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This is scrawlspace. I scrawled in this space. Do not expect coherence or permanence here.
If youād like to see newer entries, have a look at 2024ās page:
The universe handed me an unpleasant but ultimately tolerable surprise today.
After dealing with it, did that ālisten to your bodyā thing that is a good idea from time to time.
My heart was a little too busy for me sitting on my chair doing diddly squat.
I checked my watch.
101 BPM, give or take.
I figured that if I was going to have a three-digit heart rate, I ought to do something that deserves it.
So I got up off my backside and did some dance-qua-exercise.
I had all the coordination of a man who misses voting for Reaā scratch that, Nixon ā but I got the ticker going at a proper 150something beats per minute with a good reason for it.
It is nowā¦97 beats per minute, now that Iām out of the shower. Success?
I saw a tweet today that boiled down to āthe kids these days (actually college students) donāt know where places areā.
I was a kids-these-days once. One of my international-relations textbooks had a short lament by the author; he said that people donāt know where things are because they havenāt properly memorized where things are in relation to each other.
He then helpfully explains how to go about memorizing where stuff is, like he had to when he was younger. Hereās the technique, first complicated for expository purposes:
ā
Take a place. Like, say, the Great Plateau in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
ā
Now, this is an overly complicated example, as it deals with fuzzy boundaries and geographic areasā¦not all of which have names. For something closer to home, one can bang out statesā neighbors much faster:
ā
If you memorize locations like this, you wonāt have to spend any time looking at a map to answer questions like āsure, thereās North Korea and South Korea, but what would West Korea and East Korea be?ā. Youāll just know that the answer is āChina and Japan, respectivelyā.
I go to the eye doctor. My right eyeās been bugging me, and now my left eye, too.
Doc says my eyes arenāt slimy enough. Happens to people who stare at a computer all day. Of course, Iāve been doing that for decades and not needed extra slime until now. On the other hand, middle age is all about having things become problems that havenāt been problems ever before.
I get some slime and put them in my eyes. First just the right eye. Then both eyes. Then I get my phone, watch, and tablet to all bug me three times a day to add more slime into my eyes, whether I think I need slime in them or not.
Right eye still not right in the mornings. I start thinking āyour eyes arenāt slimy enoughā canāt be quite right because they should be self-sliming when my eyelids are shut. I havenāt wanted to wear contacts in the morning in months, and nobody wants to put in contacts at 3 PM after a shower at the gym and the dayās half over already.
I see the doc again.
āStill not slimy enough. Your eyes arenāt always totally closed when you sleep. You need stronger slime right before bed.ā
I get recommendations for three different brands of eyeball slime and head off to my local pharmacy. I see one box of the brands he recommended and pick it because itās second-one-half-off and the other one isnāt.
Active ingredients:
This isnāt even pretending to be tears. This is a tiny squeeze thing of petroleum jelly that passed a SERE course and wants to get squirted into the most hostile places on Earth.
I read the instructions and it says to squirt the stuff into my cupped lower eyelid. Not too difficult for my right eye. By the time I decide to slime up my left eye too, thereās a hardening dribble of slime on the tip that I canāt deal with properly, so a bunch of it gets on the outside of my lower eyelid. I manage to not touch the tip to anything this time.
When I blink it looks like Iām seeing through slime. Mission accomplished.
ā
I wake up in the morning. My eyes are unbothered. I think my face is oily, but that could be me oil, not mineral oil. I do my morning routine and not need to put eyedrops in at all. Eventually I do some exercise, take a shower, and put normal eyedrops in.
They donāt last very long. A few hours later, Iām adding more drops.
10 PM rolls around. All my gizmos tell me to take my go-to-sleep and my go-back-to-sleep pills and also do eyedrops. I decide to slime up my eyes again.
I manage to get a cup in my lower eyelid, but somehow manage to squirt the slime and miss. Iām worried Iām going to poke my eye with the tip of the thing. Eventually, on the second go-round, I get some slime in, or at least on, my eye.
Next eye. I mostly miss. I figure thereās a skill issue here, but Iām not sure what it is. Itās not like I can just lean my head back to make gravity do half the work of getting this goop on an eyeball.
I now have slimy eyelashes, at least. Probably also slimy eyeballs. Kind of. I wonder if thisāll last the night.
I read a PDF. The author swears up and down, in the introduction to one part of it, that there are NO typographical errors. There are curly quotes. There are straight quotes. There are em dashes. There are pairs of hyphen-minuses in invisible trenchcoats pretending to be em dashes. There are quotes curled the wrong way by an autocurler.
I read a magazine. Youāve heard of this one. It does not have obvious typographical flaws.
I read a book. You probably havenāt heard of this one. It has all the quote flaws of the PDF, plus in places it uses en dashes for trailing-off speech. Unlike the PDF, it uses two newlines instead of an indented paragraph. It looks like it was written in and also pasted into Word, before the transition from Times New Roman to Calibri or whatever the new font is.
I glance at another book by the same author and also a magazine. The magazine has a review of the book. The reviewer says he doesnāt like the book. I decide to read the other book before reading the magazine. The magazineās body text needs more leading (rhymes with āheadingā).
I read the other book. Decent leading, but otherwise it has every other weirdness Iāve seen recently. Plus some of the ms and ns are a teeny bit squished. Somehow. I donāt know enough how printing can go wrong like this. It doesnāt look like the kind of thing that would show up in a print-to-PDF test run, but what do I know?
I notice the authorās writing style flowing into my ownā¦
I finished reading Felienne Hermansā _The Programmerās Brain_.
One thing that I wanted to mention that I left on the cutting-room floor is, well, I think one of her references missed a spot.
In chapter 5, section 1, she mentions Jorma Sajaniemiās Roles of Variables framework. The different roles are:
I think Sajaniemi and Kuittinen missed a role:
These show up in a couple of different contexts:
Hermans suggests annotating each of these different roles with a different icon when printing code out and trying to figure out how it works. If I had to make one up for next functions, Iād use āā, and possibly ā for the reject function.
References:
My review of _The Programmerās Brain_
An Experiment on Using Roles of Variables in Teaching Introductory Programming
Four more CondĆ© Nast Traveler issues have piled up on my coffee table, and now Iām going to read them.
This includes the 2023 issues of:
I think they do like 10 issues a year, so some months get doubled up.
March has an advertorial for Saudi Arabia right before the Editorās Letter. Evidently thereās a place in Saudi Arabia that looks like the Oseira Plains, complete with Mountā¦well, it actually doesnāt look like Mount Granajh in the background. The color matches Mount Granajh and Daval Peak, but the flatness of the whole thing reminds me of the Cliffs of Ruvara or somethingā¦except itās all one level. The caption says itās of Al-Qarah Mountain.
ā
The editorās letter isnāt half bad. He has a kid, which is a good thing.
In talking about travel, itās hard not to notice how often we use the language of spiritual questing: pilgrimages and self-discovery, the transcendent and sublime. Consciously or not, weāre seeking a higher purpose or meaning.
The last time I read this magazine, I commented that itās an interesting peek into the thought processes of people very different from me. So far, I havenāt been disappointed.
A hotel chain called Raffles has an ad:
RAFFLES LONDON, OPENING AT THE OWO
I suppose thatās one way to pique curiosity ā prompt some tiny fraction of your adās readerbase to think āā¦whatās this?ā
This is a Readersā Choice issue, so there are pages of lists of things that probably donāt suck. New Zealand is featured for this. Among other things, people hike up to a secluded waterfall, and then do yoga there. Me, I like yoga because I can do it in the living room in my underpants at 10 at night.
Another article highlights Virgin Voyages, a new-ish cruise line. Started in 2021, which wasā¦almost the worst timing to start a cruise line. Evidently they have onboard tattoo parlors on their ships.
ā
The September/October issue.
The Editorās Letter isnāt quite as fun as the other ones, but he does make a good point about how people pay attention to things other than the typical tourist attractions that they go to see.
ā¦Iām running out of steam to say things about what Iāve seen. I saw a woman wearing like ten hats piled on top of one another and I didnāt want to stop to make a Team Fortress 2 joke.
ā
This editorās letter can be boiled down to ātravelās pretty sweet, even when it sucksā. Not wrong.
This issue, the July/August issue, mentions San Francisco.
So the schadenfreude that has erupted recently over home prices and homelessness, street crime and empty office towers, is nothing new.
A different article says, in so many words, that Hong Kong is back.
Iām starting to get the impression that many of these articles have the subtext of āno really, itās OK to vacation here, youāre not crazyā (think Qatar, SF, and Rwanda).
ā
The March 2023 Editorās Letter is kind of a snooze.
Thom Browne, the guy whose shtick is ill-fitting suits based on British boysā school clothes, takes eight-mile runs in the morning. Iām not a cardio guy, at least in my own mind, but good for him.
ā
ā¦yeah, these are kind of played out, at least for me. I pretty much read them only for the āgram ā er, capsule. Donāt expect any more. Reminds me of how, in my Tears of the Kingdom playthrough, Iād only say stuff for the first two hours of gameplay and anything after that only got scattered notes, if that.
