I’ve had a go at making a two-player chess game for Gemini. If you want to try it out it is available at the link below. There is also a version of wordle there, though I made this before I realised that there is already a much better wordle clone available on gemini, Wordo.
In response to Solerpunk’s 2024 OFFLine-FIRst SOftware CHallenge, I wrote a command line script for looking up flight ‘information’ offline.
Solderpunk post on OFFLFIRSOCH
As with all things Solderpunk related, I loved the general concept behind this and was eager to participate. A few things stopped me from engaging with it fully, however:
One of the most noticeable things about Gemini is that it is text-based. Sure, it can support images but, depending on the client, these are mostly left hidden. Gemini gains a lot of its identity from this emphasis on text. One of the first things you’ll notice if you compare an average web page and a page on Gemini is that one is filled with images and highly visual, while the other is just a wall of text.
A few days ago on Mastodon, I came across a very useful toot by Fixato. He had provided a comprehensive shell command for updating you TLS certificates in light of the recent update to the agate server. He also kindly helped me troubleshoot additional issues I had.
Nothing much to report here. I updated the capsule structure to try make it more minimal and even easier to manage.
Now, I only have one page (Gemlog) for all my posts. I also introduced a ’tagging’ page for attempting to sort the posts be category as opposed to date. I kept the nano log separate.
I’ve added a new ‘feed’ section to my capsule. It uses ‘comitium’ by alex/nytpu.
The timing of comitium’s release was perfect. I have recently been browsing gopher a lot more and I was missing the ability to subscribe to feeds. I really love the way you can do it in Amfora.
Problems, in the best sense
Much of the Gemini ‘content’ I’ve found so far, at least, some of the most engaging and unique, centers on technical questions about Gemini itself - how to set it up, navigate it, write in it, etc. These questions are usually accompanied by musings on what we can then do with this new protocol or about what Gemini ‘means’. Neither the answers to the technical questions, nor the accompanying speculations, are fully concrete. This is because both how Gemini works and what it can do remain somewhat vague. Yes, the broad brush-strokes have been laid down, but the smaller details have yet to be filled in. This is not a bad thing at all. Gemini is still in its very early stages. Much of its appeal stems from its huge potential.
Navigation
A problem:
- ephemerality: content seems less ‘solid’ than on the web, less well mapped out and less defined.
A corresponding idea:
- ‘Maps’ are ways of drawing boundaries, of creating identities. Mapping will always, inevitably occur, the difference that matters lies in the form of map-making. How are well-defined, solid maps drawn on the web?
One way, as we know, is through sheer computational power, afforded only to the most wealthy and largest in scale. Do we, the ‘users’, have a choice in the shape of these maps? To an extent, but not a very large extent. The roadmap, the layout of the web, is like our gps. We can input destinations and even set some quasi-meaningful markers (‘home’, ‘work’) that help ‘personalise’ our gps, but not much else. Our gps is extremely efficient and effective at getting us to a desired destination. Nevertheless, we have to wonder whether our very human desire is really so uni-directional. What if, instead, we took responsibility ourselves for the task of map-making? What if we develop our own tools? These tools will inevitably be less powerful, less precise. But, isn’t that the point?