Also not a product per se but bib overalls, specifically ones with lots of pockets, or even better, one big pocket on the chest. I wear them pretty much every day now. Having ADHD means anything not immediately on my person is lost, and being blind means it’s lost forever, so everything goes in a pocket.

There are lots of blogs (gemlogs), but there’s a surprisingly well done Reddit clone gemini://bbs.geminispace.org that I check up on from time to t

The key to enjoying geminispace is understanding the goals of the project and its community, to take things slow and keep things small. It’s not out to replace the web, it’s a quiet retreat from it.

My big complaint, as I said before, is that the community has somehow made a text-only protocol inaccessible to screen reader users.

Gopher was at one point an alternative back when the web was more text-heavy. Now it’s an “alternative” in the sense of being another option for a document interchange protocol that sits on top of TCP/IP.

I was until recently writing sci-fi short stories based on my maladaptive daydreams, but I’m trying to quit.

Sure silent in the audio spectrum but what about RFI? I put ferrite chokes on all the things.

Cool now turn on TalkBack and cover your eyes and do all that from the beginning

regarding low bandwidth, I think part of the problem is the mandatory encryption, both for legal reasons because encryption is dissallowed on amateur bands in many (most?) countries, and because encryption adds overhead.

Yes. I had the same thought. If it ever became more widely adopted the preformatted code blocks would be used to plug holes in the markup standard like tables, nested lists, etc. in a way that would not be accessible.

Also, an accessible browser would take a day or two for someone with coding experience and a desire to develop said browser, and there seems to be little overlap on that Venn diagram.

Gopher predates the WWW (at least to market) but ended up losing out to it.

Gemini is a spiritual successor to Gopher born out of dissatisfaction with the state of the modern web. Everything about it is deliberately, almost aggressively minimalist, to a degree that will likely put off many. But it’s meant to be human-scale, the technical details are something a technically inclined person can wrap their head around in its entirety.

I was running a mediawiki instance for a while, and despite the very low human traffic and arguably useless nature of the site to anyone but me and a few online friends I was getting hammered by Amazon. I don’t think it got to the point of a denial of service but the traffic was excessive.

This was a problem before AI but has only gotten worse now that AI companies are scraping sites for training data.

CAPTCHAs and the like are often inaccessible to screen reader users, so the proliferation of CAPTCHAs has affected me greatly.

It is what it is I suppose.

Whichever closest planet has intelligent life that’s amenable to receiving extraterrestrial visitors so I can tell them “don’t worry guys there IS life out there and we’re rooting for you.”

Reddit has niches within niches within niches. There’s a sub for dogs, but also a sub for labradors. If you want to get even more specific, there are subs for chocolate, black, and yellow labs, and all of them are lively and active. I’ve run across legitimately interesting subreddits just by misspelling another subreddit name. Reddit’s user base is also very diverse, with more than just tankies and Linux nerds. But reddit is aggressively banking on social media addiction with their constant reminders to crosspost and weird mobile-game-looking ‘achievements’.

Lemmy’s constant politicking is exhausting, but the lack of an Algorithm is refreshing. I would, however, like a better way to find communities or posts. Surely there’s a an alternative to the content black hole that Lemmy can be vs the attention sucking time vampire that main stream social media can be.

Back in 2017 I found a bunch in our garage. I bought a cheap USB floppy drive off Amazon and went through them. It was real nostalgic hearing that noise and seeing the A: drive show up on the explorer sidebar. I archived them all on what is now my NAS.

Prior to that, probably the early 2000s. My parents bought a computer in 2004. It was the last one I can remember coming with an internal floppy drive.

Lemmy.radio is right this way

Your local ren fair or comic con?

You’re the reason I never share pics online lol.

Speaking Spanish. Haven’t needed it in years and my actual grasp of the language is tenuous at this point but every native speaker I interact with says my pronunciation is great. Understanding the differences between English and Spanish phonetics helps a ton in that regard.

Double posting but…

FOSS has problems too. Personality clashes can end or severely set back projects (MMDVM vs M17). If something isn’t fun *coughAccessibilitycough* it doesn’t get done. Projects get abandoned as devs loose interest because interest is the only motivator. Documentation usually sucks because the dev is the one doing the documenting and doesn’t understand that the end user doesn’t have their intuitive grasp of the software they themselves wrote. And 99% of the population doesn’t care a whit about code being open because surprise surprise they’re not software developers and won’t know the difference between = and ==. And no they’re not going to take night classes just to patch some program they use.

I bought my first Pi in (I think) 2014. It’s one of the things that got me into IT. The low price was an important feature, since I was much less reluctant to experiment and take risks with hardware that cost as much as a family meal. But nearly $400 the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

I guess I’m lucky in that I got a pi 5 back when they were selling at MSRP. I have a couple Pi 4’s, two 3’s (one I can’t find anymore sadly), my original Pi 1 model B, an also lost Pi zero W that I successfully soldered the GPIO pin headers to, and a Pi 400 I bought on a whim.

When people ask me about experimenting with Linux I usually tell them to either emulate it in virtualBox or buy a Raspberry Pi if they want a bare metal experience. It was specifically because the Pi was cheap and thus low risk if something did go wrong.

Currently listening to a random mix of video game remixes on YT at work.