Iāve been reading a book and taking notes. Occasionally, in those notes, I will have thoughts of my own. Generally, Iāve been writing them as parenthetical asides ā like one bullet point where the entire contents of the bullet point is in parentheses.
For example:
- (TaskPaper is great for this)
Eventually I noticed that I was also making more normal parentheticals too, and I kind of want a way to be able to go back and find all of my thoughts.
While
- (
is trivially greppable for, the construct canāt just appear anywhere.
The following construct, however, can:
. o (
This is supposed to look like the beginning parts of a thought bubble, as in the following:
. o (this is very much not like the kinds of JSDoc-style comments I writeā¦do Go comments ever have anything like this? Maybe at file scope?)
Iām not sure Iāll keep using the thought-bubble construct reliably, but itās nice to have a memorable way to highlight everything Iāve thought when summarizing othersā thoughts.
The .ics file on Appleās site said the event would last from 5 to 7 PM.
It was over by 5:30.
Prompted by, but kind of in response to this time:
Also relevant:
eapl.mx, āRe: ĀæEs Gemini una comunidad?ā
Maybe also relevant:
Miguel āyretekā de Luis Espinosa, āRE: ĀæEs Gemini una comunidad?ā
Also, if you havenāt read my previous post, āYou call this a community?ā, you might want to now. Itāll illuminate where Iām coming from.
Both of us agree that Geminispace isnāt a community. (There might currently be a community of Spanish speakers here, but Iām not plugged into that particular corner of the Internet well enough to say. Maybe they all know each other pretty well and e-mail each other back and forth regularly!)
If Geminispace ends up being a proper community, that means only a small number of people are using it, or at least not a lot of people are using it. Whatās more, for it to remain a community, the people in it need to be interacting with each other. None of them can just shout into the void and never respond to anyone (like the overwhelming majority of my posts here on Scrawlspace and the other pages on Halfway to Mars).
One of the great things about Internet document-publishing protocols like HTTP and Gopher and Gemini is that you can let your freak flag fly and talk about things that nobody else is talking about. The most interaction you might ever do with your site (or moral equivalent) is to let a search engine or three know your site exists.
Hereās a concrete example of a capsule existing and not being part of Geminispace-as-a-community:
If Geminispace were small and connected enough to be a community all by itself, this kind of thing wouldnāt happen, largely by definition.
Prompted by, but not really in response to:
āCommunityā is a common word these days, especially coming from corporate communications.
Letās have a look at TwitchConās FAQ:
TwitchConās FAQās first entry, āWhat happens at TwitchCon Las Vegas?ā says:
Imagine a festival of streamers and folks from chat, all coming together in Las Vegas. A place for you, your friends and the streamers you love, to hang out for a weekend of games, meet & greets, networking, learning new skills, live esports, the Loot Cave and so much more. Made for the community, by the community, itās here that youāll find the stars of the stream on the Glitch Theater stage, attend sessions and workshops to help improve your stream, discover the latest from the biggest brands on the expo floor and chill with new and old friends in the legendary Kappa Cabana. Get together with people who get you for a weekend where you will create memories for life!
OK, ācommunityā is kind of buried in the paragraph. Letās skip down a few paragraphs to answers for some of the other questions:
The trouble is, the streamers that theyāre parading around on the front page are super-famous. Their channelsā chats go by so fast, you canāt get a word in edgewise. You might get a parasocial relationship with the streamer, but youāre not going to really get much of a chance to have an in-depth conversation with anybody else in chat.
Do people REALLY think that a criterion as loose as āwe all watch the same streamerā makes a community? Or is the use of ācommunityā just a misleading turn of phrase popularized by multiple companiesā (Twitch included, of course) corporate communications arms?
Letās continue.
### Do I need to be a streamer to go to TwitchCon Las Vegas?
TwitchCon is for the entire Twitch community. While there will be sessions and some content geared towards streaming, we have plenty planned for non-streamers as well.
Letās dwell on that phrase a bit:
the entire Twitch community
Now, this claim is even more audacious ā itās claiming that everyone who watches Twitch is a member of a community. This attempt at naming a group of people makes about as much sense as āthe knife-and-fork-using communityā. Even if you narrow it down to āthe spork-using communityā, it still doesnāt make sense. Thereās no fellow-feeling there. Yretek rightly rains on this parade (my own translation, possibly riddled with material errors and omissions):
I think itās insufficient to speak of a Gemini community. For this thereād need to be a feeling of community, a āspiritā, a totem, a something that groups us up, transforming us from a mass of people to something in common.
Now then. Back to the TwitchCon FAQ.
### Can I meet up with my community?
Yes! Weāll have community meeting areas and MeetUps onsite. Theyāre perfect for hanging out with friends from chat.
And now we have an entirely separate working definition of ācommunityā ā people you already know from chat (at least somewhat), and likewise know you (at least somewhat) And you like (at least somewhat), and like you (again, at least somewhat).
This use of ācommunityā might actually fit a commonsense definition of community and isnāt just corporate Astroturfing.
Iām trying an idea out ā namely, āmake a bunch of blog posts, each with a moderately coherent topic, and then string them together instead of making one giant rambling postā. It seems to be a good idea ā I mean, it worked for this guy:
Rationality: From AI to Zombies
So. More on Gemini and community later.
I use Working Copy. While I barely ever write and commit using it, itās nice to have my entire capsule on my phone in case I want to write something then and there and not use a separate client to actually do the composing.
That said, making the feed entry is a massive pain in the rear on the phone. I also donāt have a way to process the feed entry into the various formats and then upload them anywhere, so I really do need to finish up everything on a proper computer.
Anyway.
Working Copy has a widget.
The widget can go on your phoneā¦when itās in StandBy (put it upright in landscape mode and charge it).
So you can have a list of the two most recent commits that are on your phone, plus a download-more (merge and fast-forward, something like that) button. So you can update whatās on your phone while you use it as a desk clock.
Iād say āI didnāt know I needed itā, but I donāt need it.
I didnāt know Iād be entertained by it for ten seconds (plus however long it took me to bang out this post). The download button was the surprise that knocked it, well, not out of the park. But knocked it far enough away to get a base hit.
Background:
Working Copy, a Git client for iOS and iPadOS
A while back, I was alerted to a language that has a linter rule for what it calls āproblematic constantsā. These constants are written in the source code in decimal, not hexadecimal, presumably because they spell out naughty things.
In HTML and CSS, colors can be specified in hexadecimal: two hexadecimal digits for how much red, two for green, and two for blue. A while back, Chrome started interpreting a fourth pair of hexadecimal digits as how strong to make the alpha channel (full strength, and the color is opaque; 0 strength, and itās colorless and transparent).
Anyhow, 2Ć4 is the same asā¦4Ć2; most constants like these tend to be two four-hexadecimal-digit chunks.
And so I got to thinking: These constants could be interpreted as colors. Are the colors pretty?
The first constant was, well, problematic. 184,594,741 in decimal is #B00B135 which has one too many or one too few digits. I decided to both lop off the final digit and double it to see what kinds of colors Iād get. One would be full-strength, while one would beā¦55ā¦thatās a little less than halfway to FF, so a lighter version.
I figured pastel would be great for this:
After refamiliarizing myself with pastelās commands, I pasted this into my shell and ran it:
pastel color \#B00B13 pastel color \#B00B1355 pastel color \#ABADBABE pastel color \#ABBABABE pastel color \#B0BABABE pastel color \#B16B00B5 pastel color \#BEEFBABE pastel color \#CAFEBABE pastel color \#CAFED00D pastel color \#DEADBABE pastel color \#F00DBABE pastel color \#FEEDBABE
A solid (both literally and figuratively) red. Has a bit of brown to it.
I suppose itās an interesting color, but āredā and āmostly transparentā donāt really work for me.
Nice partially-transparent battleship gray.
Like all the other constants ending in `be`, itās mostly transparent. This one is a nice green color. Maybe if Iād already seen Mamma Mia!, Iād be able to say something more about it.
Kind of a less-green version of #abbababe, but still green. I donāt think Iāve ever seen a drink this color and opacity in a boba-tea shop.
Brown and transparent, and honestly looks like something smeared on the inside of a newbornās diaper.
An eye-searing neon bluish green.
A lot like #beefbabe, but yellower.
`0d` isnāt 99% invisible, but if I did my math right, itās 94.9% invisible. So, basically invisible and colorless. `pastel` says itās most similar to aquamarine, palegreen, and lightgreen, which is what it said about #beefbabe (although not in that order).
Thereās probably a decent joke about how the one d00d is the least alpha of the bunch, but it would take me more time to workshop the joke than itās worth.
Iām not sure why dead dudes, cafĆ© dudes, boba dudes, beef dudes, and food dudes arenāt represented here in this list.
You remember _Babe_, the book about a pig, or maybe the movie made from the book? This transparent pink color is perfect for a cartoon ghost of a pig, who ā spoilers ā does not die in the story.
