Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 26/03/2023: More TikTok Bans



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

    • Server

      • Container Journal ☛ Docker, Inc. Celebrates 10th Anniversary With Alliances

        Docker, Inc. celebrated the 10th anniversary of the namesake artifact used widely for building cloud-native applications by announcing alliances with Ambassador Labs to improve the developer experience and Hugging Face to make it simpler to launch and deploy machine learning applications on a cloud service using DockerFile. In addition, Docker,

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Applications

      • Linux Links ☛ 100 Essential and Must-Have GUI Linux Applications

        There is a staggering amount of proven open source software available to download. But it’s really difficult to keep up with the cream of the cream. That’s where this compilation aims to help.

        We select the best-of-breed GUI (Graphical User Interface) software ranging from projects coded by individual programmers, small teams of enthusiasts, extending to large multinational corporations. The compilation largely reflects software that our volunteers use as their daily drivers.

        We mostly recommend cross-platform software, but, where appropriate, make some exceptions. We include a select few proprietary applications along the way. We try to avoid duplication as much as possible. A few of omissions will definitely raise some eyebrows. For example, there’s no room for Firefox even though it’s open source software (unlike Chrome) and some of our volunteers strongly prefer it over any other web browser.

      • OMG! Linux ☛ Tuba is a Magnificent New Mastodon App for Linux

        Faithful fans of the Fediverse need to check out Tuba, a new Vala/GTK app for Linux that is fine-tuned for social interactions.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Command to Install UNRAR in Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04

        UNRAR is a free command utility (GPL licensed) on Linux systems for decompressing and extracting files that are compressed and archived in the RAR archive format. RAR is a popular archive format that is proprietary but commonly and widely used to compress large files.

      • Glances installation on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Linux

        Glances is a free open-source command line software solution for Linux systems to monitor computer activity in real time. It can be considered a good alternative to top/Htop command line system monitoring tools for Ubuntu. Here in this tutorial,

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How to enable mod_headers on Apache Web server?

        Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to enable mod_headers on Apache web server. The tutorial is intended for Debian / Ubuntu or some derivatives of these. Let's go. Introduction According to the information provided by Apache This module provides directives to control and modify HTTP request and response headers.

      • Linux Made Simple ☛ 2023-03-24How to install the Brave Browser on a Chromebook in 2023
      • Linux Made Simple ☛ 2023-03-24How to install Flowblade video editor on Linux Lite 6.2
      • Linux Made Simple ☛ 2023-03-23How to install FreeOffice on Linux Lite 6.2
      • Linux Made Simple ☛ 2023-03-23How to install Pinta on a Chromebook in 2023
      • DebugPoint ☛ How to Fix: pip command not found error in Ubuntu

        A quick and simple guide to fix pip command not found in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. You might have encountered the |pip command not found" error while installing any Python package or module. This error occurs when the system cannot locate the pip package manager used to install and manage Python packages.

      • Red Hat Official ☛ How I created a Red Hat OpenShift cluster on tiny hardware

        Build an OpenShift cluster on a small, sub-$300 computer.

      • 2023-03-20Firebird 5 compiling on Oracle Linux 8 Ampere V1 (arm64)
      • FOSSLinux ☛ Quick and efficient Tmux session and window switching

        This guide provides tips for quickly switching between Tmux sessions and windows, including keyboard shortcuts, navigation commands, and customization options.

      • FOSSLinux ☛ The guide to installing and using Ruby on Ubuntu

        In this guide, we will provide a step-by-step tutorial on how to install Ruby on Ubuntu. We will cover the installation process using both the command line and package manager, as well as how to check the installation to ensure it is working correctly. We will also explore some popular tools for setting up a development environment, including Ruby on Rails.

      • Kifarunix ☛ Configure Log Retention Period in ELK Stack

        How do I change the log retention policy in elk stack? In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure log retention period in ELK stack. Elasticsearch uses ILM (Index Lifecycle Management) policies to define what actions to be applied to indices according to your performance, resiliency, and retention requirements.

