Wed Apr 13 22:46:31 UTC 2022

What is it about Wednesdays?

Some older entries here have been mangled  for some time now. I was originally
saving them as UTF-8,  which may have something to do  with it. Trivial enough
that I  can't be  arsed, but  I did  at least  get rid  of all  the extraneous
linefeeds.

I still  spend most of  my time in  a terminal, and  for the most  part remain
happy there.  But even  with my  carefully crafted  and curated  collection of
config files, I'm noticing more and more of late how all the various tools and
environments  are showing  - not  their age  necessarily, but  their crumbling
infrastructure and  lack of  general maintenance.  Like the  Linux framebuffer
that was the crown  jewel of INX [0] but fell into  squalor and disrepair, the
console in general has never gone away and in fact has recently seen a revival
of interest.  But this  is exposing more  of the warts  and quirks,  from line
drawing characters to color  management. Try as I might to  get all my texttop
programs looking  and working the same,  I remain stymied by  the multitude of
standards. Bad  enough people insist  on writing  terminal programs in  Go and
Rust. I know, I know. At least it's not node.js.

And it's  not an isolated thing.  Jumping around from  tin to mutt to  lynx is
already  jarring  enough  before  running into  more  annoying  decisions  and
frustrating tradeoffs.  Lynx does Gopher  but not Gemini,  so I need  a client
that does Gemini. Sure,  I already have a million programs  and one more isn't
going to cause  the whole thing to  come crashing down. But  especially when I
have such trouble getting these tools to behave consistently in my hands, then
if possible  I'd like to  avoid cramming  another into an  already overflowing
tool  chest. The  more  of them  sitting around  without  an obvious  cohesive
interface tying them all  together, the more I tend to  forget they even exist
until they pop up to annoy me in a random bash history search when I'm looking
for something else.

In the  case of Gemini, I  was trying bombadillo.  Good idea in theory,  but I
still have no idea how you actually go  to a bookmark once you've saved it - I
can bring up  the list of bookmarks,  and tab back and forth  between that and
the main window, but any numbers  entered stubbornly insist on following links
from the  main window.  And if  you enable the  option to  give you  access to
the  filthy plebian  world  of http,  not just  the  rarefied exclusive  cyber
neighborhoods  of Gemini  and  Gopher, the  inconsistencies  become even  more
apparent.  Don't get  me  started on  trying to  maintain  my Solarized  color
settings in the face of all this cruft. And WTF wtfutil - over forty megabytes
for this program? To  do what even in these decadent  times any halfway decent
shell  script  and countless  other  programs  can  manage  in a  few  hundred
kilobytes?

Of course  there are plenty of  gems. Despite the occasional  annoyances, lynx
and  mutt remain  solid workhorses.  epy  turned out  to be  an excellent  and
feature-packed ebook  reader to replace the  old epub.py I was  using. btop is
visually appealing  without going overboard  on form over function.  And bless
the folks who took over the abandoned newsbeuter and gave us newsboat.

I  know half  the problems  I run  into are  probably due  to my  insisting on
accessing the  host systems from all  sorts of different client  software, not
always on the same operating system. I think part of my malaise in this regard
stems from what I see as a  similar balkanization of the people. Sure, there's
probably a  good deal  of crossover  between those who  read Gopher  pages and
those who read Usenet. But in practice, those communities almost might as well
be walled gardens.  SDF itself has two  chat systems I'm aware of,  an IRC and
some bizarre old CP/M  looking thing I can't recall the name  of. Part of this
is the prevailing attitudes of the people  in question - it's like any attempt
at actual  social networking is viewed  with bemusement or even  disdain, like
something only  "normies" do. Here and  there I do  see people who seem  to be
trying to  blend the best  of the old  with the new.  But too many  are either
stuck in  the mud  of the past,  or striking some  steampunk pose  that's more
about mimicry and fashion than finding the right tool for the job.

Pretty much every time  someone tells me I need to  create Yet Another Account
on Yet  Another Site,  I instantly nope  out. And pretty  much every  time, it
turns  out I  don't  need  to. Just  like  I try  to  minimize  the number  of
"accounts" I  have to deal with  and be responsible  for, I strive to  keep my
toolbox uncluttered. That way I know what  I have, and I can quickly lay hands
on whatever I need.

Imagine how opinionated I'd be if I actually had to work with this stuff for a
living.


[0] http://www.inx.maincontent.net/