A partially transparent hot pink. Has an ā80s vibe. Sort of.
On one hand, it kind of looks like hay (which, last I checked, isnāt food for pigs), but it even more looks like slightly cloudy lemonade.
Further down, thereās an entry with a title of āThe upload method constrains the messageā that was posted on 9/2/2023.
In a nutshell, if you have a habit of uploading all your files in one fell swoop by running `make up` or something similar at the command line, then adding in a bunch of images is going to massively bloat your upload time.
Right now, a full upload of everything takes about 19ā22 seconds.
What I could do, I figured out a while back, is that I could have one folder called āAssetsā or somesuch and it could have all the images in it. Then, if I want to blindly upload all the images, I can run `make up-assets` and then have all the images and such get uploaded, and then I can go off and do something else while the upload happens. This would happen much less frequently than when uploading the rest of the site, because only a handful of changes would involve an image addition.
Of course, the Git repository backing this capsule would monotonically increase in size much more quickly, but thatās not likely to be a problem unless I start adding lots of big pictures and/or churn them quickly.
You read āWhy You Should Start a Blog Right Nowā already, right? Or at least skimmed it?
Alexey Guzey, āWhy You Should Start a Blog Right Nowā
ā
One of the subheadings is āWriting helps you think betterā. I totally agree. Thereās been a bunch of times where Iāve prepared a long Slack message to a colleague, and, partway through, figured out one more thing I could try that hadnāt occurred to me before. Itās basically rubber-duck debugging, in text.
ā
On the other hand, I donāt think writing here, in Scrawlspace, has helped me think better aboutā¦anything. Most of what I write is one-shot, with generally only editing for typos.
I also might have done some thinking when predicting whatāll happen at an Apple event coming up in a day or two.
Most times, however, Iām doing all the thinking before writing the post, and then I just bang it out in one go.
ā
One of the things Iāve been mulling over is putting a couple of related Scrawlspace posts into their own, more permanent, places. I think memes like:
These pieces would need at least a little bit of rewriting.
These pieces should be part of a collection. Say, /words/computing/gemini/.
They should link to each other. Not just in passing (although thatās difficult-er in Gemtext), but as part of a āRelated:ā or āSee also:ā block.
There should probably also be an introduction to, well, this kind of work. A .mollyhead file might be able to provide this. Eventually, I might have to suck it up and write a links page that introduces everything with short blurbs.
The āYou should save stuffā page should come before the āYou should make your capsuleās saved pages findable againā.
That was helpful. If youāve been paying attention to the feed (linked from the colophon; scroll down to the bottom of this page), youāve probably seen these other pages already.
Background:
Wikipedia: āRubber duck debuggingā
A while back, I stumbled over Alexey Guzeyās āWhy You Should Start a Blog Right Nowā:
Alexey Guzey, āWhy You Should Start a Blog Right Nowā
Itās a pretty good article. Definitely worth reading.
Much more recently, I stumbled over a site that had already packed up, and this explanation was left:
This site is shutting down for a while. It really doesnāt serve much of a purpose and Iām not content with just posting the sort of sophomoric life advice, schizophrenic nonsense, internet pilpul, and bad takes in general that a lot of sudo-intellectuals fall into upon encountering the classic āI donāt know what to put on my websiteā problem. The best personal websites are a reflection of the interesting lives their creators have built, and of the thoughts they have while not saturating their minds with endless āred pillsā, ādebatesā, and other such useless knowledge that mistakes indiscriminately consooming the undigested thoughts of other men with having any of your own. Not every man is equipped to reach deep philosophical insights worth publishing and thatās fine, but while the deficit of good thinkers is lamentable itās a mistake to think that an army of illiterate bloggers who at least get (some of) the basics right by poorly mimicing the philosophers of the past is a serious answer to this dilemma. By all means, if you want to run a personal website then great, it can be a fun and interesting hobby, but if youāve failed to cultivate an actual personality first (no, āreject modernityā doesnāt count) and donāt have any other legitimate interests to post about then youāre going to end up inducing as many eye-rolls as the tranny on Neocities scribbling about depression. And as such, Iām taking this site offline until further notice since my work schedule makes it difficult to do much of anything worth sharing publicly and I still need to figure out how to get a real education if I want to engage in the public sphere with anything worth listening to.
[ā¦]
Honestly, Iām really just jaded with the web and technology in general as its development has long been spearheaded by godless men in pursuit of Tikkun Olam and if you think centralization is a new problem that arose with the dawn of Facebook then you really donāt know the history of industrial society. Of course I am not suggesting that we should go back to eating bugs and living in mud huts ā we are stweards of the earth whose job it is to tame and civilize it and maintain it for our children ā but the history of industrial technology has long been plagued by an occultic desire to usurp Godās role as Creator and I donāt know what can be done about that. Those of you who have watched Lain (God forgive us) while I certainly do not wish to tempt anyone to delve into these teachings of demons, are you aware that the idea of a āworld soulā (the Schumann Resonance thing in the show) is an ancient gnostic idea? The temptation to omniscience is also as old as time (Genesis 3:5) and leads far too many men into toal schizophrenia as they fail to discern truth from sophistry in the barrage of information the web provides.
ā[T]he barrage of information the [W]eb providesā. Bo Burnham has a song about that.
ā
Thereās an utterly charming banner ad out there for a webhost that says āmake a website! everyone will love it and want to be your friend!!!ā. Things donāt always work out that way.
ā
I might have more to say later about this, but the prevalence of tech talk on capsules is almost certainly in part because you donāt need to have interesting hobbies to write about computer stuff. You also donāt have to leak much in the way of bits of information about who you are in the real world.
ā
Update, a day later:
This entry and its musings about the prevalence of tech talk on Geminispace would probably make a bit more sense if I mentioned that Iāve also been mulling over this one Twitter-now-X post from @browserdotsys:
it is a constant, monumental effort not to turn my account into one that just complains about problems with computers. there is a near infinite amount of material to draw on
Related:
Bo Burnham, Inside ā Welcome to the Internet
Gwern Branwen, ā_Death Note_: L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropyā
@browserdotsys on resisting the temptation to switch his account to only complaining about computers
I changed things so:
You can expect this latter redirect to change after I post something next year.
Now, the things I write are a bit more permanent, and links to things donāt get broken at the end of the first year of their existence.
One wrinkle: For a while, I used to have posts for both year n and year n+1, then after a few posts Iād archive all the posts that were made in year n in a per-year page. This was kind of nice, because that meant I didnāt have a page with, like, one or two posts on it. I canāt get away with that now. I might miss that in a few months.
I read Rob K. Hendersonās newsletter.
Hereās his most recent (as of this writing) public post:
Rob Henderson, reviewing Roy Baumeisterās _Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty_
In a section titled āSadistic Evilā, Henderson writes:
Thus, people with such preferences often have to pay prostitutes to take on [the role of sadist]. Other findings indicate that the desire to be spanked is far more common than the desire to spank someone.
This George Bernard Shaw quote immediately came to mind:
The roulette table pays nobody except him who keeps it. Nevertheless, a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette wheels is unknown.
This past weekend, I went through my bookmarks and offloaded any sites that didnāt load to a list of links.
There were a lot of sites that got shoved off to the graveyard.
I might make the list public at some point. Thereās 35ā40 entries in it.
While bookmarks of individual pages are nice, if thereās an article or something on Geminispace that you want to be able to refer back to, you should probably save it to your hard drive instead of expecting it to just be there months or years later. People get tired of hosting stuff for $8/month plus whatever the domain registration takes per year. Or they reinstall the OS on their Raspberry Pi machines, and forget that they were running Jetforce or something like that.
If you havenāt already read it, consider scrolling down for my entry on 9/24/2023 that goes into what you can do to make it so people who save your pages can find out where they came from.
I should probably turn that into a standalone page so other people can link to it and spread the word.
Not unrelated:
Delorean Time Machine at kennedy.gemi.dev, similar to the Internet Archiveās Wayback Machine
Over the past few years Iāve seen prices of things go up. Van Leeuwen ice cream stopped going on sale regularly and the containers shrunk to 14 ounces instead of a proper 16-ounce pint. The new ground-beef on-sale price is the old sticker price.
On the other hand, Iāve been watching iPhone announcements and thought āthatās oddā¦didnāt they miss an opportunity to bump the cost of the phone by $100?ā
Someone else did the math and the things have been getting cheaper in real dollars. I actually was noticing a real thing.
āConfirmed: The iPhone 15 is the most affordable iPhone since 2007ā
In case you want to find out what prices of yesteryear are like today, I use this:
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ā CPI Inflation Calculator
I use Theodolite. I like it, and recommend it (although I donāt know what else is out there in this space).
One annoyance: When you open it on your phone (or iPad), any playing audio stops.
However, if you never grant it microphone access (or revoke it later), then the operating system wonāt need to pause whateverās playing when you open the app.