      • TechRepublic ☛ How to manage multiple SSH sessions from a single window with EasySSH

        Jack Wallen shows you how you can wrangle all of those SSH connections you use daily into a single, easy-to-use application.

      • Techtown ☛ Deploying Your XAMPP Project to a Web Server

        XAMPP is a popular solution for web development and testing on a local machine. However, once you have completed your web application, you will need to deploy it to a web server to make it available to the public.

      • Techtown ☛ Securing XAMPP: Best Practices and Tips

        XAMPP is a popular web server solution for developers who need to test and develop web applications on their local machines. However, like any other software, XAMPP can be vulnerable to security threats if not configured and managed properly. In this article, we will discuss best practices and tips for securing XAMPP.

      • Techtown ☛ Configuring XAMPP for Your Development Environment

        XAMPP is a free and open-source web server solution that includes Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl. It is widely used by developers for testing and developing web applications on their local machines. Configuring XAMPP for your development environment can be a straightforward process if you follow the steps outlined below.

      • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install WildFly Java Application Server with Nginx on Ubuntu 22.04

        Wildfly is a simple, lightweight, and flexible application runtime used to build Java applications. This tutorial will show you how to install Wildfly with Nginx as a reverse proxy on Ubuntu 22.04.

      • Make Use Of ☛ How to Type Accented Characters in Linux

        You may wonder how to type accented characters in Linux. Fortunately, it’s easy to do so with a keystroke or a character map application.

      • The New Stack ☛ Inspect Container Images with the docker scan Command

        If you’re serious about container security, then you know it all begins at the beguine…images. No matter how much work you put into locking down your deployments, your network, and your infrastructure, if you base your containers on images with vulnerabilities, those deployments will simply not be secure. And simply trusting that a random image pulled from Docker Hub is enough is a big mistake.

        Sure, there are verified images to be had on Docker Hub, but those verifications cost quite a bit for a company, so not every image is verified. And although you can generally trust verified images, it’s best to know, first-hand, that trust is warranted.

        And as far as unverified images, every single one you attempt to use could cause you problems. To that end, you must scan them for vulnerabilities. If you find an image contains vulnerabilities, at least you’re informed and, in some cases, you could mitigate a vulnerability by updating the packages contained within an image.

        Fortunately, there are a number of tools you can use to scan those images. One such tool is built right into Docker, called docker scan. It’s very easy to use and reports back very simple information about any known vulnerabilities it finds.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Nate Graham ☛ This week in KDE: Distro upgrades for Fedora KDE in Discover

          With the new XwaylandVideoBridge utility, you can now screencast native Wayland windows from Xwayland apps like Discord (Aleix Pol Gonzalez and David Edmundson, Link)

          Dolphin now has an option to not change the information and preview shown in the Information Panel when hovering over files, and to instead only do so when deliberately selecting files (Oliver Beard, Dolphin 23.08. Link)...

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Make Use Of ☛ 2023-03-2212 New Linux Distros That Launched in 2022

      Hundreds of new Linux distros spawn each year, with many becoming the norm among the community. Here are some distros that were released in 2022.

    • Why I Will Never Use Alpine Linux Ever Again

      Nowadays, Alpine Linux is one of the most popular options for container base images. Many people (maybe including you) use it for anything and everything. Some people use it because of its small size, some because of habit and some, just because they copy-pasted a Dockefile from some tutorial. Yet, there are plenty of reasons why you should not use Alpine for your container images, some of which can cause you great amount of grief...

    • SUSE/OpenSUSE

      • Dominique Leuenberger ☛ openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2023/12

        Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

        This week we released only 5 snapshots, but one was hefty in size and we needed the extra time for the mirrors to settle again and get the bandwidth back under control. The large snapshot was due to the change in the default compiler: Tumbleweed has been rebuilt entirely using GCC 13. The released snapshots were numbered 0316, 0317, 0318, 0319, and 0321.

