========== Mastodon ========== I am a microblogger now! Decided to finally try out Mastodon, even though I still rather dislike the involved technologies. But to avoid interacting with them too much directly, as well as to setup a separate communication channel, I registered at emacs.ch and tried to use an Emacs Mastodon client, mastodon.el. Quickly discovered that there is a memory leak in my Emacs version, related to images, so now using the usual Mastodon's web interface. It is okay: somewhat buggy and awkward, but there are many worse ones. Hashtags are interesting: they are basically keywords or a toy version of RDFa references, but unlike those, they are actually widely used, by both writers and people discovering materials on the topics they reflect, making them much more useful in practice. On Mastodon, they also work across federated servers, which is neat. Also as with RDFa, by adding a hashtag, you simultaneously link more materials on the topic, and make the post (a "toot") discoverable. Since discoverability is a big issue in federated and distributed systems, I think it is rather nice, though it is not the only discoverability-related feature in Mastodon. Perhaps it is even a more important issue to focus on, rather than nicer technologies. Now that I wrote it, I recall somebody in Gopherspace writing something along those lines before, arguing either that or the opposite. I already spotted there a few people whose phlogs I saw before, along with a bunch of fellow Emacs users and Haskell programmers; I guess starting from emacs.ch provided that bias, in addition to using a federated system in the first place. Somewhat related, saw a discussion on markup formats there, adjusted my views on those a little yet again, and now thinking of using something other than reStructuredText here, maybe plain text with common conventions (although that might be quite close to Markdown/CommonMark). I picked RST initially because it seemed rather neat when viewed as plain text, with outstanding titles and concise reference syntax, but then the references always felt awkward, since people unfamiliar with RST may not recognize them as such, and will not know to look at the bottom. The observed discussion made me to consider using "embedded URIs", though those are more awkward in RST than in plain text. Anyway, here is one, to `my new microblog `_ mentioned above. Other news ========== In the assorted news section, I will duplicate some of the stuff written in the microblog, highlights of the past month: - Made more stews (they are nice and practical), tried making fried rice for the first time (very nice, but perhaps less practical, especially without a wok). - Removed xmlNode manipulations from rexmpp, rewrote it to use a custom XML structure, so that it can be used from Rust without reliance on libxml2 (as well as with other XML parsers, including Rust ones). - I keep trying new coffee varieties; apparently Ethiopian ones tend to be nice and floral, though pretty much all the coffee varieties I tried are nice when they are freshly roasted, and when you switch between them, since flavors seem to be better felt when there is a contrast, when you are not used to them. - I keep adding physical exercises to my routine, the most recent (and rather fun) addition is balance exercises, such as `these wobbling exercises `_. - Cleaning some parts of the apartment today, it is nice to have less dust around. Oh, and I still don't smoke (for 3 months now, didn't notice any cravings; possibly because of gradual reduction before that), so there is no smoke, either, which is also nice. ---- :Date: 2023-06-09