The app in question:
Theodolite (for iPhones) on the App Store
Theodolite HD (for iPads) on the App Store
Back on 2/28/2022, I wondered about capsule-page branding. Capsules and pages in Geminispace seems to be at least as ephemeral as Web sites and pages, so saving pages you really like seems to be an extra-good idea.
But if someone does that with your page, and wants to go check on your capsule to see if itās still around, will your page have enough information in it to help the person go look for your live capsule, assuming it still exists?
My opinion at the time was āI donāt care enough to make this easy for other people. It would be too much work, especially if I want to move pages around.ā
However, after a little bit of thinking, I decided to have my āHomeā link be absolute instead of a series of links to the parent directory (referred to as ..).
This was easy enough in Visual Studio Codeās search-and-replace. While Jamie Zawinski (and everyone else on the planet) is right to say you canāt parse HTML with regular expressions in the general case, youāll probably be OK if you have an interactive regular expression editor that will show you the before-and-after and also a way to verify, with diffs, whether the changes were OK or messed up.
I did the same thing to the tracking-pixel link. Those links are all absolute now, too. The parameter, however, is relative to the capsule root.
With these two changes, a download-happy technically-savvy Geminaut now has a snowballās chance in hell of figuring out where Halfway to Mars pages came from originally.
Bjƶrn āew0kā WƤrmedal asks about terminal-emulator usage:
Bjƶrn āew0kā WƤrmedal, āAre You a Terminal Emulator Hipster?ā
I primarily use the bundled Terminal.app on macOS. Itās pretty good as long as you donāt need or want 24-bit color (which you really do if you use Kakoune or Helix or Micro).
Then I started doing day-job work on my machine. I like to keep work-work segregated from my personal stuff, so I downloaded iTerm 2 and run all my day-job stuff in that. macOS is ā unlike Windows and all Linux desktop environments Iāve used ā very application-centric as opposed to window-centric, so having one terminal app per task area is nice. Sometimes Iāll want to hide all my work stuff during the weekend, or not have work windows pop up when Iām trying to select a personal-stuff terminal window.
iTerm has 24-bit color, but it doesnāt have San Francisco Mono or blurring for partially-transparent backgrounds.
I eventually started wanting a not-work emulator capable of 24-bit color, so I settled on Alacritty. Itās comically Spartan by macOS standards (all configuration is in a text file and there arenāt any keyboard shortcuts for it other than āH and āQ), but it does do 24-bit color. It does not blur backgrounds or use San Francisco Mono.
If I were on probably any other platform I wouldnāt juggle multiple terminals like this. When Iāve dabbled in (fake-)UNIX desktop environments Iāve never cared enough to use anything other than the default unless the default is comically bare-bones, like xterm.
I wanted to download the Apple Event titled āWonderlustā (mentioned below). I tried using yt-dlp, and that gave me the biggest, bestest videoā¦but the audio track it snagged had audio with descriptions.
Hereās how I ended up getting the audio that I wanted.
As of this writing, the link to watch the event is on the main Apple Events page:
https://www.apple.com/apple-events/
Thereās a āWatch the eventā link that links to an M3U8 file:
.m3u8 files are .m3u playlists, but with UTF-8 support. You ought to open one up in a text editor sometime.
Anyway, thatāll be the operative URL for all this yt-dlp jiggerypokery.
Hereās how you can get a list of everything available:
yt-dlp -F $URL
Where, of course, $URL is the .m3u8 URL mentioned above.
This will give you a big olā table:
ID EXT RESOLUTION FPS ā FILESIZE TBR PROTO ā VCODEC VBR ACODEC MORE INFO āāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāā audio-atmos-eac3-640-English mp4 audio only ā m3u8 ā audio only unknown [en] English audio-atmos-eac3-640-English_Audio_Descriptions mp4 audio only ā m3u8 ā audio only unknown [en] English Audio Descriptions audio-stereo-aac-128-English mp4 audio only ā m3u8 ā audio only unknown [en] English audio-stereo-aac-128-English_Audio_Descriptions mp4 audio only ā m3u8 ā audio only unknown [en] English Audio Descriptions 383 mp4 640x360 30 ā ~ 233.04MiB 384k m3u8 ā avc1.64001e 384k video only 406 mp4 640x360 30 ā ~ 246.69MiB 406k m3u8 ā avc1.64001e 406k video only 894 mp4 640x360 30 ā ~ 543.03MiB 894k m3u8 ā avc1.64001e 894k video only 916 mp4 640x360 30 ā ~ 556.67MiB 917k m3u8 ā avc1.64001e 917k video only 601 mp4 640x360 30 ā ~ 365.12MiB 601k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.L90 601k video only 1111 mp4 640x360 30 ā ~ 675.10MiB 1112k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.L90 1112k video only 772 mp4 960x540 30 ā ~ 469.26MiB 773k m3u8 ā avc1.64001f 773k video only 1283 mp4 960x540 30 ā ~ 779.24MiB 1283k m3u8 ā avc1.64001f 1283k video only 891 mp4 960x540 30 ā ~ 541.60MiB 892k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.L90 892k video only 1402 mp4 960x540 30 ā ~ 851.58MiB 1402k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.L90 1402k video only 1109 mp4 1280x720 30 ā ~ 673.73MiB 1109k m3u8 ā avc1.4d401f 1109k video only 1161 mp4 1280x720 30 ā ~ 705.47MiB 1162k m3u8 ā avc1.64001f 1162k video only 1619 mp4 1280x720 30 ā ~ 983.72MiB 1620k m3u8 ā avc1.4d401f 1620k video only 1672 mp4 1280x720 30 ā ~1015.45MiB 1672k m3u8 ā avc1.64001f 1672k video only 1253 mp4 1280x720 30 ā ~ 761.05MiB 1253k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.L93 1253k video only 1340 mp4 1280x720 30 ā ~ 813.87MiB 1340k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.L120 1340k video only 1763 mp4 1280x720 30 ā ~ 1.05GiB 1764k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.L93 1764k video only 1850 mp4 1280x720 30 ā ~ 1.10GiB 1851k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.L120 1851k video only 2518 mp4 1920x1080 30 ā ~ 1.49GiB 2519k m3u8 ā avc1.640028 2519k video only 2702 mp4 1920x1080 30 ā ~ 1.60GiB 2702k m3u8 ā avc1.640028 2702k video only 3029 mp4 1920x1080 30 ā ~ 1.80GiB 3029k m3u8 ā avc1.640028 3029k video only 3212 mp4 1920x1080 30 ā ~ 1.91GiB 3213k m3u8 ā avc1.640028 3213k video only 2132 mp4 1920x1080 30 ā ~ 1.26GiB 2133k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.H120 2133k video only 2231 mp4 1920x1080 30 ā ~ 1.32GiB 2232k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.H120 2232k video only 2643 mp4 1920x1080 30 ā ~ 1.57GiB 2643k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.H120 2643k video only 2742 mp4 1920x1080 30 ā ~ 1.63GiB 2742k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.H120 2742k video only 3119 mp4 2560x1440 30 ā ~ 1.85GiB 3120k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.H150 3120k video only 3629 mp4 2560x1440 30 ā ~ 2.15GiB 3630k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.H150 3630k video only 5201 mp4 3840x2160 30 ā ~ 3.08GiB 5202k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.H150 5202k video only 5711 mp4 3840x2160 30 ā ~ 3.39GiB 5712k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.H150 5712k video only 5994 mp4 3840x2160 30 ā ~ 3.56GiB 5994k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.H150 5994k video only 6504 mp4 3840x2160 30 ā ~ 3.86GiB 6505k m3u8 ā hvc1.2.4.H150 6505k video only
Now, use -f to pick the video and audio streams you want:
yt-dlp -f 6504+audio-atmos-eac3-640-English $URL
Run that, wait a bit for it to download, and now you have your 75-minute infomercial uncluttered by spoken description ā and itās in Dolby Atmos, to boot. Of course, you should probably listen to one of these tracks with descriptions at least once, because the speaker will occasionally know things that you might not (like what the garage at Apple Park looks like, and that youāre zooming through it during a transition from, say, Craig Federighi to Johny Srouji).
Background:
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
Solderpunk has a new file format:
smol.earth: āCompendium curatorās file formatā
It looks like this:
# this line doesnāt start with gemini:// or gopher://, so itās a comment, and the # is entirely unnecessary gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/adiabatic/scrawlspace/ tech self-promotion unfocused gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/ information-for-newbies
These spaces could be tabs. Iām not sure if multiple spaces-and/or-tabs are allowed. Iām also not sure whatās supposed to happen if the line starts with whitespace.
Anyhow.
You could make a file like this and put it on your capsule for automatic pollers to consume and generate an aggregated, tagged list of things.
This sounds interesting from a technical perspective and the kind of thing Iād like to do myself, but I canāt think of any single topic worth aggregating and publishing. I have enough trouble keeping my Lagrange bookmarks organized as it is.
Iād note that itās not inherent to the file format that these things be individual pages on a topic. One could categorize various capsulesā home pages the same way, or possibly capsulesā topic pages (like my own So You Want To Lose Fat).