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • Fedora Project ☛ Fedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2013-12

        Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

        I have weekly office hours most Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time). Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

      • Fedora Magazine ☛ Fedora Magazine: Use sysfs to restart failed PCI devices (WiFi cards, sound cards, etc.)

        This article describes one method of restarting PCI devices. It demonstrates restating a wireless device. But the concept should work on any device whose device driver has adequate hotplug support.[1]

        Computers typically consist of several interconnected devices. Some devices can be physically disconnected and reconnected with ease (for example, most USB devices). Others might require a specific interaction with the operating system or specific software. And others will require a full reboot.

        Built-in laptop wireless cards are PCI devices that could fail at runtime but might not be easy to physically disconnect and reconnect without a full reboot. In many cases these devices can be restarted through Linux’s sysfs interface without having to do a full reboot of the computer.

        This article will specifically demo how to restart an Atheros wireless card which has locked up.

      • Fabio Alessandro Locati: Fedora Sericea and Sway Spin beta

        The Fedora Project released Fedora 38 beta images. The Fedora Sway Spin and the Fedora Sericea ones are in the long list of released images!

        This is a critical point in the release of those Fedora artifacts based on Sway since it is the first time it has been possible to test them for the wider public. Although the Fedora Project has been creating Sway artifacts for a couple of months, those were based on Rawhide, which is “a not always stable” version of Fedora, since it tracks far in the future (4-10 months) versions of Fedora.

      • Enterprisers Project ☛ ChatGPT: Top 3 industries that can benefit now [Ed: Red Hat keeps prompting this overhyped proprietary spyware of Microsoft; who does Red Hat truly work for these days?]
    • Open Hardware/Modding

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Programming/Development

      • Emmanuel Maggiori ☛ I’ve been employed in tech for years, but I’ve almost never worked

        When Twitter fired half of its employees in 2022, and most tech giants followed suit, I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I think little will change for those companies. After being employed in the tech sector for years, I have come to the conclusion that most people in tech don’t work. I don’t mean we don’t work hard; I mean we almost don’t work at all. Nada. Zilch. And when we do get to do some work, it often brings low added value to the company and its customers. All of this while being paid an amount of money some people wouldn’t even dream of.

        What is happening right now in tech may be one of the greatest market inefficiencies—or even deceptions—in history. I am writing this article because I think outsiders deserve to know what’s really going on in the field.

      • Project Management for Software Engineers

        At some point in your career you will be asked to manage a project. This can be intimidating, it can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be. We can leverage some time-honoured techniques, and adapt them to the unique approach required for software projects to deliver on time, on budget, and with success.

        This article is a collection of techniques I’ve learned for managing projects over time, that attempts to combine agile best practices with project management best practices. If you study project management to any level of depth, it is inevitable that you will come across the Project Management Institute, or PMI. The PMI is a global professional body that provides training and certification in project management topics. PMI provides different certification options, including some for Agile processes and Scrum.

      • Jordan Kaye ☛ Go slow to move fast

        Technical debt is an often debated topic. Like most concepts in software, it isn’t particularly difficult to find arguments supporting opposite sides of the spectrum - in a single minute of searching I was able to find that some believe that technical debt doesn’t exist, while others feel that technical debt is the most important aspect of product development. From the conversations that I’ve had with others in the industry, both within my place of work and with technical leaders from other companies, I’ve come to believe that one of the root causes of the gap between these viewpoints is primarily definitional.

        Part of the reason that some people don’t like the term “technical debt” is that they feel it becomes an excuse. To these individuals, everything that software engineers don’t like within the system on which they’re working gets labeled as debt, and that debt becomes a boogeyman that gets blamed for all of their problems. Those on the other side of the argument feel almost the exact opposite: technical debt gets little attention and they’re forced to spend inordinate amounts of time struggling against implementations and concepts that make it more difficult to make changes than it otherwise could be. An interesting realization (and something that makes this conversation particularly difficult) is that both groups can be right at the same time. This can be true only because the two groups are misunderstanding one another. But where does this misunderstanding come from?

