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My wife and I sat in our easy chairs at the end of the day and both commented that "today was a very good day". We didn't win the lottery, or welcome a new great grandchild, or even find a lucky penny on the sidewalk. It was, in most respects, rather quotidian. Amanda was here, and Jamie spent the afternoon with us. We prepared cookie trays to give to friends and families. That's really about all that happened that day that's worth mentioning now (two days later).
After agreeing that it was a good day I commented that I have seen about seventy December 20th's come and go and I can't remember anything at all about any of them. Neither of us could call up any memories associated with any of our previous fifth-day-before-Christmas days.
So, I went digging through the archives in my computer to see what was recorded for dates that included "12-20". The oldest record I found on my initial pass through the most accessible material was a few photos that we took (without flash) on December 20, 2002 at a children's Christmas pageant that we attended at our friends' church.
Six years later there are three snapshots we took while visiting our daughter and her family in Arkansas, and last year I took a couple of pictures of a batch of oatcakes that I baked on December 20. That's all the photographic memory aids I could find.
It was really easy to find records of purchases we've made on December 20 over the past decade or more: 2012 - $13.49 for a prescription and $2.15 at a fast-food burger place; 2013 - three grocery stores and lunch at another burger place; 2015 - car parts, a dollar store, a membership warehouse store, and a convenience store; 2019 - a grocery store, and my wife got her hair cut; 2021 - two different big-box retailers fifty miles apart, and parking at the airport where we picked up our grandson coming to visit; and 2022 - a gift for our grandson from a local specialty retailer. We live such exciting lives!
Digging deeper I found over two thousand e-mail messages containing "20 Dec" going back to the late 1990s, most from mailing-lists that I've participated in. I did notice that on that date in 2010 I read an article online that was particularly appropriate for one of our grandchildren so I forwarded a link to "Reading, Writing, ‘Rithmetic and Relationships" to my daughter.
Reading, Writing, ‘Rithmetic and Relationships
We remember the days our family members were born or died. Great joy or great trauma stand out in our memories, great days don't. Still, it was a very good day, and now we may remember that for even longer.
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📅 c: 2023-12-22 12:16 ✏️ e:
🏷 tags: #Christmas #memory #family
2023-12-22 12:16 📖 The Fiftieth December Twentieth
I've been casually monitoring the COP28 talks and I am more and more becoming convinced that they are primarily for show. Fossil fuel exporting nations won't accept (for good reason, from their perspective) any language in the agreements that includes the phrase "phase out" in relation to fossil fuels. Most other nations insist that such language is crucial to reaching an agreement.
COP28 Summit: Climate talks enter last day with no agreement in sight
The international agreements are probably important, but let's not lose sight of a crucial fact here. In all these economic transactions there is a producer/seller and a consumer/buyer. Even if the fossil fuel producers won't sign an agreement at some international meeting, the rest of us can certainly just stop buying what they're selling.
Don't let the instransigence of a minority and the showmanship of high-level gabfests distract you. Insist that your own local, regional, and national govermnents take appropriate actions to phase out the use of fossil fuels.
Big oil is too powerful? Stop buying gas from them.
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📅 c: 2023-12-12 12:26 ✏️ e:
🏷 tags: #COP28 #StopBuyingGas #DrivingIsSociallyUnacceptable #WalkingWorks #BikesAreNice #RideTheBus
2023-12-12 12:26 📖 Just Don't Buy It!
The oldest pages on my website date back to about 1997. I was in school, my ISP provided webspace for me as part of their service, so I learned to write HTML to take advantage of that. The School of Business at this university had recently decided that the ability to work well with others in group setting was a very important skill for their graduates to acquire. Nearly every course included a group project of some sort, and having a place to easily share files with group members proved to be very helpful.
HTML soon became my primary document format. I used word processor software for documents that required more than what HTML offered, but nearly everything else I wrote was done as HTML; in fact I soon started writing drafts of papers in HTML and then imported the HTML into a word processor for the final edit.