Tim starts his bit with an Apple Watch Ultra. I think his forearms are bigger than mine, and heās got less fat on him, too.
ā
The music playing during the transition to Jeff Williams is strongly reminiscent of strangling-cat vocals ā listen to the Demon Slayer: Kametsu No Yaiba introductions for an idea of what I mean. I suppose itās nice that theyāre drawing from multiple sources available here in the US rather than the usual two-pole axis.
ā
On-device Siri processing? Thatās something I could use.
ā
Double-tap? I might be able to use that occasionally.
ā
ā¦
Words fail me.
ā¦
Actually, no, they donāt. This skit reminds me of Joel Spolskyās retelling of a Meeting with Bill where he actually doesnāt break and actually answers all of Gatesās questions.
ā
High-quality carbon credits
As opposed toā¦?
āPsst.ā
āHey buddy.ā
āYou wanna buy somma deezā¦carbon credits?ā
[opens side of trenchcoat]
ā
I wonder why the 5% virgin titanium is a thing. Maybe they just canāt get enough broken Snow Peak sporks.
ā
Still the camera mesa. Expected, and yet somehow still disappointing.
ā
Interesting that one can charge an AirPods case right from the phone. The USB-C future^Wpresent is weird.
ā
Titanium. Now my phone can feel like my Snow Peak sporks.
Lightest Pro models ever
I could use that.
Thinnest borders ever
More accidental edge taps. Grumble.
āSporkā. Thatās what I could call one of these things if I get one.
Maybe āGhost sporkā.
The blue one looks nice. Itās not green, though. āWait for a green oneā might be the winning play.
ā
Action button
Handy.
ā
3nm chip on the Pro.
10 Gb/s USB-C. 20x what USB 2.0 does. Guess my initial music sync wonāt take an hour+.
Hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Remember PovRay? And running the thing overnight, or longer? For one picture?
Is Resident Evil Village really playable unless you have a controller and pretty good eyesight?
ā
Take pictures of your lizardā¦heh, heh, hehehehā¦
Seriously, thatās an impressive lizard. Even if it doesnāt make you run faster when you cook it into an elixir.
Zoom is 3x here. 5x if you get the Max.
Macro photography. Thatās fun sometimes.
$100 for 128 of storage. Money off if you trade in an 11 Pro or later. Probably not much money for an 11 Pro.
ā
Tim again. In a departure ā hopefully permanent ā from recent convention, he does not exhort his audience to stay safe.
ā»
I get to my phone, which Iāve somehow let get down to 13% battery.
ā¦how much will I get for my current phone?
Background information:
Joel Spolsky, āMy First BillG Reviewā
Recently Kagiās announcement that theyād gone and done something to highlight small-web sites crossed my desk.
Iām in favor of this. While the small not-web is nice ā if youāre reading this, itās probably on the small not-web ā it doesnāt fit everything. If youāve got a blog with a lot of pictures on every single post, things will probably be nicer for your audience if they donāt have to click on every single picture.
Then thereās gwern.net, which does all sorts of fancy things with what I am told is completely optional JavaScript. Turning footnotes into sidenotes, that sort of thing. It has an entire Design page describing all the fancy stuff that goes into it, as well as an entire separate page that went into things that ended up not working out.
Further reading:
blog.kagi.com, announcing their small-web search-engine enhancements
https://gwern.net/design-graveyard
Background:
solderpunk, āAnnouncing the Smol Earth Compendiumā
Ben Hoyt, āThe small web is beautifulā
Quoth Solderpunk:
people (mostly critical outsiders) keep claiming that Geminispace is just a bland and one-dimensional place where nerdy tech people go to write posts to one another about nerdy tech things that nobody else cares about. [ā¦] I want to explicitly encourage and incentivise the publication of non-tech content on Gopher and Gemini and make it very easy for people who only want to read that content to find it.
Something of mine got linked to, but the overwhelming majority of updates that I do to my capsule are all to one file that gets rotated out on a yearly basis. I suppose I could move to a with-permalinks type thing like literally every other blog out there on the planet, but itās more work for me to create files and name them and rename them after I think up a decent title (which isnāt always the first thing that comes to mind when I think up an idea for a post).
I still figure, perhaps wrongly, that I put more time into this capsule than everyone else on the planet combined, so it very much makes sense to optimize for me than for everyone else on the planet. Having one page per year also makes it somewhat nicer for drive-by visitors, as theyāre not having to click on oodles of links and can just scroll, scroll, and scroll. On the other hand, if any of them want to save a scrawl, theyāll have to copy and paste the thing into a file instead of choosing Save in their Gemini client of choice.
So yeah, while I do tech posts and non-tech posts, most of my non-tech posting is very much intermingled with my tech posts and isnāt individually addressable.
Letās give a rundown of this yearās posts so far:
If youāre allergic to tech, youāre definitely going to have a bad time here on Halfway to Mars. A lot of the most prolific Geminauts post lots about tech, too, even though all of us have other things to post about. At least most other Geminauts have one-page-per-post setups so the tech-talk-avoidant can easily avoid it without using any kind of āskip to next headingā functionality in whatever Gemini browser may be at hand.
I watched Kakegurui on Netflix.
Penn Jillette, of Penn and Teller fame, said that magic is just putting in way more work than other people think itās worth.
Five episodes in, it seems that this series is all about cheat detection. There are also a lot of panty shots of high-schoolers.
After watching the whole thing, and also Kakegurui ĆĆ (the second season), that about sums it up for me. You may get other things out of it.
Itās currently on Netflix. Netflix also has a live-action remake that I didnāt bother with.
I recommend watching it with a currency converter handy so you can translate the massive yen amounts into money you understand.
This upcoming Tuesday at 10 AM, Apple releases new phones and probably new watches. I also assume that iOS 17 is coming out 2ā4 weeks later. I hear itās been an especially buggy beta season, so the smart thing is probably to hold off on upgrading if you can get away with it.
These will be the first phones of theirs with USB-C-shaped holes. I have reservations about the move to USB-C:
On the other hand, there are a bunch of upsides that might end up offsetting this:
I wonāt be able to ditch all my Lightning cables, because I still have a perfectly good touchpad and AirPods cases that need charging every so often. One of the AirPods cases can be charged with the watch charger, so I can charge up both cases at the same time with only one Lightning cable, provided I donāt also need to charge up my watch, too.
Iāll need a Lightning-from-C cable if I ever travel anywhere and need to charge up my second-generation AirPods case, but thatās about it.
ā
My current phone isnāt broken and has a maximum battery capacity is 83%, which isā¦fine. If I were out and about longer, Iād start worrying, but as long as I have a chance to charge my phone up in the morning, Iām good. Even if I donāt, thereās still the car charger that works just fine. And even if that doesnāt work, thereās still large external battery packs to charge from (the laptop) or smaller ones (USB-A and/or -C battery bricks).
Supposedly, only the Pro Max version will have the periscope camera, which is one technology that Iāve heard will be used to turn the camera mesa back down to a camera bump. Iām not a fan of phablets, so one of the biggest annoyances of the current phones is still there.
AFAICT, while itās not at all easy to repair iPhones unless theyāre the most recent Pro versions (and likely all other versions going forward), I donāt worry about the environmental impact of frequent phone churn. If Iām not using my phone, it can be sold to someone who will use it, probably after getting a fresh battery. You know those people who get the new phone every single year? Their old phones get used by other people, or refurbished, or broken down for parts, or outright recycled. Iāve used The Swap Club for non-Pro AirPods battery replacements, and their service is pretty much as advertised.
I kind of wonder whoās going to get TSMCās new fewer-nanometers chips. The Pro models only, maybe, or perhaps all the models. Plus there are maybe watches that might get them ā and watch chips can use the battery savings way more than phone or iPad chips can.
My watch is still fine. Iām having trouble imagining what they could release that would make me want to upgrade before my current one is decidedly long in the tooth.
I could use a phone with satellite SOS capabilities. Well, I never have, and hopefully I never will, butā¦you know what I mean. All the hikes around here tend to have spotty ā at best ā cell-phone coverage, and if Iāve gone and fallen and canāt get up innawoods, then that kind of thing would be super handy. This feature was introduced last year, and Iāve kind of been sitting on it, hemming and hawing. On the other hand, even the longest unimpressive hikes around here are still relatively well-traveled, so if something nasty happens to me, itās almost certain that I can flag someone whoās walking by.
ā
Not entirely unrelatedlyā¦
My previous entry, dated 9/2/2023, was my ROOPHLOCH 2023 post. I didnāt bother lurking much, and I probably should have lurked more, but I didnāt really have a good tie-in with what I wanted to say to where I was composing it (on a mountain, without cellular Internet or even WiFi). Iām not the āhay guise iām on a mountain isnāt this coolā type, so I didnāt even bother leaving a parenthetical at the end. Sometimes, youāre in the woods, but donāt want to talk about the woods.