      • Why people misuse inheritance

        In the thread, he recalls the adage "prefer composition over inheritance". This is a well-known principle of good OOP code, and yet inheritance is commonly used where composition would serve better; the question that comes to my mind is, "Why?" I think I have at least a partial answer, but let me meander a bit before getting to it.

        The thread gives an example use case of a map that counts explicit insertions, which is the example I'll use here. If you inherit and override the put() method, the behavior you get may be wrong, or may be right in one version and wrong in the next. On the other hand, you didn't have to write a lot of code.

        (One post, an oldie but a goodie, that significantly influenced my thinking on this matter, suggests that you should never override a method that was not designed to be overridden, and talks about how building this into the language slightly improves ergonomics when you do override.)

        Suppose I did the "right" thing and used composition (in this case, also delegation, and also the decorator pattern, for people who think in GoF design patterns). I would have to implement the map interface, calling down to a map implementation that stores the actual data. To implement the Map interface in Java I would need to implement 25 methods! Most of them would be boilerplate, just passing the arguments to the equivalent method on the delegate. Other languages are not better (the Haskell Data.Map module has more than 100 functions).

      • Lawrence Tratt ☛ How Big Should a Programming Language Be?

        Reading the thought-provoking "Patterns & Abstractions" post reminded me of a long-held opinion I have about programming language design: we have a tendency to keep adding features to a language until it becomes so big [1] that its sheer size makes it difficult to use reliably. Since most of us spend most of our time programming in one language, it can be difficult to see a common trend amongst languages in general.

  • Leftovers

    • Kev Quirk ☛ I Re-Joined Twitter

      I’ve decided to re-join Twitter. I miss an awful lot about it and I might leave Mastodon too.

      Yes, you read that right. I’ve decided to re-join Twitter. There’s a lot of stuff I miss from the social network - the community, the threads, the hot takes. the fun.

      I feel like Mastodon is becoming way too serious…it needs more of those fun-time Twitter folk. Because I intend for Twitter to be my primary social network, I’m thinking about putting my Mastodon profile out to pasture too.

      But what lead me to these decisions? Well dear reader, that’s a looooong story. So I decided to do a video about it instead of writing War and Peace.

    • Quartz ☛ 4 ways for execs to leverage social media better [Ed: No, social control media is a waste of time, going down the drain, even banned.]

      As a business community, we’ve tried to shame execs into being on social media for at least 10 years, and the results are decidedly mixed. Despite the expectations from employees and consumers, only half of the CEOs in the S&P 500 are on social media.

    • Culture Viruses

      In large organizations, culture is key. The values and habits of an organization, and what it rewards and punishes, are the background radiation driving towards discrete outcomes in a world of infinite possibility.

      Your culture is a living thing - it changes and adapts to new teammates, external forces, and the broader environment. And sometimes it gets sick; sometimes your culture gets a virus.

      A Culture Virus is a contagious idea that hooks into your culture like a pathogen, passing from person to person, and very often preying on the weak and struggling - the people who are susceptible to convenient excuses.

      Below we’ll work through examples of common culture viruses that can occur as companies grow. These elements of culture aren’t matters of style – if you let them creep into your company, they will meaningfully deflate, devalue, and debase your company.

    • Gemini* and Gopher

      • Personal

        • Duckburg Family Trees (Rota vs Rosa)

          It’s neither OK that Elvira and Scrooge are siblings nor that they are Donald’s parents (kind of contradicts Scrooges early appearances in Barks). It’s even less OK that they are both those things. That book came out in Swedish in 86 (two years after its original Italian publication), I saw it and always wanted to read it, but when I did get a chance to a few years later, in the later eighties, I was super weirded out and not happy. (The Swedish book also contained two Lockman/Strobl stories and they were pretty good.)

