+# December 2021 Status

+

+=> gemini://drewdevault.com/2021/11/24/A-philosophy-for-instant-messaging.gmi Early this month, I read Drew's article about productive IRC usage.

+I decided to give it a try, and started by asking which of two projects I should prioritize developing. This led to more swipe-typing work.

+# Swipe-typing

+My wvkbd setup got a lot more responsive, with a highlight trail, case-insensitive matching, and a smaller word list. Staceee suggested some changes to the input typing which could fix the known edge-cases, and Proycon has some ideas about language processing. I think if we add ngrams context-awareness, that could improve the quality of the suggestions. Possibly

+#SXMO

+I added some patches to support my commonly-used programs: VTE3, git, micro, and a new workflow pattern for switching workspaces (without using the super-key or the num row). I'm using a much shorter keyboard, to save that precious screen real-estate.

+My app store script was merged into the sxmo-userscripts repo. That will be the home of my emoji and unicode scripts too, when I get around to submitting them. There's no convenient way to install them, but that could be good for the future.

+

+In future-work, there's some necessary pgrep/pkill fixes, and an exciting improvement to the proximity-lock (shout-out to sourcehut for teaching me `git send-email`, very helpful for sending patches to the kernel tree).

+

+# go projects

+I use several projects written in go. This month I patched senpai (an IRC client primarily for use with IRC bouncers) to be more usable on a narrow display. I also started to look into better mouse-support for lf (alternative to ranger).

+aerc... I still use, but I think my effort there might be better placed into a notmuch wrapper. For UI-design, acme's plumbing rules come to mind, but as far as I know, there's no touchscreen friendly software with that functionality.

+

+# gemini projects

+=> gemini://nytpu.com/gemlog/2021-12-11.gmi After reading nytpu's article about fragments on gemini, I think I may try to update Grande and Gerbil to support it.

+The scope of gemini-browsers is quite large, so there's always something that could be done there.

+

+I think there's some idea about the open-source application lifecycle in here: we create projects and add features and users until it gets to the point where either it needs to be rewritten (e.g. ranger => lf) and the cycle restarts, or it's too large to be replaced (chromium, kernel). Feel free to disagree. Note that suckless tools aren't 'applications' the way a gemini browser is. Maybe acme-plumbing is the way to go: develop a generic platform atop which simple email, mastodon, gemini, and xmpp tools can sit. That's enough philosophizing for now though.

+

+#Servers

+I promptly updated my VPS to alpine 3.15, which came with PHP 8 and some issues for nextcloud. I believe they've been worked out and backported. I guess the lesson is to wait to update (unless you like contributing fixes to alpine :).

+This gemini-capsule is still on a debian buster machine, but may add more redundancy if any open SD cards materialize.

+

+# life

+I'm doing a little bit here and there, which could be sustainable while leaving more time toward open-source work, but still hoping for something more substantial.

+This time of year is usually my vacation (where I spend *more* time on Free&OpenSource software), so it's a little strange to have no change in that respect.

+Thanks for being a great audience. Living in "Christ's Era", it's always a great time to reflect on his work; I wish you all the best.

+

+=> mailto://~earboxer/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht?subject=Status%20Update%202021-12 -Zach (earboxer)

+

+=> 2021-12-22-status.gmi 2021-12-22 Status Update for December 2021