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smolZINE - Issue 12

eZine lover (@eZine)

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smolZINE

· 3 months ago

smolZINE - Issue 12

2021-10-15

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Introduction
Hidden (and not so hidden) Gems
Emanations
Spelunking
Gourmandery
Word Search
Community Contributions & Discussion
Thanks

Introduction

This issue shaped up really nicely. As always, there are some great gems. Emanations and Word Search reappear and we have a brand-new section, Gourmandery. This new section will likely only appear once every quarter rather than every issue.

Hidden (and not so hidden) Gems

SandboxGeneral

A blog that has moved from the big web to gopher, now calls gemini its home. Somewhat tech focused, however, there are plenty of other topics sprinkled in. With over 10 years of posts now living on the capsule there is a lot here to explore.

=> gemini://sbg.one SandboxGeneral

hoa.ro

Arthur from France has a nice capsule with a gemlog and other sections for cooking, games, movies and software development.

=> gemini://hoa.ro/ hoa.ro

Walkaway Handbook

The Walkaway Handbook is a repository of ideas, resources and a manifesto of the desire to move towards building an alternative societal structure that is centered more on harmony with nature. There is more here than I can fit in a brief description, so if you find this intriguing, it is well worth exploring further.

=> gemini://walkaway.wiki/ Walkaway Handbook

Cyberpunks

These two capsules house lists of various cyberpunk writings, media and other information and discussion. Jack in to cyberpunks in space and decrypt[.]fail and have a look around.

=> gemini://cyberpunksin.space/ cyberpunks in space
=> gemini://tx.decrypt.fail/ decrypt[.]fail

The Pulse

A virtual reality gemlog hosted on a floppy disk. You have to you use your imagination a bit but that's the fun part. The pulse also resides on main street in Nightfall City.

=> gemini://pulse.antipod.deThe Pulse
=> gemini://nightfall.city/main-street/ Main Street, Nightfall City

Emanations

Simplicity Allows Wonderful Diversity

There aren't many web browsers out there today. Safari, Firefox, Chrome and its many derivatives. That's pretty much it, and to be quite frank Google more or less controls the web standards going forward. Of course there are some smaller or niche ones, but developing and maintaining a web browser is no small feat. Getting started from scratch is almost an unthinkable undertaking, and keeping a web browser up to date with the latest standards is a sisyphean task.

Other standards suffer from similar problems on different scales. ActivityPub looks simple enough to implement in theory, but in practice the de facto standard has grown immensely and there is very little documentation on how protocol-adjacent communication is actually performed. A major selling point for the protocol was that it's infinitely extensible. Well, it has extended quite a bit. Maintaining an ActivityPub server means keeping up with the Joneses, and the largest and fastest moving of them all is Mastodon.

Gemini is a tiny and simple protocol, and you can tell by the enormous diversity of the ecosystem. How many server softwares do we have today? How many browsers? The choices are so abundant one could easily get analysis paralysis when trying to pick one. While that may be a small hurdle to overcome for beginners it's a very good thing for the future.

Some browsers will add more features to a point where making a "competing" browser becomes a time-consuming effort; maybe they render a table of contents for pages, have support for the titan protocol, have built-in feed readers... You name it. The difference here compared to the web is that none of those things are actually necessary to enjoy geminispace to the fullest. Capsules won't break in your gemini browser because it doesn't create a table of contents. If you don't have support for titan that just means that you don't have support for titan -- an altogether different protocol. No different than not supporting ftp or ssh in your gemini browser (emphasis on "gemini", your target protocol).

My primary browser is AV-98, and has been so for a long time now. It's simple, and by now it's comparatively old. It does what it's supposed to, though. Even the very newest capsules work perfectly in it. I've made a few changes in it myself, even. Something I wouldn't even begin to consider in a web browser.

Where Firefox and Chrome need hundreds of thousands of lines of code and hundreds or thousands of engineers to keep them on top of the modern web and compatible with the old, AV-98 is around 1500 lines of fairly simple python. I dare say I understand every line of it by now. Even found a bug or two that I have yet to care enough about to fix. No need for plugins, large render engines, a complicated protocol stack (HTTP3 isn't even really HTTP anymore; they're reinventing it completely and calling it QUIC), DRM support, new markup tags. It works already.

And if you don't find a browser you like, you can actually write one yourself. With just the features you want.

-- ew0k
=> gemini://warmedal.se/~bjorn/

Spelunking

I. Junk Punk Defined

First there was punk. And it rocked.

=> gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Timeline%20of%20punk%20rock (timeline of punk music, gopherpedia).

Then there was cyberpunk. It took punk sensibilities and applied them to humanity's relationship to technology.

Then there was steampunk. Sigh. Certainly some cool builds and images, but I hope we can all admit that it got a little out of hand.

Then there was solarpunk. Punk sensibility, relationship to technology, and let's see if we go forward living within the budget of energy allotted to us by the sun each day.

I want to talk about junk punk. That's what I like to call the stuff I make in my shop.

Junk punk is about reclaimed materials and not really caring about how something looks. In fact, there is often a perverse pleasure in what is ugly. Particle board, cardboard, boxy designs. Well, boxy when taken from something pre-made. Otherwise, the lines are going to not be parallel, and often wobbly.