Further reading:
Solderpunkās ROOPHLOCH 2023 announcement
Youāve probably heard Marshall McLuhanās dictum by now:
The medium is the message.
This struck me as obvious nonsense (nowadays, Iād describe it as āsaying stupid stuff for clicksā) because while the medium constrains the message and makes some things easier and some things harder, it doesnāt control the message. You can have a lot of different messages in any medium, assuming the medium is high-bandwidth enough to have more than one message.
One thing that Iāve been wondering about is how upload methods make some forms of expression easier than others. I have SFTP access to my capsule, and I run an upload script that reuploads everything every time I make a change worth publishing. However, since Iām not using rsync or anything fancy, if I start putting photos or videos someplace, Iāll have to deal with bloated upload times every single time I update the capsule.
You will probably not be surprised to learn that I only have a tiny one-pixel WebP image as a joke.
Allowing only SFTP access seems to be pretty popular among free Gemini hosts. I wonder if people would share more photos if uploading photos were cheaper. Most of the capsules Iāve seen with pictures donāt seem to be hosted by anyone other than the capsule author.
Now, you might think the relative paucity of pictures makes Geminispace better, or at least closer to your tastes. Iām agnostic on the matter, while leaning towards āFewer pictures? Good.ā
If youāve been keeping an eye on the feeds here, you know that Iāve been playing quite a lot of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Because Iām not quite so patient as I was years ago, and calling (206) 885-7529 isnāt an option anymore, Iāve gone online to check where stuff is and to get the occasional hint.
The SEO on, say, IGNās wiki pages is kind of marvelous. It seems to work well, too; IGNās pages tend to be near the top of my search results when I type in the names of things that Iād like help with.
Letās have a look at one of the pages. Iāll go with something that happens early on in the game, and shouldnāt surprise you much at all if you played Breath of the Wild.
At the top of the page (visually) is an <h2>: āThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Guideā.
The <h1> is āHylian Armor Setā. No fluff.
The first <h2> in the document: āWhere to Find the Hylian Outfit Set in TotKā.
While Iād be tempted to have a second-level heading of āWhere to find itā (adjust capitalization to taste), people like me search for sets of terms like āhylian outfit totkā. Having āTotKā show up in the headings helps direct people whoāre searching for this outfit in this game to this page, instead of accidentally sending them to a very similar page that says how to get this outfit in Breath of the Wild.
Second <h2>: āHylian Set Armor Upgradesā
Iād just have a second-level heading of āUpgradesā, but this funnels people in who want to get a sneak peek at what theyāll need to upgrade parts of this outfit.
While itās not unpopular to sneer at the sorts of titles that sellers on Amazon are strongly incentivized to construct (āAmazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max streaming device, Wi-Fi 6, Alexa Voice Remote (includes TV controls)ā) itās nice to see that even obvious SEO tweaks donāt always make the reading experience obviously worse.
Partially inspired by then-current events, I watched the Beatlesā Yellow Submarine. Iād watched it once back in elementary school, but I didnāt remember much of it. Now that Iāve listened to a fair bit of Beatles music, I figured at least Iād understand the music.
Watching Yellow Submarine kind of hammered home that weāre living through a ā60s-revival moment here in the US, at least when it comes to art direction coming from bicoastal internet companies.
A few years ago, I noticed that comically wide (antonym: condensed) fonts were popping up occasionally, at least for headlines. Dropbox might have been one of the first outfits to do this. I figured that this was becoming A Thing mainly because advances in OpenType support in browsers was becoming good enough to support picking a wider font by using font-stretch, as opposed to having a separate .ttf or .otf file with just the wide font in it.
Of course, this made me think of what was popular in the ā60s and ā70s. Iām not surprised this sort of thing leaked into the ā70s; as far as I can tell, āthe ā60sā only really got going in 1968.
Watching Yellow Submarine ā released in 1968, naturally ā provided the other part of whatās inspiring corporate artists on both coasts here. While there is a pronounced Monty Python Animated Segment aspect to it, the other half of the animation is what we now know as AlegrĆa or Corporate Memphis.
Seeing the direct precursor of whatās currently all over FAANG illustrations was low-grade shocking, like seeing Red Forman play Dr. Wilsonās dad.
ā
From what I gather, having an animated movie neatly solves the problem of trying to get a movie out of four insanely popular music stars. All the guys have to do is get in a sound studio and say a handful of lines that are peppered (er, sorry) with Beatles-song references and nearly-chuckle-worthy jokes. The plotā¦OK, it makes sense, but if you like your fiction to, well, make sense and take place in a knowable world and universeā¦well, this aināt it.
Originally, I was going to say that this movie is probably significantly better if youāre on mind-altering drugs ā say, a dose large enough to give you a 0.5% chance of thinking youāre a glass of orange juice for the rest of your life. On the other hand, maybe the disjointed anything-goes world and journey through it is a good low-grade substitute for these sorts of drugs.
The music is good, and thereās a lot of it. Of course, youāve heard the music already.
Background:
The font-stretch CSS property on MDN
āCorporate Memphisā on Wikipedia
āCorporate Art Styleā on Know Your Meme
āDead Poets Societyā on IMDB
My oldest /scrawlspace/ entry is dated 10/6/2020.
My initial commit to the repository that manages this capsule is dated 9/7/2020.
Solderpunk says that Gemini dates back from 6/20/2019, assuming Iām subtracting by 4 properly.
I came for the Calmā¢ and stayed for the low-friction publishing with a workflow that Iām used to (edit text file, git commit text file, upload text file somewhere, let automated backups do their thing when they get around to it).
I ended up making at least one Scrawlspace post per month. Then I noticed this, and managed to Goodhart myself. Oops. At least I donāt think my post quality declined.
I keep wondering if I would have posted this stuff anyplace else. AFAICT, probably not, so Geminispace has probably gotten words out of me that wouldnāt have been published on the Internet otherwise.
I donāt expect this incentive gradient to change much in the next several years.
Background reading:
Solderpunk ā āFour years of Gemini!ā
Goodhartās Law ā āWhen a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measureā
Pretty good week, really.
Iām happy thereās a larger-screen Air.
No idea if the Mac Studio still makes too much noise, but itās nice to see regular spec-bump updates.
Iām happy that the Mac Pro remains an item in their lineup, although Apple, so far, has ceded ground to people who need to put like six GPUs in their computers to have them crunch data. Then again, like Ternus said in The Talk Show, supposedly thereās things you can do with 196 GB of RAM thatās shared with VRAM that you canāt do on whatever Nvidia is capable of shipping.
Couldnāt care less about Contact Posters. You know those people who care about things like āwhere to go to see and be seenā mentioned in āI am sent three CondĆ© Nast Traveler issuesā back on 1/13/2023? This feature sounds like itās for them.
Voicemail transcription sounds handy for people who arenāt me.
Check In sounds like a good idea.
NameDrop sounds minor-league handy.
Not a fan of ācontinue the file transfer over the Internetā functionality in AirDrop. If itās big enough to step away from while youāre transferring, then itās big enough to make a serious dent in your data plan.
Not sure I like having yet another thing to watch for when Iām typing to make sure Iām not getting an accidental autocorrupt that nonetheless has perfectly normal words in it.
Hooray for Dictation becoming even better.
The engineer time spent making Journal would have been better spent fixing bugs.
StandBy sounds neat. I donāt have a stand like the one pictured, or a phone that will stick to it, though. And I donāt even want a red clock going all night, so thereās that.
I donāt get all that many false-alarm Siri activations except on my watch. Still, cutting the wakeword down to a mere āSiriā seemsā¦maybe itās a marked improvement for languages where āhey so-and-soā isnāt a thing?
Downloadable maps? Nice.
Iād cheer for widgets on iPadOS but I donāt really use the lock-screen widgets on my iPhone. Like, theyāre there, but I donāt really pay any attention to them.
I think itās cool that Iāll be able to get a big-ass picture of Mars on my iPad.
I wonder if the multiple-timers thing is exclusive to watchOS and iPadOS, with the phone and real computers missing out.
If I get Health data on my iPad, Iām going to have to cloud-sync it. Sure, Advanced Data Protection, butā¦ehhhā¦
The PDF support in Notes seems interesting. Itās no replacement for LiquidText, but itās nice to have a lightweight option for most people.
Iām not a Stage Manager guy except when I want to look at three different windows on my iPad at the same time. Say, Music, OmniOutliner, and Excel in the kitchen.
Sonoma: Nice part of the state, but it continues with Appleās turn towards soulless abstract wallpaper. Give me stunning aerial photography like we got for Catalina and Big Sur.
Iāll keep my widgets in Notification Center, thanks.
I watched someone else play Death Stranding a few years ago, so Iām not itching to play porter myself.
The presenter overlay stuff seems meh.
Profiles is a feature thatās important for people who develop websites. Having this should make testing websites in Safari easier, so Iām glad this feature got added.
Web apps? I might use this.
Adaptive Audio sounds handy, especially with Conversation Awareness.
