💾 Archived View for mrnd.xyz › log › reading.gmi captured on 2020-11-07 at 01:03:50. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I don't like reading long-form content on computers. Or even worse, on a mobile phones.
There are many things to dislike: easiest thing to point at are probably all the infinite distractions. There are so many other things one could do on the same device, on some other tab. It is very easy to quickly skim the content and move on.
The second problem is the device itself, or more specifically the display: I am not exactly sure what the problem with light-emitting displays is, but they are definitely not ideal. Maybe it is simply the fact that it is very hard to keep the brightness in sync with your surroundings (too bright and it hurts your eyes, too low and you lose the contrast).
It also seems like bright displays create some sort of portal effect: when looking through the bright window, it is easier to ignore your surroundings, which to me makes it harder to be intentional when using your devices.
The point being, I really like e-ink devices. They are more comfortable to read with, but they also help protect against distractions, yet don't trigger my hyperfocus as easily as bright screens.
Books are easy: even if they often come with DRM, that is usually easy to strip away.
For longer web content, I add them to my Wallabag instance, which parses the content and saves it in case of link rot. Then I have a script that converts the text content into a epub-file, and sends them to my reader tablet.
Another nice tool is Goosepaper: it combines multiple feeds into a single file, that I generate and sync to my reader daily with cron:
you can include RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, news articles, wikipedia articles-of-the-day, weather, and more. I read it when I wake up so that I can feel anxious without having to get my phone.
For me the point is to feel less anxious: I can pre-commit to select news sources, which helps reduce the drive to constant doomscrolling throughout the day.
My latest innovation on this area was to do the same with Gemini content: I have a script that fetches all Gemini-links from CAPCOM with `gmni`, converts them into PDF through LaTeX, and then syncs them to the reader. Now I can read the latest Gemini posts on my tablet, without having to actively browse anything!
This is not yet perfect: the converter doesn't conform to the Gemtext spec completely, as it follows the LaTeX-semantics with lines. But most of Gemini content seems to separate paragraphs with empty lines anyway, so it works out nicely.
And links of course don't work, but maybe the script could follow them recursively to some depth...
A̶n̶y̶w̶a̶y̶s̶,̶ ̶I̶'̶m̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶b̶a̶b̶l̶y̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶g̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶p̶u̶b̶l̶i̶s̶h̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶c̶r̶i̶p̶t̶ ̶a̶t̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶y̶e̶t̶:̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶h̶a̶c̶k̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶g̶e̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶h̶a̶r̶d̶ ̶c̶o̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶p̶a̶t̶h̶s̶ ̶e̶t̶c̶ ̶ See the appendix!
Hopefully this idea can be an inspiration to someone though!
At least for me, automating away some of the browsing and taking a step back from the computer helps being more mindful with my tech usage, and improves my relationship with it.
I was asked to provide a picture of the result:
This entry as it arrived on my device
I also cleaned up the script a little, so here is the core: it accepts gemtext formatted text as input, and outputs Latex in stdout
gemtex.rb - a script to convert gemtex into latex
Similar tool was also published for HTML:
There is also a Pandoc issue for gemtext support:
