Over/Under #47 with Ploum

Over/Under #47 with Ploum Today, my guest is Ploum , also known as Lionel Dricot. He’s a Belgian blogger, writer, and opensource developer. He wrote many SF books , created Offpunk , an “offline-first command-line browser” , and blogs often about things that could make our world better. He’s a bépo user, and loves split mechanical keyboards. As you can see, there are many reasons to follow him on Mastodon at @ploum@mamot.fr , to subscribe to his RSS feed , or to send him a plaintext email . Here are some topics I picked up for him ⤵️ Mailing lists Completely underrated. You can join and participate in a mailing-list without creating any account. For some, you can even participate in a thread without subscribing to the whole list. You can filter message in your client. You can easily search the whole history in your own client. The history can easily be displayed on the web if that’s useful. I remember, 25 years ago, people subscribing to mailing-lists they didn’t read only to have a local copy of the archives, just in case. When some mailing-lists were lost, people managed to rebuild the archives for historical purpose. All of that on your own schedule, without that urgent need to reply in real-time. The young generation using Discord have no idea what they are losing. And they will regret this heavily. Bikes Also underrated. People don’t realise how fast it is to bike on a short distance. They see it as hard. They are afraid of sweating. But once you build a condition by biking regularly, you end up being faster on short routes: shorcuts through the paths, no traffic, no parking problems. And it makes you happier. Have you ever see an angry cyclist? Now compare with drivers... Gemini Completely underrated. People see it as “too simple”, “not pretty”. The genius move of Gemini is the gemtext format and the idea to allow only one link per line and no text formatting other than title. Newbies typical reaction is always that “it cannot work”, “it’s not enough for their writing”. If you need bold and colours, it means you can’t write. Have you ever seen a good book, a real good book? There’s no bold, no underline, no colours. Those are distraction. Those are used by people who can’t write. If you think you need to make it bold, it is because you don’t trust your sentence to be powerful enough. You don’t trust your reader to understand you. You insult the reader and yourself. Gemini is pure text network. And it is incredibly powerful. People who use it are learning to write, to convey strong meanings. Calendar.txt and plaintext files Well, this is more about UNIX and command line tools. It is incredibly underrated. When I stared teaching, each year I received complex Excel sheets with the list of my students, lot of columns for all their informations, and I needed to fill columns with the different grades. It...

Preview: ~500 words