philosophy and a few other topics all nicely organized into topical categories and an RSS feed is provided as well.

malinfreeborn.com

Bjorn's Garden of Hypertext

Bjorn's capsule has some quite interesting reading on the subject of the environment as well as a few other things. There is also a bookmarks page where you might find a neat capsule or two you haven't seen before.

Bjorn's Garden of Hypertext

Emanations

Offpunk

If you haven't heard of it before Offpunk is a gemini client/browser that has an increasingly unique set of features, developed by ploum. While it started as a fork of Solderpunk's AV-98 it is now quite a bit different. The main difference is Offpunk's focus on offline usage. Offpunk can be used normally to browse gemini in real time while connected to the internet but the really interesting part is its ability to sync capsules to your local machine, enter an offline mode and browse as your normally would while completely disconnected from the internet. This offline ability is also quite flexible with options to specify which capsules get synced and how old you want the offline capsules to be before they get re-fetched by the sync operation.

Beyond the cornerstone offline feature there are a number of other features that make Offpunk different. Recently it has gained some new abilities such as rendering http/s links (after running them through a readability filter so they are nice and pretty), browsing gopher and also displaying images directly in your terminal. Whether you are interesting in being a litte more "offline" or just curious about some less well-known gemini clients I recommend giving it a try. Offpunk does things differently and is very unique experience in geminispace.

You can read a number of posts explaining some of the features and philosophy behind Offpunk's development on ploum's gemlog linked below.

ploum's gemlog

Get Offpunk

- kelbot

Recreation

Chess Puzzle

by carriunix

. . ♜ . . . . .
♚ ♟ . ♜ . ♟ ♟ .
♟ ♖ . . ♟ ♞ ♟ .
. . ♙ ♛ . . . .
. . . ♙ . . . .
. ♕ . . . . . .
. . . . ♘ . ♙ ♙
. ♖ . . . . ♔ .

White (♙) mate in 4.

Solution

Stinky Pinky

by kelbot

To play Stinky Pinky you will need to read the two descriptions below. They each describe a word and the two words rhyme. Example: 1. Smelly, 2. Finger; Answer: Stinky Pinky. Get it? You can email your answer to the address found at the bottom of each smolZINE to confirm if you are correct. The first to answer wins...uhhh I haven't figured that out yet so my congrats will have to do for now.

1. Red fruit

2. Type of boat

Community Contributions & Discussion

Please consider taking part in making this zine better and more diverse by contributing your thoughts and finds. If you are interested in contributing a short article or capsule picks email me at: smolzine (at) cyberbot.space.

If you have any feedback or just want to discuss anything related to gemini or smolZINE hit me up at the above email or ping me on the fediverse at kelbot@retro.social and/or use the #smolZINE tag.

Thanks

Thank you to the following geminauts for their contributions to this issue of smolZINE.