        • body image

          I have found myself more relaxed with certain aspects of my body the past few months. I remember as a teen, it was basically normalized to be obsessed about your body in a way that doesn't even make sense and that you hopefully, usually, grow out of; at least I did, gradually, but did most of my growing the past year or so, I think.

        • Retcon-style mechanics

          The playtest for the version of D&D that’s codenamed “D&D One” has Guidance and Resistance spells be post-hoc instead of pre-hoc and I thought that seemed great at first but through playtesting we’ve run into trouble. The more we use it, I’ve gone from “sure, that makes sense” to hating it, but my players are becoming more entrenched in loving it.

          To me it feels like retconning and I’m not into it. Jarring and unfun.

          I like fortune at the end and dislike “fortune in the middle” mechanics, like how you can retcon your attacks by spending points, and this is even worse since what you add retroactively is even more dice. It’s “fortune in the middle and then even more fortune”.

        • Wither proficiency dice?

          When 5e was being playtested, the proficiency bonus wasn’t a static +2, +3, +4, +5, or +6. It was a d4, d6, d8, d10 or d12. The character sheet was much simpler, too. You had your basic ability modifiers and then you would just note if you were proficient. So if you had +3 strength, you’d roll d20+3 if you weren’t proficient but if you were, you’d also toss on a d4 (at lower levels, and more at higher levels).

        • Fortune at the End

          I love what RPG designers call “Fortune at the End”; making your decisions before the roll and then the roll shows you what happened. You have all kinds of ways to influence the roll but you do that first, and then there’s the showdown. Poker and roulette are similar in that regard. You think you’ve figured out when to hold’em and now it’s time for a prayer on the flop. I hate fighting in real life but these kinds of mechanics feel, to me, appropriate to how a good swashbuckling movie should feel. You’ve swung your sword or drawn back your bow and now all you can do is see how it landed.

          This is contrasted with “Fortune in the Middle” or “Fortune in the Beginning”, where you roll your dice but then you get to fiddle endlessly with the result with points and chips and spends and this and that and the other. Legalized fudging. Not my jam. I want tension and release, not tension and hold-​on-​let-​me-​just-​tweak-​some-​levers.

      • Politics

      • Technical

        • Re: Systemd-free

          There's a recent post by Lesogorov about SystemD-free distros that's worth a read if this sort of thing interests you.



          Around 2017 I started migrating away from using old crappy X86 desktops as home servers to a small army of Raspberry Pi's. I immediately ran into a few SystemD related issues that somewhat soured my feelings towards it.

          [...]

          The heart of the issue is that SystemD was attempting to mount all disks before that disk had even finished spinning up, causing the mount to fail because the kernel didn't even know the disk existed yet.

          [...]

          I've since found Void. I am extremely positive about Void. It's not perfect, but it really is very good. I love that it uses Musl libc. It uses Runit for init and process supervision, which is crazy simple.

          [...]

          I've got Alpine in a VM for evaluation. I have to say, I'm totally impressed. I can see this replacing Arch as my development environment because it's actually up to date (Void lags just enough to annoy me) and it is also Musl libc based. There are a couple things I'm not entirely happy with though. I don't particularly care for BusyBox, as I've seen the code, and I'm also not entirely happy with the way packages are split.

          [...]

          This is not a great tendency. I'd point out that Unix was originally brought up in large part because Ken Thompson needed an OS to run his Space Travel video game on the PDP-7. A few collaborators, notably Dennis Ritchie, who were frustrated with how large Multics had grown, chipped in and it took off.

          [...]

          Would I recommend a non-systemD distro? Depends. If a person has a bit of experience Void makes a great server and a decent desktop. I actually think Alpine makes a great desktop, but you have to have some knowhow to bring it up. I wouldn't recomment Artix.

