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a tinylog by: @smallpatatas@gemini.patatas.ca
ended up just reinstalling manjaro on the desktop after too many battles with dependencies and backports with Debian, at least when it came to getting wine, yabridge, pipewire, bitwig, PlugData, and ffado all working happily together.
now that everything's running again: bitwig is such a fun piece of software, way too many knobs to twiddle. always had trouble finishing things though, so as fun as the endless tweaking is, it's also dangerous ...
Someone on Lemmy recommended the movie Bacurau (2019) recently - watched it yesterday and it was fantastic.
It's a Brazilian film set 'a few years in the future', and the person recommending it suggested going in with no knowledge of the story or themes. It's solid advice; the mystery is a big part of the experience.
Enjoy!
got annoyed by another case of cyclical dependencies in manjaro on my desktop and, because i am a masochist, decided to try switching to debian 13 instead of learning how to deal with cyclical dependencies
Took a bit, but most things are working now, except plugdata, which i even tried building myself; it seemed to compile OK, and mostly seems to function, except the window freezes when i click the 'load a patch' button... yet i *can* open a patch from the recently loaded list?!
No idea how to go about troubleshooting that one. Missing library or something? Zero clue.
On the plus side, I learned about winetricks and got a couple really nice-sounding vst synths working :))
finished listening to the audiobook version of Kohei Saito's "Slow Down" yesterday.
Good book, inspiring. I did struggle a bit with its criticisms of Modern Monetary Theory, however. Saito shows how a common critique of Marx's thought - that it amounts to 'capitalism without capitalists' - does not fairly represent Marx's thinking, particularly toward the end of his life.
So when a similar accusation is made re: MMT, it rings a little hollow, because I see MMT primarily as a set of insights, even if some of its main proponents do make specific policy recommendations that might warrant the critique (e.g. an emphasis on productivity).
Will keep thinking about it, I guess.
Important announcement:
new hours of operation for my weblog at
(all times EST)
Mon-Tue: open 24h
Wed: closed
Thu-Sun: open 24h
Not sure if this is an acceptable workaround:
I'd like to use paragraph breaks in this tinylog, but 2 consecutive newlines isn't within the spec. So I'm just adding a single space-character on the empty line.
Reasonable? Hope so
I'm almost certain that a couple of guests at the bitcoin 2024 conference 'newsdesk' were running a mini pump and dump out in the open, by intentionally spreading misinfo on-air about a 'special guest' being on the way, and claiming it was the reason for the delay of Trump's speech.
One even claimed to know who it was going to be! There was never a special guest.
But Polymarket, a crypto betting/predictions market, went *wild* with trades on the question "Will Elon Musk give a speech at the Bitcoin conference?". (Every single trade is visible - lol, crypto - so it's pretty easy to spot a few accounts that bet tens of thousands of $ *against* the rumours in a ~30min span.)
Minor accomplishment today: finally deployed the craftsperson website that I've been building almost entirely from scratch - except for the javascript lightbox.
Had been planning to avoid JS entirely, but the tradeoff here seemed worth it, given how image-heavy the site needs to be. Sure, it doesn't look like a professional web designer built it, but it's got a relatively unassuming vibe because of that.
Either way, it's a visual upgrade over the wordpress site I put together a few years ago. Plus it loads *fast*, without any cloud infrastructure whatsoever. Feels good!
GoToSocial has added a BUNCH of stuff recently, just upgraded to one of the latest snapshot builds from 0.16.0 stable. Reply controls, remote media size limit... need to find a front-end that can do all these things, but even still. Good things happening there
Still waiting for the next blog topic to present itself to me. Was thinking that a few words about the upcoming bitcoin conference would be fun, but I don't know if there's much new to say about that whole phenomenon.
The fact that Trump is headlining it is a new wrinkle - and yet somehow it's the most obvious thing that could have happened. Scams inspiring feverish devotion, stringing the followers along with the never-quite-realised return (or as they might call it, a "retvrn") to some imagined state of glory, while mostly just helping a select few insiders? In retrospect it was inevitable they'd cross paths.
Hmm... maybe I shouldn't get ahead of myself with the coding stuff - took me quite a while just to chop the python code for my bookmarks page into a bunch of functions and put them in a 'helpers' module!
Still a bit confused when it comed to variables' scope too.
In fairness, it's a huge PITA to debug things in a gemini browser, as opposed to in the terminal or an IDE etc; at least in those you get errors with relatively useful information. Not especially proud of how long it took me to find a capitalization discrepancy between a function definition and a function call, lol
Now that I'm spending more time in this space (tbh largely due to the daily games!), and having hacked together this tinylog and a bookmarks page w/ CGI scripts in Python, I'm getting curious about how to build other stuff on here.
Like, is there an existing method for private messages over the gemini protocol? I feel like it should be possible, but I don't know enough about how TLS/DNS/etc work to know if it would actually be secure? Will keep reading. I feel like the eventual outcome is building an activityPub server similar to tootik that does what I want it to (and, more importantly, doesn't do what I don't want it to). Programming skills are a *long* way off though
ok all fixed (hopefully!)
whoops
just found out there's a set of standards for tinylogs that I'm clearly not following, will have to correct that lol. Mostly it's the date format, but the paragraph breaks within entries might be a problem too
tinylog rfc (https://codeberg.org)
Still haven't figured out who '乙' is (like, if they have a capsule or whatever) but I get the sense there's a bit of a WordTunneler rivalry emerging between us, and it's fun :)
Ok maybe 'rivalry' is a bit optimistic, since they're *really good* at it and they keep spanking me ... but still. Nice to have a bit of friendly competition. Just wish I knew a bit more about the person behind the Unicode character!
My fediverse feed is now full of US politics, most of which is people arguing over what is real - for instance, I've seen:
And loads more. We're through the looking glass now. *That's* scary.
Was just reminded of a podcast episode I listened to while doing research for recent posts --
in 2021, Kim Stanley Robinson went on a "green cryptocurrency" podcast to talk about his book The Ministry for the Future, and it was hard to listen to, but bless Stan for trying to change people's minds!
Wow, the debate was incredibly painful to watch!
Despite calling each other names, they did seem to agree on a bunch of stuff, e.g. they like golf, don't respect sex workers, and support Israel's horrific genocide against Palestinians.
Joe Biden was a complete disaster, and despite it all, there were still mainstream Democrats in my Fediverse feed talking about how CNN should have been doing fact-checking, and how Biden has a cold.
Just in complete denial of what happened up there on the stage. Oh, Trump tells lies? Yeah no shit. Your guy could barely put a sentence together, and no, it was not his stutter. The "vote harder" folks are beyond help at this point.
just testing from my phone as well...
😎
Suh-weet: here's my first official tinylog entry.
This page is built dynamically by a python script which reads a csv file - which in turn is generated by a separate script that prompts for user input, then prepends the time & date to each log.
Not super complicated really - but one thing I'll have to get used to is remembering to use 'shift-enter' for a linebreak, when writing these logs in Lagrange.
Anyway... kind of in between blog post projects right now, so some coding practice seemed like a good idea. Fun!