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There was a post on gemini lately about how we shouldn't use ⓒⓔⓡⓣⓐⓘⓝ sᴛʀᴀɴɢᴇ 𝒸𝒽𝒶𝓇𝒶𝒸𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓈 in our writing because . My hot take is that as long as the characters being used aren't used improperly (accents/foreign characters), we should just fix our TTS software to pronounce things as the author intended.

I used an iPhone for 3 days 

I configured to use emojis for the clock time stamp. In related news: does anybody know how I can go about contributing my code change upstream to ’s stdlib?

@technomancy @mdhughes @GeoffWozniak Thing is, there isn't always an alternative to C. If you want to target unpopular OSes and architectures in constrained environments, "modern" langs like Rust won't work.

If you know a lang that can produce small + fast binaries for a vast array of non-mainstream platforms (x86, ARM, Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and Windows are the mainstream ones), I'm all ears.

There are three reasons why C works on just about every platform under the Sun:

1. It's standardized, which makes writing a new compiler/backend much easier.
2. It's slow-moving, which makes it easy to maintain said compilers
3. It's old, so it has a lot of compilers/backends already built.

Achieving the first two of the above three qualities are quite essential to "replace" C.

Was thinking about how so much content on gemini is mirrored or converted from other sites (I'm guilty of this too). Isn't this why the protocol allowed for proxy requests? Maybe it's a client-capability problem. Anyway, started working on a proxy from to .

I want to learn awk so I can do cool efficient text pipeliney things (like start printing on match, stop printing on another match, or run such and such command on a subset of the stream), but everytime I look at a tutorial for it, I think "these aren't practical" or "this makes no sense".

Hypothesis: posts that are outliers in engagement metrics (comments, score, etc) are more likely to be low quality/controversial/damaging to communities.

Mini-project B from this week: Grande: a gemini client for Android (open source fork of a different client). Don't fall in love with it yet: I'll probably make lots of disruptive changes. Read about and download ... on gemini.

gemini://gemini.zachdecook.com/grande/

Thinking about building a command line tool to create pngs of music notation so I can write about music theory on my wiki. Playing with @neauoire's nasu as a way to generate the sprites I'll be using.

tty = fopen_for_read(CURRENT_TTY);

Ah, thanks busybox. Just open the tty as a file :)

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Does anybody have a clue how less (and more) work internally? Do I need to read ALL of stdin before I can get controlled by the user?

Today I learned how to use `brltty` to make a "headless" microcomputer talk.

The important step is that you remove lightdm (and any other gui packages which might run as the login shell).

Works okay, except it only reads out the line the cursor is on, so it's still important to pipe commands through `flite -voice awb`

Have been experimenting this last week with serving different bible translations over gemini. All scripts in gemini://gemini.zachdecook.com/cgi-bin/

esv.sh - great formatting, but rate limited by upstream
net.sh - no paragraph or section breaks, but haven't been rate-limited yet
oeb.sh - reasonable formatting, missing most bible books, self-hosted
lsv.py - minimal formatting, no section breaks, self-hosted

Gemlog request 

gemini://gemini.zachdecook.com/capsule/2021-02-20-font-creation.gmi

Chronicle of my amateur font-making experience. (1300 words).

Pocket Paint is the only painting/image manipulation android app I recommend.
I especially love layers, and how the bucket fill uses transparent colors.
The only feature which is lacking is semi-transparent image masking.
@gdroid@mastodon.technology

The dollar is suddenly worth 0, all the stores are boarded up.

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Added the option to see each 1-bit channels per line, and the assembled 4-colors result.

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Look mom, I'm famous!
gemini://drewdevault.com/2021/01/15/Status-update-January-2021.gmi

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