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       Some replies from Iceland
       July 05th, 2019
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       Hi everybody! I'm in Iceland now. We moved this past weekend and
       we're settled in an airbnb for July getting everything in place.
       If you're interested in my expat adventures, that's something I'm
       writing over in web-land so my parents and wife's friends can
       follow. Check it out [0].
       
 (HTM) [0] tomasino blog
       
       Tonight I thought it would be fun to take stock of recent things
       happening on gopher and send some feedback. So, here goes:
       
       moji, over on circumlunar, has detailed their efforts to cut back
       on the caffeine [1]. It's a solid post and raises some good
       thoughts on what it means to be reliant on something like coffee.
       Addictions, even relatively benign ones, have some hold on you.
       I can totally respect the effort. More power too you.
       
 (TXT) [1] moji - caffeine
       
       pkotrcka, whose name I have to be very careful typing out, wrote
       a neat phlog about cameras that put my head in weird places [2].
       Mainly it made me sad that photography is pretty much dead.
       I mean, not really at all, but as a profession it's gone from this
       highly technical artform with super expensive equipment, years of
       training required and it's been overrun by quick snaps with your
       phone and bottled filters. There's little spots left for the art,
       like wedding photos and... is that it? Really though it's a "dead"
       technology in the same way gopher is.
       
       There's the part where my mind turned happy again. When we say
       it's dead that just means that capitalism stopped seeing monetary
       value. That's not the same thing at all. Why is there no money in
       gopher? Well, not enough people to be worth the effort investing.
       Photography? Same thing. Niche stuff sure, but other than than
       just let it return to the afficianados. Let the pkotrckas of the
       world have their fun, right? Keep on keeping on, pkotrcka.
       
 (TXT) [2] pkotrcka - cameras
       
       The amazing, incredible visiblink did some hard work recently
       cleaning up insulation and maybe asbestos [3]. Well done. That's
       not what I wanted to comment on at all, though. At the very end of
       the phlog they mention that the gopher hole switched over to a pi
       zero w, saving more power. I love this ultra-low power stuff.
       I have some basic notes on how I stripped my pi zero down to the
       minimum draw for the little free library project. I recommend
       checking it out in my archives for tidbits.
       
 (TXT) [3] visiblink - asbestos
       
       Ubergeek kayaking with son
       
       ubergeek got his son out kayaking and that's so awesome [4].
       I adore kayaking. It was really sad having to sell my kayak when
       we moved. There's something really ... perfect about being out on
       the water. I can close my eyes and feel myself relax just thinking
       about it.
       
       I learned to kayak in Alaska in Resurrection Bay, near Seward. It
       was cold and beautiful. I saw bears and salmon and eagles and was
       forever in love. I love lakes now. They're so smooth and you can
       just pull yourself a bit with the paddles and drift away.
       
       Anyway, I can see why his son is connecting with it. I wish you
       both the best. It's some special stuff, there. Good dad-ing.
       
 (TXT) [4] ubergeek - kayaking
       
       Our pal heavysquare sent me an email the other day asking me to
       point his phlog roll post to the root directory where he's added
       a really killer gophermap. There's so much more to see than just
       the "noise" phlog I had there before. Check him out [5].
       
 (DIR) [5] heavysquare
       
       Finally, there was a lot of talk this past week about Gemini's
       link syntax [6,7,8]. Out goes the [|] and in comes the =>. I'm
       into it, guys. It's cool as heck. Here's my 2-cents:
       
       1. Spaces optional. You can split on whitespace easy enough with
          regex alone and not care if it's one space, zero, or
          a tab-space-tab-space salsa.
       
       2. Link first. We're talking about clients doing some magic in the
          gemini world, but how much should we rely on the client's
          display choices to fulfill that important note that a URL
          should always be shown. If we have it at the end it could get
          cropped off screen or hidden in a wrap or any number of things.
          Link first is more likely to be seen, easier to parse across
          languages, and MOST importantly, means that the label can be
          optional. 
       
          You see how I'm linking to things paragraph by paragraph in
          this post? I have numbers referencing things with the square
          bracket syntax because it's my convention, but the position of
          the links in context to the copy says enough about what they
          are. In many cases I just described the link in a paragraph and
          the label on the link is redundant. If the label in gemini is
          optional then you can just do something like:
       
          => gemini://cosmic.voyage
       
          And let it live on its own.
       
 (TXT) [6] solderpunk - quick update on link syntax
 (TXT) [7] ascraeus - peter frampton reference
 (DIR) [8] sloum - commentary on link syntax
       
       Thanks gophers. Keep gophin' around.