In the beginning I tried various ways of editing my HTML files. Netscape Navigator included authoring tools, W3C offered their Amaya software that was designed from the beginning to be both an editor and a browser, and most word processor software by this time had an option to export a document in HTML format. I soon dicovered a small editor (QuickPage) I liked that was designed just for editing HTML, and specifically tried to ensure that the HTML you wrote included only valid markup, making it easier for me to avoid careless mistakes as I wrote. I began to care even more about the quality of the HTML code that I wrote and soon updated all my pages to ensure they were compliant with the latest HTML specification: 4.0.
This worked well for me for the following 20 years or so. I spend most of my time with a web browser open anyway. If I needed to print a document the browser nearly always did a good job of that. HTML files are easy to edit, relatively small, and easy to share. I had been writing HTML for so long that I didn't mind inserting "<p>" and other markup as needed, it had become mostly automatic.
In May of 2022 I discovered the Gemini protocol and its associated gemtext file format. I tried it out for a while at tilde.team and discovered it was quick, light, had smaller document sizes than an equivalent HTML document, and really easy to write. I tinkered with it a while and soon decided to convert most of my existing HTML to gemtext on my website. (There are a few documents I left as HTML that demand the more complex features of HTML, but even some of those I provide a simplified gemtext version of.) I never learned to like Markdown, I often resorted to just inserting HTML code into the markdown file anyway, so it never really semed worth the effort to master it. But gemtext is a breath of fresh air! When I bump up against its limitations I can still switch to HTML, so I am really enjoying writing again.
Now I find that gemtext has become my new default document type. My biggest frustration though, has been that I only know of one Gemini client that prints a nicely rendered gemtext document: Rosy Crow. Sadly, even that one has not been working properly on my phone since recent updates.
This past week I spent a few days exploring what options there might be. The simplest option would be "lpr myfile.gmi", but this just prints the raw text of the file rather than a nicely-formatted version that clients like Lagrange offer, and it doesn't even word-wrap the lines. Gemtext is simple to parse, so I thought I might write a quick script to generate a nicer version to send off to the printer. Soon I was up to my eyebrows in LaTeX, PostScript, and PDF generation -- there is NOTHING simple about that option. Those toolsets are very old and very complex to work with, and do not easily handle Unicode characters. Of course it could be a case of "yes, Linux is user-friendly, it's just real picky about who its friends are", since my programming skills are rather shallow.
The best option I've found for printing a gemtext document is converting it to HTML, loading that into a web browser, and printing from there. There are dozens of gemtext-to-HTML converters available; the one I found easiest to use is a single PHP script that I found somewhere last year. I thought it had come from Hundredrabbits, but couldn't find any reference to it on their site. I originally stored it in a directory named "gemini.sensorstation.co/" with a read-me file named "computing.gemini.gmi-to-html.gmi". Similarly, I can find no reference to it at gemini.sensorstation.co, so I can't offer a link to the source. It includes no comments or metadata within the file to offer clues. I suppose I could publish my modified version of the file if anyone is interested in it.
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/hundredrabbits/
gemini://gemini.sensorstation.co/
That's great for printing gemtext files that are on my webserver, but I want to print files from my local nework. I do already have PHP running on my local desktop machine but didn't want to mess with installing and configuring a real webserver. A few modifications to the script now allow me open a local gemtext in a web browser and then hit CTRL-p to print. It is clunky and cumbersome but it will work until I can convince the rest of the world that sometimes we do still need to print paper copies of our documents, and it would be good for full-featured Gemini clients to offer that option.
I've spent another day or two looking at this issue and have worked out a two-pronged approach for generating printed documents from gemtext source files.
The first I have already implemented, thanks to the generosity of Frank Seifferth, who e-mailed me offering his solution to the problem: a Python script that generates nice PDF files from gemtext. I spent a little while building a custom CSS stylesheet and now get good-looking prints when I need them. There are two limitations to gemdoc that lead me to continue working on this problem.
