==========
 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
<https://emacs.ch/@defanor>`_ 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: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT_Eon4STrw>.

- 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
