💾 Archived View for carcosa.net › journal › 20210215-catchup-tech.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:09:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I've had a productive couple of weeks for thinking; not so productive for writing or making anything. Acquired some slow technology, or things to add to my slow technology lifestyle. Thought about a lot of projects, didn't do a lot of them. I'm going to catch up here.
Maybe the biggest thing is that I'm completely off of social media, both corporate and distributed. There are a number of reasons, but the main one considered in the long term is that I've come to believe social media is a neoliberal project – it facilitates the marketing of the atomized individual as a brand, the value of which is to be maximized. Decentralized social media, such as Mastodon, doesn't really do anything to change the dynamics of this project. I'm coming around to the idea that there's no way to do public, global, short-form writing that doesn't fall into this trap.
My main alternative has been private, closed-group short-form writing, in the form of private Matrix group chats with friends, and also some semi-public XMPP chat rooms. I'd like to be doing more public, global, long-form writing (on Gemini), but that's not where my head has been.
I wrote up a post about how to make Gemini more accessible to mainstream/non-technical users, got discouraged about it and didn't finish it, then decided to publish it unfinished. I'm posting it along with this note, but backdated, so it probably won't show up in your feeds.
A user-friendly interface for Gemini
Thanks to a conversation with some friends who don't work in tech, I have gotten a better idea of what the actual roadblocks are for normal people who have heard of Gemini and found it interesting, but have been unable to get into it. In order to address those problems, I'm working on a Gemini quickstart guide, the first part of which goes on the World Wide Web, and guides them through installing a client, finding things to read, and hopefully eventually setting up a space to write. I have a domain for it, and have been doing some writing. There's still a lot to do.
Since 2018, I've been doing as much as possible of my reading on a reconditioned Kobo Touch (2011) that I bought for under $30. I had mainly wanted to see if I liked reading on an eInk device, and whether it would help me to read a longer book (compared to trying to read on my phone). It turned out that I really liked it, and used it a lot. One drawback was that it didn't have a front-light, like most newer readers, and in practice, this was my main complaint with it. I tried various cheap book-lights with it, but they were always hard to position properly and tended to get in the way. It was also surprisingly low resolution – 800x600 at 6", for 160 DPI. Compared to desktop screens of the 2000s, 160 DPI is pretty high, but now we've gotten used to >200 DPI on phones, and I could notice defects in the font rendering. Waterproof would have been nice (reading in the bathtub!), but not a high priority.
I ended up shopping around a bit, looking for refurbished, open box, or new old stock, because I don't like to buy brand new electronics for cost and environmental reasons. I strongly considered a Kobo Aura 2; they seem to be generally the best buy in ebook readers at this time, but I kept noticing that the Kobo Clara HD had a higher resolution display, for 300 DPI. The going rate for an open box Aura 2 was already more than I wanted to pay, but given that, it wasn't much of a stretch to go for a Clara HD. I won't say what I ended up paying, but it was a little below what they tend to go for.
I've been super happy with it. It was quick to activate it and install KOReader on it, which has many advantages over the built-in Nickel reader. The front-light automatically adjusts its color temperature based on the time of day, and the font rendering is super crisp. So if I haven't been writing much, the fact that I'm reading so much may have something to do with it.
Heading says it all – I've started writing a Gemini client library for Common Lisp, with the intention of using it in a feed reader application similar to CAPCOM. I haven't gotten to put much time into it yet, and it shouldn't take very long. The interface will be similar to the widely used Common Lisp HTTP client Drakma, which in turn is similar to Python's Requests library. It will support redirects and streams, and will have very basic support for client certificates. It won't directly support TOFU server certificate validation, only making server certificates available to the caller, in case they want to implement it.
My ThinkPad X230, another piece of electronics I bought used, came with a 300 MB HDD. I don't need more space, but I did notice that a lot of the slow-downs I experienced with it were due to waiting on disk IO. So I decided now was the time to replace it with an SSD like I'd wanted to for some time. I got a cheap 500MB 2.5" SATA SSD, and a dongle that can connect a SATA drive to USB, externally, and made sure my backups were up to date.
Installing the drive was super-easy, given that it's a ThinkPad, and installing Fedora Workstation 33 on it went really quickly. Copying my data over and installing missing applications was pretty quick, though it was a bit of effort to remember what all needed to come, other than /home.
What's really been a pain, though, is that the display now has a tendency to glitch in certain applications, most notably Alacritty and most annoyingly in Firefox. I'm not sure whether the SSD is causing some kind of interference that is messing with the Intel integrated video, or if there is some obscure configuration that was on my old Fedora 33 install (continuously upgraded from 26 or so) that I'm now missing. If anyone has a clue, please let me know.
So, if you've made it to the end, thanks for bearing with me. This update is kind of pointless, but it lets you know what I've been doing. Please send me replies by email if you have something to say about it.