        • A New Firefox Workflow

          It feels like the web has really changed a lot over the past decades, but innovation in web browser workflows has been stagnant by comparison. For the most part everyone is still just doing the address bar and horizontal tab list at the top of their screen, and it's only been fairly recently that some browsers like Vivaldi and even Edge have started experimenting beyond that.

          I gave Vivaldi a try yesterday and really liked it. I had it set up with a vertical tab bar on the left and a side panel with various bookmarks at the right, a setup that I think makes a lot of sense since I can sometimes end up with dozens of tabs. Hardly any websites make full use of the available screen width anyway. I almost stuck with Vivaldi, but a couple obscure bugs with keyboard shortcuts had me coming back to Firefox in the end.

        • A Retro-grouch and ATB computer

          "Retro-grouch" is a facetious term I believe was originally meant pejoratively to denote a bike geek out of step with the current trend in new bicycle technology. Now I see it laughingly and affectionately adopted by many folks passionate about steel all-terrain bicycles, practical commuter accoutrements, and resistance to keeping up with new, useless, expensive bike technology 'innovations.'

          I favor just this kind of riding for a few reasons. It values tried and true tools and technology. We don't need to adopt hydraulic brakes, tubeless tires, and internal routing. These things are more expensive in the first place, and require new tools and specialized parts, and often expert level knowledge. Alternatively, classic bike setups can be understood reasonably by me, an amateur, through experimentation, how-to books and tutorials, and they use fairly universal swappable parts.

        • Going Github

          The main reason is I'm kind of tired of the amount of spam bots that keep signing up to my Gitea. The juice of self-hosting a public-access git forge, even locked down to prevent arbitrary repo creation, that juice just isn't worth the squeeze.

        • Oddball Technologies

          One of my core principle to IT: Try to use different stuff. Don't be afraid of the _weird_ things. In a lot of cases, the weirdness is your friend. Usually the weird is a deisgn or feature to solve a need that is not met by the mainstream. Even if not, there's a lot to learn from the weird.

          This is why I write web services in C++, investigate GNUnet, use a TLS library that's not OpenSSL, maintains OpenBSD support for libraries, and so on. Maybe Gemini to a certain degree. See, I run into problems. A lot of them. I see certificates breaking, connection reset and even code that just don't work on certain OS-es that is not used widely. But I also learned a lot from the process. The fact that OpenSSL is not fully compliant to the RFC, that opening a file is not always possible even if permission is correct.

        • Saying LLMs Lack "Understanding"
        • The “Tens-Complement” system

          One thing to know with houserules is that you’ve got to know when to walk away if the houserule is about a part of the game that’s not mainly under your purvey.

        • Announcements

          • Gemtexter 2.0.0 - Let's Gemtext again^2

            I proudly announce that I've released Gemtexter version `2.0.0`. What is Gemtexter? It's my minimalist static site generator for Gemini Gemtext, HTML and Markdown written in GNU Bash.

        • Programming


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



Recent Techrights' Posts

Dejan Panovski Outs linuxize.com as a Slopfarm, Another Site That Sold Out and Became LLM Garbage
From what we can gather, both images and text are slop
A Microsoft Lunduke OS (LCOS) is Not Even in Top 100 in DistroWatch, Microsoft Lunduke Just Games the Numbers Like Linspire Did (and Got 'Banned' for It)
Linspire used to send people to 'its' DistroWatch page to make the illusion of popularity
 
