💾 Archived View for gemini.circumlunar.space › users › adiabatic › scrawlspace captured on 2022-03-01 at 15:03:44. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Scrawlspace

This is scrawlspace. I scrawl in this space. Do not expect coherence or permanence here.

2022-03-01: Being OK with missing responses

Background:

bacardi55 on gemlog replies

The relevant (to me) bit. Linebreaks added:

The Gemini community is globally very nice and I've really been enjoying the different interaction I had with fellow geminauts over station, tinylogs, gemlog entries or via email (keep emails coming!).

I really like those interactions, but I feel like interacting with each other over gemlog entries remains difficult. At least to ensure the author see all the responses to their posts.

It's very common to see a gemlog entry being a response to another author entry, but we don't have yet a simple way to notify each other.

The problem is, of course, how to contact the author of a given post to tell them we wrote a response? A "simple" solution would be going to the capsule, find the contact of the author and send an email… But not every capsule has a contact page and the process is very manual, requiring to use another tool and protocol to communicate.

One of the tradeoffs of a system where you’re going to see all replies to your posts is…you see all replies to your posts. Even replies you might not want to have seen.

Of course, people can and do put e-mail addresses or other contact information on their capsules. This is a good idea. I don’t, mainly because I weighed the pros and cons and figured that I’d rather not get a response to something I’ve written than risk the small chance of getting mail in my inbox that I’d rather not have gotten. Sure, Geminispace is mostly Calm™ now, but I like keeping my mellow un-harshed and I’m not much of a gambling man.

Of course, this dampens the likelihood of someone else writing a response to what I’ve written here. Without any surefire way to contact me, a potential respondent might wonder “sure, I could write something, but what if he’s not checking Antenna that week? He might miss my superlatively enlightening reply! It might be entire months before he checks the relevant backlinks page on geminispace.info!” and decide to not bother after all.

I take that sort of risk of failure-to-connect as part of communicating on the Internet itself, as opposed to a communication service hosted on top of the Internet, like Twitter or Tumblr.

And, of course, if I want either Twitter or Tumblr…I know where to find them.

2022-02-28: Do you care about how branded your capsule’s pages are?

Normal HTML pages have lots of branding and stuff on them, so if someone decides to download an HTML page from your site and save it on a hard drive somewhere, anyone who views that page will be able to figure out where on the Web it came from.

Ditto printed-out Web pages; they usually have some kind of URL of the page they’re of printed in the margins somewhere.

One of the nice things about gemtext is that you probably don’t need to brand every single page on your capsule. Any decent client will have Up functionality itself, leaving you to have a first-level heading that’s just the page title, without a sitewide header on every single page.

However, if you don’t, people might download one of your super-cool pages, and, three years later, have no idea where your capsule is, or at least was.

Here’s an example of a superlatively well-branded page:

“What’s the Deal with Leap Seconds? A Brief Overview of Timescales” by Solderpunk

It has a preformatted-text pseudo-header, plus a real header for the actual document. The preformatted-text header will help anybody who sees the document figure out “oh, this is from Circumlunar Transmissions, whatever that is” and the “Circumlunar Transmissions - Issue 1” link down at the bottom will give a further clue as to what the page is from.

But other capsule pages don’t. Most of my own capsule’s pages don’t really say where they’re from. This saved me quite a bit of work for the Halfway to Mars rebranding, but if, for some reason, someone hits Ctrl-S and saves a page of mine, well, then, good luck figuring out where it came from 18 months later.

At any rate, do you think this is a problem for your capsule? Or, like me, do you not really care?

2022-02-07: Always be closing

As mentioned previously, I am the owner of an Apple Watch.

There are three rings:

outer red ring: this is the Move ring. You make progress on it whenever you walk around or otherwise move.
middle green ring: this is the Exercise ring. You make progress on it when exercising at or beyond a brisk walk, or when you start a named exercise.
inner teal ring: This is the Stand ring. You make progress on it when you stand for at least one minute every hour.

Given the initial movement target for the red Move ring, there are only a few ways I could fail to close it:

stay in bed all day, only getting up to go to the bathroom, accept delivered pizza, and eat delivered pizza
not wearing the watch for more than half the day

“close your Move ring” seems like a subtle way to merely get people to wear the watch all day instead of leaving it off. Sure, I could crank it up materially, but I’m not convinced that’s a better idea than making sure I get decent levels of proper exercise per day.

The middle green Exercise ring closes automatically when you get your activity level “above a brisk walk”, or if you manually start a logged exercise from the watch.

This is the interesting ring to close. Cutoff times are right at midnight, so there’s no fancy logic for people who have a nonstandard sleep cycle. One evening, I started a 45-minute yoga session (with the three-months-free Apple Fitness+) at 11 PM. Still made the midnight cutoff, but if I’d started 35 minutes later I wouldn’t have closed that particular ring that day.

I should probably try HIIT workouts on Fitness+ if I’m feeling too lazy to prep for a gym run or even strap on the Ring Fit Adventure Joy-Con thigh garter, but yoga seems to about as useful for calorie burning as a walk around the neighborhood.

The inner teal Stand ring closes when you stand at least once per hour for at least one minute.

I turned the initial stand count down to 10 hours, mainly because I don’t have the thing on my wrist all the time and I don’t want to get penalized for not wearing the watch. I may turn it up back to 12 or whatever, but I don’t really have a strong incentive to do so.

One of the insights that I had the other day was “if I close all my rings, I won’t have any incentive to keep the watch on, and I’ll be able to take it off and just leave it on my desk until it’s time to go to bed”. This does not sound like the start of a happy, productive relationship with an electronic gizmo.

While I could stand to lose more than a few inches (ask any but one of my pairs of pants), the oblique “keep me on your wrist” clinginess via incentive structure is vaguely unsettling, even if it is useful. The exhortations to close one’s rings at the end of yoga sessions still manage to seem vaguely creepy.

2022-01-20: A man with one calorie tracker knows how much energy he’s burned; a man with two is never sure

I got an Apple Watch recently. It’s utterly incapable of telling the difference between me sleeping in bed and me lying in bed awake, making it useless for the main reason I bought it, but that’s a story for another day.

One of the ways I keep from morphing into a blob of fat is by doing Ring Fit Adventure for the Nintendo Switch. As you might guess, you can tell it your height and weight and, as part of all its tracking, will tell you how many calories you’ve burned during a play session.

Today’s play session lasted one hour and 40 minutes of wall-clock time. This translated into 48 minutes of exercise time (as opposed to resting-pose time, or navigating-through-menus time).

Ring Fit Adventure says that I burned 328.75 calories.

My Apple Watch, set to track calories as I perform “Fitness Gaming”, says I burned 891 “active calories”, and had a total calorie-burn count of 1,083 calories. This was counted during a duration of 1 hour and 37 minutes (I counted RFA’s cooldown separately).

The Apple Watch says at the outset of the exercise session that anytime it can’t track your calorie expenditure, it’ll fill in the estimate with however many calories are burned by a brisk walk, but I don’t have any idea how much workout time it had to use this fallback for.

For reference, 328 calories is, roughly, biking on a recumbent bicycle trainer at a leisurely pace for an hour or so, according to the bicycle trainers I’ve been on. Meanwhile, walking uphill at a 13% incline for an hour at 3 MPH (4.8 kph) burns about 800 calories, according to all the treadmills I’ve been on.

⁂

I’d like to have some kind of wrap-up or broader lesson that I drew from all this, but I don’t have one. I’m still stumped. Calling Unsolved Mysteries at (800) 876-5353 wouldn’t do anything, but I’m not sure what would.

2022-01-14: Size matters

Background information:

Overcast, an iOS and iPadOS podcast client

Concourse, a font by Matthew Butterick

Overcast got an update yesterday. From its release notes:

- Now exclusively uses the system font for practicality, modern design priorities, and broader world-language support. I bid a very fond farewell to the excellent Concourse font that served us well for many years.

While I can totally understand why Arment dropped Concourse in favor of SF Pro, the visual change had two pronounced effects on what the UI looked like:

On iOS, it seemed like the overwhelming majority of the app’s personality just died.
On iPadOS, the app seemed much more like a pro app. I was running it in dark mode at the time.

A net negative for my uses, but I really didn’t expect the weak positive on my iPad.

Updates

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