---------------------------------------- Some replies from Iceland July 05th, 2019 ---------------------------------------- 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.