cadey at cetacean.club wrote a post today about their plan to experiment with automatically generating eBooks (in .epub and .mobi formats) from Gemini content fetched via Atom feeds, with chapters corresponding to days:
cadey's post "Newsbook Experiment"
On the whole I think this is a very cool idea. It's a great strength of text/gemini that it converts so simply and directly into various "nice to read" formats, like eBooks, or PDFs built from LaTeX. Receiving Gemini content in something like a weekly batch and then being able to read it offline on an eBook reader sounds like a lovely thing. It fits very well into the "offline first" computing model of seafarers and off-griders. It encourages consumption at a slow, healthy rate. These are all good things!
My single misgiving if the apparent plan to implement it as a single project, documenting *everything* that happens in Geminispace, with authors asking to have their content added to the one master list. I am currently working on a post for my full length Gemlog which is very relevant to preisely this issue, so stay tuned for that! But please don't let this comment give you the idea I don't think this is awesome and exciting. The essential idea is a very good one and I look forward to trying it.
I don't even remember how it happened, in that wonderful "rabbit hole of link-following" way of the internet, but lately I've really be enjoying checking out Japanese woodblock prints online. There's a more diverse range of styles than I realised (I'm not all *that* partial to what I personally think of as the prototypical style), and I am really digging some of the simpler, more graphic stuff. A random sprinkling of favourites (HTTPS links):
"Terminus: Tokawa Station" by Ino Eiji
"Cat in Straw Hat" by Maeda Morikazu
"Winter Peony" by Kanamori Yoshio
Via a toot by Alex Schroder I learned of this:
Very nice and thorough review of many Gemini clients
acdw writes:
I've been thinking for a few days now that the constellation doesn't update quickly enough. I've been used to the firehose of updates from the Big Web (or shall we call it the Terrestrial Web, or better yet, the Solar Web -- the sun constantly pounds us with millions of watts of radiation every second, whereas the Sidereal Web has smaller points of light, twinkling merrily in a vast black emptiness?), where every refresh brings more content, more images, more things to read and to look at, that the slower pace of the aptly-named Slow Web feels
glacial, or even unfair.
acdw's post "I feel like I have nothing more to say"
This is funny: lately I've been thinking the opposite! Okay, it's not too hard to keep up with CAPCOM and/or Spacewalk these days. But that's just the tip of the iceberg! I keep checking the GUS known host list, and it's still SSS growth other there - slow, steady, silent. New hosts are appearing, they're not on either of those aggregators, and nobody's announcing them on the mailing list (all of which is fine!). Some of them have great content (I'm enjoying rpdillon.net!). I feel like it won't be long at all before it's just not practical to keep up with everything. Which I have to admit triggers a little FOMO in me - but that's not a healthy mindset and something I should work on. Small and slow are good and healthy.
Words of wisdom from Tom of Foobaz
Nobody on Hacker News ever writes about geese. Computer nerds like me are the poorer for it.
The S24O happened, I made a lengthy report on it in my gemlog:
I have waaay too many computing related tasks/goals lying around that I am not making progress on. I think I need to make a concerted effort to better organise my tinkering time. Goals include but are not limited to:
Pushed S24O back to tomorrow after the weather forecast changed.
Finally started hacking away on a dead-simple self-signed cert generating tool for Gemini applications!
Thinking of doing an S24O tomorrow night! It will be my first in Sweden.
Have you checked out gemlog.blue yet? It offers free gemlog hosting which is managed through an ultralight web interface instead of ssh/sftp/rsync/git/etc. No javascript, no cookies, no third-party requests. Super cool.
Experimenting with a new mail client:
Too soon to say whether I'll stick with it. Initial impressions are mostly positive. Some stuff feels weird, but it's likely just a matter of being different to mutt and not objectively worse. Perhaps after a brief settling in period it will feel normal.
My wife and I recently made a simple little wooden frame with chickenwire in it that friction fits into our loungeroom's window frame, so we can open up said window to let a cool breeze in without our cat being able to escape. The cat loves it and now demands its installation each day, even when it's not hot enough that I would normally think it worthwhile. This morning it's cool and raining lightly and I wasn't looking forward to it, but actually it's really lovely. Fresh and atmospheric.