Iām not sure I want twisting the watchās crown to actually do things. Iāve tried the Siri Suggestions face and some of the suggestions are, to put it bluntly, whack.
I donāt cycle on anything that moves, but this sounds cool.
I could definitely use downloadable topographic maps.
I wonder if Screen Distance will nag at me for having the phone too close.
Apple Vision Pro seems neat but uncompelling. I donāt think Iād use one much even if I were given one as a present. Then again, it doesnāt really have any third-party apps yet.
ā
OK, that was me going through the keynote transcript and using that as a memory aid for the opinions I had a week ago. Now for the Platforms State of the Union, skipping over the things I donāt have much to say about:
The watchOS 10 redesign seemsā¦big. From what I understand, lots of things look kind of bad on the Apple Watch Ultra and maybe this redesign will fix that, as well as make a bunch of other things better.
Speaking of, LOTS of people in these videos are wearing Ultras. Like, almost everyone in these videos has an Apple Watch on, and maybe ā of them are wearing an Ultra. I like having an unobtrusive, lightweight watch on my wrist while I sleep, but having a big olā chonker on the wrist doesnāt look weird on them.
ā
After the Keynote and PSotU, the annual on-video The Talk Show happened. What surprised me was how tall these men are. John Gruber, the host, is, as far as I know, something like 6ā²3ā³ (1.9m). The only guy who wasnāt within an inch of Gruberās height was Greg āJozā Joswiak, and heās āonlyā probably 6ā² (1.8m).
Itās interesting to see these sort of events happen, especially if youāre at least kind of aware of the constraints everyoneās under (mostly Apple-imposed). Apple people have an ironclad policy of not talking about future products under any circumstances, so that throws out a lot of otherwise interesting questions. Joanna Stern will dutifully ask the questions that are most important to her audience (āWhen will we be able to set multiple timers on the iPhone?ā) but Gruber wonāt do that because he knows the answer heāll get already, and most of his live audience knows that. Heck, he even mentioned that this year in passing. While these events are undoubtedly mostly Apple PR by other means, itās interesting to see Gruber lob the hardest softballs he can to try and get something interesting out of his guests. Sometimes, the interesting bits arenāt even coming from expertly-crafted prods, though ā hearing the guys explain the philosophy of the Apple Vision Pro (you use it to connect to people ā people close to you, and oftentimes physically close, as opposed to putting you in an immersive world far away) kind of confirmed my suspicions on how theyāre going to pitch this in a world where theyāre definitely not first to market and all sorts of other VR things, at least on paper, have lots of the same things on their checklists.
The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2023
Advanced Data Protection for iCloud
When I started shaving, I used a two-blade Gilette Sensor Excel. It served me well for a while, and then their Mach 3 came out. While the three-blade design was OK, I couldnāt get a straight edge on my sideburns. I switched back to the Sensor Excel.
A few years ago, I started to look around to see if there were any better, newer razor designs that come out, and I picked up a Harryās starter set with a handle in DONāT SHOOT ME IāM HUMAN NOT A DEER orange. This new razor was fantastically better than my old Sensor Excel, mainly because a single blade would last me 8ā10 shaves, which at my frequency works out to a blade replacement once every two or three months. The Sensor Excel, by contrast, would only last a week, or one shave, before starting to nick my face. I think part of this is because I could store the Harryās in a drawer with a blade cover instead of out on a high ledge exposed to steam every day, but I didnāt really care enough to try and figure that one out.
The Harryās blade was better in other ways, too. While five blades may give you a ragged edge, you donāt need to use the five on your sideburns when the single blade on the tip is available. It was also plain more comfortable to hold. Really, the Harryās blade was an upgrade in every way.
More recently, I wanted to try out a Jeremyās razor. I got their starter pack and let it sit in my closet for months because I was still using a perfectly adequate Harryās blade.
After three shaves, I can confidently say that the Jeremyās razor isnāt as good.
The Jeremyās razor is significantly heavier and smoother than the Harryās razor. While this makes it feel nice and expensive, I have to take extra care to grip it carefully in the shower to make sure that I donāt accidentally drop it on my foot. Furthermore, while the dark green is nice, itās harder to see when I have my glasses off compared to the DONāT SHOOT ME IāM HUMAN NOT A DEER orange that Harryās offers.
Whatās worse, after every single shave with the Jeremyās razor, Iāve cut myself. Not enough to have to use my styptic pencil to stop the bleeding, but a cut is a cut.
Iāll probably donate the Jeremyās razor and any remaining blades after this. While itās nice to have options, the quality difference is too large.
https://www.jeremysrazors.com/
(There are all kinds of spoilers for BotW here, including both gameplay and story. None of them are earth-shattering, though.)
While Tears of the Kingdom is actually out for me right now, I wanted to wrap up my previous Zelda experience. In the run-up to the TotK release, I watched someone else play BotW with a couple mods enabled. This got me in the mood to play the game myself a little bit again, and I also wondered if I could get the soundtrack. Way back when, when I first got the game, I looked into getting the soundtrack, and decided against. When I looked at the entry on Amazon a bit (maybe years) later, only scraps were available at ridiculous (three-digit) prices. However, when I checked the final time, they were down to normal levelsā¦but they were all imports, and all the printing was in Japanese. I still have access to at least one computer with a CD-ROM drive, so I bought the thing.
āThis is a popular disc setā, I thought. āCertainly the disc services will have English track names for all these things, right?ā
Turns out, I was half right. Gracenote CDDB, which is what iTunes uses, had English entries for all five discs. It did not, however, have identical English entries for all five discs in the set, so two discs seemed, to iTunes, to be from a different album.
Meanwhile, Exact Audio Copy uses FreeDB for disc metadata. FreeDB had only one entry each for all these discs. The snag? They were all in Japanese. Maybe one day after Iāve retired Iāll go back and change the metadata for all of them to their English equivalents.
(At this point, you might be wondering why Iām ripping to FLAC in addition to ALAC. Itās because while ALAC is the format of Now, FLAC is the format of Now and Forever.)
Interestingly enough, there wasnāt any exact-match disc art for this CD set in the iTunes Music Store database. I settled on what was almost certainly a fan-made version of the gameās cover art, done in the style of van Goghās Starry Night.
4096Ć4096 suitable cover-art JPEG, hosted on somebody elseās CDN
ā² ā² ā²
After ripping it all and making gross adjustments to the metadata, I finally had a listenā¦
Breath of the Wild takes place in post-apocalyptic Hyrule, 100 years after Calamity Ganon wrecked the place. This gives the composers license to have a fairly sparse soundtrack most of the time, like when youāre traveling around Hyrule. Before I started watching and playing the game again, I could probably only think of a handful of music bits, and only mostly after some prompting:
Well, with five discs of music, thereās a lot that I didnāt recall.
Plus, since this is a mere soundtrack instead of something that can react to what you do in game, some other things are a bit weird:
Other things are just weirdly different for no obvious reason:
Oh, and:
I got around to finishing Metroid Prime Remastered. I ended up sitting on the Ridley fight (this isnāt a spoiler; if itās a Metroid game, and Ridley shows up, thereās probably gonna be a Ridley fight) and the final-boss fight for several weekends, as one does when he has all sorts of other things competing for his time and attention on the weekend.
Iām really not the kind of person who seems to enjoy wandering around anymore. I got super duper mega lost in Metroid II: Return of Samus, even going as so wrong as to try backtracking to previous levels down the central tunnel, but these days Iām satisfied to just follow a walkthrough for most of the game. In-game time ended up being 20 hours or so, giving me a helmet-off ending. I most emphatically did not finish scanning every single enemy, so thereās an extra-good ending that Iām going to have to look up on the Internet that was recorded by someone whoās way better, or at least persistent, at video games than I am. I beat the final boss with single-digit amounts of health left, and if Iād tried to scan it, I wouldāve had to try at least once more, and possibly more than that.
I wonder how Iāll end up playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I enjoyed wandering around Hyrule in Breath of the Wild, but I donāt think the new game will be quite as freeform as the previous one and I donāt have the free time that I used to to just wander around Hyrule and do stuff.
Iām still very much tempted to try and postpone getting into Tears of the Kingdom until some DLC comes out for it. Breath of the Wild had great DLC (many of the outfits and definitely the Travel Medallion), and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity had a number of great quality-of-life improvements in its DLC, including making baked apples purchasable and adding in extra-hard enemies that could be farmed for stuff. Oh, and that Ancient bo/nunchaku thing was just plain fun.
The only question is āwhat would I play until the DLC comes out?ā. Thereās a 2D Metroid out that was released on the Game Boy with the L and R buttons. I could play that. Because itās emulated, I could savescum my way through it and get the experience well enough, although after not completely falling in love with both Metroids Prime and Dread Iām not sure itāll capture my attention for that long.
All that said, I probably have 4ā³ of books that I want to go through, and a couple of them are at least as brain-bendy as _A Brief History of Time_, at least according to what I remember.
I was bored today and away from my usual sources of entertainment, so I decided to futz around with my phone.