Another limitation of gemdoc is also a feature that I like: the PDF that is generated is a gemtext/pdf polyglot -- the same file can be viewed in your Gemini client and in a PDF viewer with no modifications. The slight disadvantage with this is that Gemini clients will display the first couple of lines of the PDF code at the top of the page, and a large chunk of PDF code at the bottome of the page, which may be acceptable for some uses. The generated file functions perfectly as a PDF though. Another slight annoyance is that gemdoc over-writes the source gemtext file, but this was easy enough to work around. This program is almost what I need, and if I had any experience with Python I'd work on getting it to do what I want. It is what I'm relying on for now. Thanks, Frank! (If you'd like to try my gemdoc stylesheet I've included a link here.)
https://github.com/seifferth/gemdoc
The second solution came to me while I was customizing my gemdoc stylesheet. Web browsers do a good job of displaying -- and printing -- documents. I'm already familar with HTML/CSS and PHP and with some Bash scripting to glue together various bits of the work flow I'll have something that works just right for me. Browsers can print direct to my printers, or print to a PDF file that I can then easily print. Browsers seem to have conquered the issue of reliably displaying Unicode. So I'm brushing up my CSS skills regarding paged media and I'll add @media sections to the code I'm already using. When it's all finished I'll make a new post with more details.
I've decided not to use gemdoc for my blog posts -- at least for now -- because I'll have to rewrite my blog scripts to accomadte the PDF content.
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📅 c: 2023-12-06 19:40 ✏️ e: 22023-12-12 13:17
🏷 tags: #print #gemtext #php #script #gemdoc
2023-12-06 19:40 📖 The Gemtext Print Hurdle
2023-09-23 00:41 📖 A Puzzling Development
🏷 tags: #puzzles #diagrams #HowToThink
2023-04-02 17:57 📖 How To Buy Shoes
🏷 tags: #shoes #embarrassment #lessons #CustomerService
2023-02-27 13:44 📖 Climate Action?
🏷 tags: #StopBuyingGas #DrivingIsSociallyUnacceptable #WalkingWorks #BikesAreNice #RideTheBus
2023-02-07 14:36 📖 What Can I Say?
🏷 tags: #ClimateChange #Degrowth
2023-01-22 12:42 📖 What's Your Plan?
🏷 tags: #degrowth #WhatsYourPlan #LetsPlanTogether
2022-11-16 18:10 📖 Open Harassment Period
🏷 tags: #Medicare #telemarketers #phone #harassment
2022-10-20 11:26 📖 How Can We Decide?
🏷 tags: #election #voting #information #deficit
2022-10-08 20:53 📖 A Very Cranberry Day
🏷 tags: #cranberries #oats #porridge
2022-09-26 12:58 📖 This Week's Photo Assignment
🏷 tags: #photo #assignment #scholartree
2022-09-24 23:04 📖 It's Happened Again...
🏷 tags: #age #celebration
2022-09-14 21:48 📖 How Do I Change The World?
🏷 tags: #climatechange #crisis #personal #adaptation
2022-09-08 22:57 📖 Historical Blog Entries
tags: #blog #history
2022-08-22 10:58 📖 Why Am I Here?
tags: #freedom #censorship #exile
tags: #open-source #fear #security #friendship
2022-08-03 13:06 📖 Things I've Learned From My Granddaughter
tags: #learning #teaching #parenting #diet #wieght-loss #nutrition
2022-07-26 07:21 📖 A Tired Old Man
tags: #tired #hopeful
2022-07-19 13:08 📖 There Is No Jewish Religion?
tags: #religion #judaism #christianity #hebrew #english
2022-07-17 20:22 📖 W.H.E.O.S.O.E.
tags: #exhausted #refreshed
2022-07-16 05:47 📖 Welcome To The Past
tags: #nostalgia #building #relationships
2022-07-14 20:20 📖 Finished (For Now)
tags: #success #uncertainty
2022-06-25 19:56 📖 Wow! The Lagrange TUI Rocks!
tags: #happy #textmode
2022-06-20 08:00 📖 Temporarily Relocated
tags: #tired, #happy
2005-04-23 20:04 📖 Another Operator: An M2 Stripper?