Gemini Links 27/09/2026: Writing Well, Productivity, and a Relaunch in Geminispace
Links for the day
Making This Site More Useful to More People
Search engines (as a concept) are under attack
Exposing Crimes of Americans (From the UK)
We must ensure UK prisons are never misused to punish/silence people who expose crimes in America
Spam and Chatbot Spam in Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
Maintaining one's own IRC network requires some housekeeping, but it's simpler than outsourcing to malicious companies
Search Engine of Techrights Improved for Better Signal-to-Noise Ratio
Our growing community needs more search facilities
Microsoft: We Love Layoffs, We Do Silent Layoffs, More Microsoft Projects/Teams/Studios Confirmed to be Shutting Down
XBox is dying. Piece by piece.
Brigading Against Women - Part VI - On Garrett and Lozza, Defamation, Attempts to Crack My Wife's Accounts, Social Engineering to Try to Take Sites Offline, Subscribing Us to Mountains of SPAM
tried swatting us
Links 27/09/2026: "Provost of Dartmouth Busted Using Hey Hi (AI) Slop for His Own Writing in Newspapers and Academic Journals" and "UK Government Enforcement Reform"
Links for the day
People and Sites Wish a Happy 43th Birthday to GNU (Today)
We've collected some examples
Links 27/09/2026: Microsoft Fired People a Day After Promotion, "Fragility of Online Journalism"
Links for the day
Brigading Against Women - Part V - SWATTING, Extortion Against Webhosts, and Lawfare Under Sworn Oath (Perjury Also)
Matthew Garrett has no qualm about still collaborating with Lozza
20 Years Later
There's a strong anti-democracy movement brewing in many places
Gemini Links 27/09/2026: Telescopes/Gskyer, Writing for Writing's Sake, and Writing Tools
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, September 26, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, September 26, 2026
Gemini Links 26/09/2026: Computer Cases Dreary, Web Drowning in Botspam
Links for the day
Reform UK auditor: Electoral Commission accounts, Companies House accounts, a going concern or not?
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
European Patent Office (EPO) Series: Temporary Public Office or Permanent Personal Feather-Bed?
there are no visible signs that the Administrative Council has the slightest interest in contemplating a change in leadership at the EPO
Brigading Against Women - Part IV - Death Threats, Threats to Women, and Threats for Pointing Out, Correctly and Based on Hard Evidence, That Garrett and Lozza Talk to Each Other About Me Every Year (for 4 Years)
Brett Wilson LLP too is a toxic manosphere
More GAFAM Layoffs at Apple, Second Time in Weeks (Silent Layoffs Silently Target Older and "More Expensive" Staff)
How many layoffs happen at Apple silently and go unreported or very scarcely reported?
Gemini Links 26/09/2026: Rant About Slop Ruining Crafts (Drowning the Signal With Plagiarism) and "Going Mechanical"
Links for the day
Links 26/09/2026: Microsoft Says Notification Data Breach/Surveillance Hole There by Design, EU Rapidly Dumping Microsoft for Digital Sovereignty
Links for the day
The Former Linux News Site ostechnix.com is LLM Slop
Please do not link to sites that promote and/or spread slop
Links 26/09/2026: Volkswagen Recalling ~50,000 Cars, US Attacks Its Own Media
Links for the day
Making Oneself Obsolete With Slop
Dr. Lemire also puts on display a degree of hypocrisy
Brigading Against Women - Part III - Racism Looms Large, Not Just Sexism
threats from a racist
Microsoft CEO Calls Layoffs "Streamlining" and Says Microsoft Layoffs Are "Great to See"
The lack of honesty here is only to be expected from Microsoft
Media silence deafening as Reform UK on brink of administration
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 26/09/2026: Travel, Group Insurance Death Spiral, Stargazing, and Lagrange Meets LLM Slop
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, September 25, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, September 25, 2026
Longtime Symbol of Microsoft's XBox Franchise, Halo, Down to Barely 20 People
The purge is huge, far bigger than submissive media cares to point out
EPO Meeting Ran Out of Time to Discuss the Scabs ('Young Professionals')
EPO staff representatives in The Hague meet a member of the 'cocaine cabinet'