Looking for people with similar thinking and feelings, I found . . .

=> https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Salvagepunk (salvage punk, web)

Meaning:

In speculative fiction this often takes place in the remnant of society after an apocalypse. However, it can also be used to describe the reperpopusing rubbish in the contemporary era. This could include the DIY culture of Cuba discussed by Ernesto Oroza where people repurposed household electronic goods into new products due to the trade embargos on the country The commonplace refurbishing of western e-waste in developing countries where they are resold and used again.

All cool stuff. . . This sort of thing is my bag, baby.

II. Junk Punk in Action.

After pulling the quote above about salvage punk, I looked into Ernesto Oroza.

=> http://architectureofnecessity.com (architecture of necessity, web)

I found myself wanting a lot more than was given, but I did find inspiration in these "wall clocks"

=> http://architectureofnecessity.com/two-wall-clocks (wall clocks, web)

I have an old wrist watch with a broken band that I didn't throw out because I thought I could do something with it. I assumed there was some way I could repair the band, but now I see that isn't necessary. After all, I could use a clock in the garage.

I thought over some different ways to proceed, and then went to the garage, grabbed a piece of particle board that had a weird over-hang left over from a previous project, put it in my vice, and sawed it off with a cheap pull-saw from Harbor Freight. I then used clamps to hold down one side of the wrist watch at a time attached it to the board with two small nails, one bent over and one only partially nailed in, so sticking out.

How to mount it to the metal shelves? Zip ties I inherited from a relative who has passed, of course. It was getting late, and I do try to be considerate of my neighbors, so I used my pump drill to make the pilot holes and a larger bit in a block of wood with a handle (which I use for countersinking) to get it to size.

=>gopher://sdf.org/0/users/candide/pumpdrill.txt (pump drill)

I was pleasantly surprised at easier it was to do this in particle board than the pine I had used in previous projects. The cheaper materials are often easier to work with hand tools.

-- Candide
=> gemini://gemlog.blue/users/NetCandide/
=> gopher://gopher.club/1/users/candide/

Gourmandery

As a celebration of all the culinary enthusiasm in geminispace we present this new section of smolZINE. We'll be featuring a menu of recipes found in geminispace from different capsules that pair well together. This inaugural menu has been curated for you by FiXato.

I love naan, leavened flatbreads, so when I saw Locrian's recipe for a garlic naan[1] I wanted to assemble a menu of recipes that could go well with that. Nico's chickpea[2] salad sounded like it could be a good match. Sticking with chickpeas I also found on Remy Noulin's capsule a recipe for a beet hummus[3]. To accompany it all is a kvass[4] recipe from Nico's capsule. Kvass is a traditional fermented Slavic and Baltic beverage commonly made from rye bread. If you have more preparation time and want something slightly more alcoholic, you can also try hrnekbezucha's Dirt Cheap and Stupidly Easy Ginger Ale[5]. To round out the meal we have snickerdoodle's banana nut muffins[6].

=> gemini://gemini.locrian.zone/recipes/naan_garlic_bread.gmi [1] Locrian's Naan Garlic Bread
=> gemini://breadpunk.club/~bagel/chickpea-salad.gmi [2] Nico's Chickpea Salad
=> gemini://gmi.noulin.net/cooking/144.gmi [3] Remy Noulin's Beet Hummus from minimalistbaker.com
=> gemini://breadpunk.club/~bagel/kvass.gmi [4] Nico's Kvass
=> gemini://tilde.team/~hrnekbezucha/finished/210309-ginger_ale.gmi [5] hrnekbezucha's Dirt Cheap and Stupidly Easy Ginger Ale
=> gemini://breadpunk.club/~snickerdoodles/recipes/2020-12-22-banana_muffins.gmi [6] snickerdoodles' banana nut muffins

Word Search

by Jone

Source Material: Pawn it all off
=> gemini://datababybase.flounder.online/pawnitalloff.gmi

```word search letter grid 
 y e w d a t a t l c e b j a y p 
 p s d e f q g a r b a g e c o r 
 e l p a w n m q x s e e w j d e 
 h p f d p v q u t p s i w n l c 
 m r y k v w b l u e t o o t h i 
 a g m k g n u j g a l u s f w o 
 n o c s e l l c n k p m a c v u 
 i o c d f u s j y e j q f d w s 
 c r h u n s e c u r e t e y z o 
 k n i z x z y n w a x p w o j v 
 b z l l i b z m i z p b a r n f 
 a i d l m o t t o s e a y g f n 
 b h c o m w z m s p r k l c u x 
 i z o m b i e s x f t e t a k e 
 e l a k o d z m d r x r k r d r 
 s a s t r e a m n x b y b e g s 
```

babies
barn
bluetooth
child
data
dead
expert
garbage
manic
pawn
precious
safeway
sell
speaker
stream
take
unsecure
wide

=> ./wordsearch-solution-issue-12.gmi Word Search Solution

Community Contributions & Discussion

Please consider taking part in making this zine better and more diverse by contributing your thoughts and finds. If you are interested in contributing a short article or capsule picks email me at: smolzine (at) cyberbot.space.

If you have any feedback or just want to discuss anything related to gemini or smolZINE hit me up at the above email or ping me on the fediverse at kelbot@retro.social and/or use the #smolZINE tag.