🏷 tags: #Opera #M2mail #e-mail #attachments #utilities
2005-04-17 06:39 📖 Papa's House: Thanks A Lot!
tags: #family #travel #customerservice
2005-03-23 07:20 📖 Papa's House: My Days As An Eco-Terrorist
tags: #childhood #adventures
2005-02-05 07:29 📖 Papa's House: Are You Serious?
tags: #ambiguity #context
2005-01-29 10:39 📖 Papa's House: What Do You Want To Be If You Grow Up?
tags: #goals #family #ambiguity
2005-01-23 02:40 📖 Papa's House: Hey, I Really Made A Mistake
tags: #errors
2005-01-18 07:37 📖 Papa's House: All Together Now
tags: #family #cooperation
2005-01-12 09:01 📖 Papa's House: A Walk In The Park
tags: #family #childhood #fun
2005-01-11 08:00 📖 Papa's House: The Nutty Nutcracker
tags: #family #school #performance
2005-01-10 12:42 📖 Papa's House: Carol's Quilt For Kaylee
tags: #family #crafts #quilt
2005-01-03 09:01 📖 Papa's House: Old And Older
tags: #family #travel #memories
2005-01-03 07:46 📖 Papa's House: Welcome
tags: #family #blog
2005-01-03 06:01 📖 Another Operator: Opera On USB Flash Drive - It Sorta Works
🏷 tags: #Opera #portableapps #thumbdrive
2004-07-11 02:07 📖 Another Operator: Why Only Opera?
🏷 tags: #Opera #irc #etiquette
2004-04-24 16:04 📖 Another Operator: I Give Up
🏷 tags: #userstyles #stylesheets #Opera
2004-01-26 07:01 📖 Another Operator: Oh No!
🏷 tags: #userstyles #stylesheets #Opera
2004-01-08 14:01 📖 Another Operator: System Colors For Stylesheets
🏷 tags: #userstyles #stylesheets #Opera
2003-12-21 07:12 📖 Another Operator: Only One Of Many
🏷 tags: #Opera #blog
2003-09-27 17:11 📖 ROAD STUFF: No, Not Yet
tags: #travel #stories
2003-09-13 17:13 📖 ROAD STUFF: Almost There
tags: #travel #desert #highways
2003-09-09 16:24 📖 ROAD STUFF: Day Eleven
tags: #travel #family #anniversary
2003-09-08 07:37 📖 ROAD STUFF: Day Ten
tags: #travel #family #Colorado
2003-09-03 16:50 📖 ROAD STUFF: Day Five
tags: #travel #family
2003-09-01 08:42 📖 ROAD STUFF: That's A Pretty Good Start
tags: #travel #Utah
2003-08-30 05:45 📖 ROAD STUFF: Are We There Yet?
tags: #travel #highways
2003-08-29 20:41 📖 ROAD STUFF: Last Night Home
tags: #travel #preparation #planning
2003-08-27 10:09 📖 ROAD STUFF: More Preparation
tags: #travel #preparation
2003-08-27 09:16 📖 ROAD STUFF: Help!
tags: #travel #preparation #lost
2003-08-24 17:45 📖 ROAD STUFF: Getting ready.
tags: #travel #preparation #lost
2003-08-24 14:02 📖 ROAD STUFF: Well... It's A Start
tags: #travel #preparation
1998-08-08 00:00 📖 Newman Occasional Journal: A common citizen
tags: #family #perspective
1998-08-01 00:00 📖 Newman Occasional Journal: Introduction
tags: #family #war #history #populationgrowth #perspective
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