I ended up going into the Health app to see if thereās anything I could usefully update in the Medical ID screen.
Age is automatically taken care of. Bumped my weight up a bit, since Iām getting fatter. Noticed that thereās a new-to-me āadd primary languageā option that I hadnāt set yet.
Letās see whatās in here, shall we?
āPreferred and regional languagesā include English and Spanish. I wonder if Iād get the same things if I lived closer to Quebec.
Now then. Now for the āAll spoken languagesā listā¦
Iāve heard of that one.
ā®
Huh. Didnāt remember this one being written in a script that looks like katakana.
ā®
Looks familiar.
ā®
OK, now this is getting pretty indie. I wonder if we can go indier.
ā®
Probably just about as indie.
ā®
Perfect.
ā®
This is a step back from indieness but I figured the only not-Mandarin dialect Iād see in this list would be Cantonese. Not my best guess.
ā®
ā
I thought about setting the option to āLojbanā, but on second thought I donāt want to send paramedics on a snipe hunt for an interpreter when Iām unconscious and can barely manage anything more than ācoi rodoā anyway.
AirPods have an option on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS to automatically connect to playing devices. This means that if you stick your AirPods in, whatever gizmo youāre looking at will make your AirPods its default device, with other devices on standby. This sort of thing tends to work decently now that all my Apple gizmos seem to have an idea of which one Iām looking at.
At any rate, I wanted to have something playing while I took a fifteen-minute break to farm dust bunnies from underneath my bed, so I just stuck a pair of AirPods in my ears and squeezed to play.
The winner ended up being my iPad, and it played Mobyās āAloneā, on repeat-one, which was the last thing I was playing from Music on it.
Background information:
Apple Support: āSwitch your AirPods to another deviceā
Iāve been in the process of writing a Metroid Prime Remastered text-only Letās Play, but decided to throw it into the round file. Really, the only interesting thing about it is that the default controls are:
My first reaction, of course, was
AAAAAAAAAA
as this is the opposite, twice over, of what Iāve gotten myself used to playing Breath of the Wild and Splatoon. So I go into the gameās settings and look for a way to swap these and
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
because thereās no way to change this for the default controls (which I guess are tuned for modern-controller FPSs). After slowing down a bit and trying to use slow, deliberate movements to re-train my brain in not one, but two axes, and aim my get-info reticle, I
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
and then I saw a pterodactyl-type thing overhead and wanted to get a better look at it and
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
So yeah, hours of fun. Iām a lot less awful at it now that Iām fighting intact space pirates, but I went back to finish up Majoraās Mask a couple days ago and the controls were superlatively intuitive, like Iād been playing with controls like that for decades. Iām worried that the next time I go back to Tallon IV, Iām in for a lot more
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
because I was deacclimating to up-is-up-and-right-is-right while I was saving Termina from some annoying imp with a mask.
Itās often quite easy to register oneās displeasure with someone elseās idea, but oftentimes orders of magnitude more difficult to craft something that might help him see the error of his ways.
I wanted to update my CV a bit.
From my laptop.
Itās stored on my desktop.
Obviously, something I should be SSHing in for.
Whatād I call that fzf alias? The one I use for changing directories?
Why are all these subdirectories of .git directories showing up in the list?
Finally here.
I already use vim.
I should use something fancier.
Kakoune is a thing.
The text is past the right side because tabs are eight columns in this thing.
Hmm. Argh.
This config file format is inscrutable even with the completion popping up.
I canāt figure out how to set the tab width.
Good thing I use Prettier on this thing anyway.
OK, this seems to help. I couldāve used it fifteen minutes ago:
āThe first two hours of Kakoune in two minutesā
OK, this isnāt awful. Maybe.
Letās try Helix.
Oh right, its themes pretty much all require 24-bit color, so I need to switch to iTerm2.
ā¦Iām already in iTerm2. But over SSH.
OK, ayu isnāt bad.
Right, this thing doesnāt support soft wrapping.
I canāt get it to automatically load the file after I run Prettier in the whole directory.
Whatever, I made the change I was going to make. `git commit -m`, baby.
Which post-Vim editor was the one that showed me lines that were changed in my working copy, again?
(This post was authored in Visual Studio Code.)
Prior reading:
Solderpunk, āDo you even compute, bro?ā
Probably everyone in Geminispace has heard Sturgeonās Law and most can probably recall most of it just from seeing the phrase āSturgeonās Lawā. While ā90% of everything is crapā is the part that everyone knows, whatās lesser known is that heās claimed, rightfully in my view, that the remaining 10% makes science fiction a genre worth the time and attention that it gets.
I think the same is true of computers and bicycle-for-the-mind computing. Most of the time, computers arenāt used for augmenting humans and instead are used for communication tasks of varying levels of importance. However, the times when I pull out the actual mind bicycle ā oftentimes Excel, but not infrequently Ulysses (many people swear by Obsidian instead) ā Iām struck by how these sorts of tasks would break my brain with their difficulty if I were thrown back into the technology level of the early 80s before spreadsheets and āF became common technologies.
So when I read the following in the above-linked article, I could only marvel by how utterly false it was:
But we have to realise and accept that when considering the destructive ecological footprint of the modern computing landscape, *that* kind of personal computing is a tiny fraction of a percent of the whole. To a first order approximation, nobody on Earth does that kind of computing.
Is most computing a distraction from more worthwhile hobbies? Almost certainly. On the other hand, I posit that all independent adults use their computers as bicycles for the mind at least some of the time, and that many independent adults (and more than a few dependents of varying ages) use their computers as bicycles for the mind for most of their workdays and a not-insignificant part of their non-work days where theyāre busy managing their households with tools that are way better than a desk calculator from 1985 and a paper double-entry ledger.
References:
Somehow, I got three issues of CondĆ© Nast Traveler. The first issue is for December 2022, the second is for January/February 2023, and the third is āAn Insiderās Guide to Qatar 2023ā. Not all at once, mind; they dribbled in over the course of months.
The two normal issues turn out to be roughly half ads, by page count. The Qatar issue is either all ad with extra ads, or mostly not-ads, depending on your point of view.
The Editorās Letter for the December 2022 issue was nicely touching. Hereās how it ended:
Wherever you choose to be, I hope you can find a party to your likingāand if thereās none to be had, I encourage you to make your own.
All the normal articles manage to present travel as a flowing, effortless, dreamlike state. Even, to a limited degree, the one about skiing on liftless mountains in Norway (hike up, ski down).
80 pages in, I am struck by the second occurrence of a phrase ā āwhere to see and be seenā. āWhere to go to be seenā is not something I think about much, if at all.
86 pages in, the circulation numbers are listed. Thereās a column for the average number of copies of each issue during the preceding 12 months. In that column, it says there are 702,781 copies in total. 538,105 are paid, while 130,718 were given out free, like this one. On row (i) it says that 80% were paid for.
The January/February 2023 issue has āadvertisementā on the front cover. Iām quite sure how this differs from all the other issues, but I suppose weāll see.
Oh. This front cover is actually fake. Itās attached to the real cover with rubber cement. This underlying cover does not have āadvertisementā on it, so I suppose the whole thing contains the normal amount of advertising in it.
I had thought that advertisements with lots of body copy were a dead art form, but advertorials still survive in magazines like this.
Page 46 describes a spa that specializes in fasting. The authoress is put on a diet consisting of vegetable broth only, with a rice cake to keep on her person at all times to keep her from passing out if she gets dizzy. In sharp contrast to my own experiences fasting, she spends three days, mostly sleeping, after which she is better than normal and goes on bike rides. Maybe I should consider using Epsom salts as a pre-fast laxative and back-engineer an alkaline powder to get the results that she did. Usually, a whole day of not eating wrecks my sleep and I wake up after a maximum of five hours even though my body needs at least 7Ā½ to function properly.
On page 94, another alien phrase waves to get my attention:
Sants-MontjuĆÆc, [ā¦] which still feels like a genuine, un-Instagrammed community going about its daily business.
I can only wonder what a thoroughly Instagrammed community is like. Maybe itās one where all the shops sell too-fancy-by-half milkshakes with half of a candy store mounted on top, or similar culinary visual spectacles.
Finally, the Qatar issue. I hear they had a bunch of soccer games there recently. This entire issue is sponsored by Visit Qatar.
They mention putting saffron and cardamom in your coffee. I suppose itās worth trying once. The saffron probably doesnāt work all that well with the instant cold-brew crystals I keep in the pantry, though. At any rate, I only keep the cold-brew crystals around for when both microwaved tea and Starbucks drive-through are both too slow.
Eighty-eight pages later, they have managed to convince me that I would not be totally crazy to vacation in Qatar. Iām not sure if that counts as mission accomplished, but itās not nothing.
If you want to read older entries, hereās the page for the previous year:
If you want to stay abreast of updates, have a look at this capsuleās colophon. It has JSON Feed and Atom feeds on it.
Additionally, the following URL will always redirect to the current year, assuming I havenāt forgotten to update the redirect after making the first post of the year:
ā