The Register MS Promotes Slop for Banned Companies That Put Chinese Back Doors in Things, "AI" Mentioned 37 Times in One Page!
taking money from the undemocratic state and its surveillance outfits
Microsoft Attacked European Courts and Jurists, Now Europe Dumps Microsoft
This is because GNU/Linux is technically better, but the political factors contribute to that as well
Julian Assange Ready to Talk More (After More Than a Decade of Arbitrary, Unjust Confinement)
Two years ago, upon his release, his wife said he'd need some time off before properly or fully returning to the public eye
IEEE Tribute to Richard Stallman, Michael Tiemann, Linus Torvalds, Larry Augustin, Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, Frank Hecker and Brian Behlendorf (Revolution OS Showing)
Live shortly
Winding Up Racists
What happens next shall be interesting
Links 25/09/2026: Selling Rogue, Defective Bots as "Agents" Results in PR Fiasco and Breaches; Russian 'Hybrid Attack' and "How Russia Evades Sanctions"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/09/2026: Arvelie Calendar, 44net, Pebbles, and Building the Bagel Concert Finder
Links for the day
Large Wave of IBM PIPs, the RAs Wave Comes After 'Low-Hanging' Fruit (Families) Disposed of
PIPs are the new RAs
Links 25/09/2026: Carcinogen Atrazine Pollutes Americans' Bodies, "Donald the Deadbeat Does Diesel", and Anger Over Data Centres Grows
Links for the day
Theory That Microsoft Cheapens Its Workforce to Push Workers Out on Their Own (Theory Advanced by Insider)
people work longer hours for less, i.e. their hourly salary is decreasing
Daniel Pocock Makes It Into Mainstream Media Again (Going After Racists)
American bigots funding blatant and shameless racists here in the UK
Tackling Racism in the United Kingdom (Racism Funded by Americans) Using the Courts
We'll talk about racism my wife and I experienced in the events leading up to litigation
Another Woman (or Women) Has Just Run Away From Brett Wilson LLP (After Barely a Month!), the Hired Guns of Garrett and Graveley (Microsoft)
They call this phenomenon "death spiral"
SLAPP Censorship - Part 200 Out of 200: Will GNU Boot Undo the Technical Damage Caused by Microsoft and Garrett? (And Garrett's Litigation Allies From Microsoft)
Today we publish the final part of this series
US Government Sites Can Now Totally Ignore Mozilla Firefox Users or Users of Firefox Derivatives
Firefox, now at 1.1% in the US (based on American government sites), has sunken to the point of no return
Things Not to Measure in Quantity Alone
More patents do not beget greater innovation
Even Microsoft Boosters Start to Doubt XBox Will Exist (It's Being Phased Out, Just Not "Officially")
This is how to phase out a business unit without officially saying so (as it might alarm investors)
Omarchy is Built on the Idea That Slop is Desirable (It's Not)
They call bots and plagiarism "agents" and "training"
IBM is Shrinking Very Fast (Silent, Unannounced Layoffs)
IBM and Microsoft both avoid WARN notices by compelling staff to leave or silently removing them with some NDA
In Some Parts of Microsoft 50% of All Staff Subjected to Layoffs, Media Pretends Only 0.1% of Staff Are Removed
This really says a lot about the state of today's so-called 'media'
SLAPP Censorship - Part 199 Out of 200: An American Burden on the British Legal System
A year ago (October 2025) the head of media (Jointly in Charge of the Media and Communications List), the judge in the Garrett case, said that this case was a waste of the court's money
EPO Management Wants Everything to be Done in Microsoft Spyware
In reality, this management should be ousted for normalising cocaine at the Office
Criminalising Opposition to Fraud
slop causes social issues
The Register MS Does Not Properly Flag Its SPAM About Slop
Signs of desperation
Gemini Links 25/09/2026: Ljubljana, Tanana River, and Curse of Slack
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, September 24, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, September 24, 2026
Supporters of winding-up process staking claims against Reform UK Party (CR-2026-007405)
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Winding-up petition leaked before service on Reform UK Party Limited / Nigel Farage
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock