Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 09/05/2023: Personal Stuff and Proportional Coding



  • GNU/Linux

    • Personal

      • Re: JeanG3nie: I'd rather be Ferrari than Ford

        For me it's liking bare fingers on acoustic guitar strings, attempting to hit higher vocal notes through 62-year-old vocal chords that might have encounters one cigarette too many the night before. It's ftp'ing files I'd vim'd to a gemini account instead of typing into either a textarea or a javascript-mediated equivalent.

      • Growing in the Wrong Places

        The city that I live in used to be a steel production town, it has since morphed into a hybrid college town and regular small city, but the scars are still here. An environmental survey of a pond near my house revealed that the only way to clean it would be to either cover the whole thing over and forget it existed, or dig out >6 feet of contaminated sludge from the floor of the pond. There isn’t 0 green-space in the city, but there is at least a 3:1 ratio of abandoned parking lots to flora. Nature within the city is often seen as a problem that needs to be overcome, rather than a harmonious relationship. In spite of this, small plants jut through cracks in the sidewalk made by the roots of trees. Squirrels use the power lines in lieu of dense forests, and geese inhabit the parks in droves, daring anybody to challenge their authority.

      • Ne-an-nes!

        Yesterday I sang the Liturgy in Byzantine chant at another church than the one I usually attend. It was stressful (I was protopsaltis and it was my first rodeo at that particular klḗros), but ultimately it was a good experience. I really enjoyed improvizing during the Anaphora, the Cherubic Hymn, and the communion hymn. The 2 other chanters were good isokratḗs and I appreciated their help in pointing me to the right hymns for the day and filling in the places I was unsure on.

        The weather has been beautiful, and spring is finally here. It's pretty warm here most days, sometimes even getting to 75℉. I've been playing koi-koi with my family and a solitaire matching game outside using a hanafuda deck I recently bought. It's pretty fun.

      • virginia woolf, between the acts

        There had always been lilies there, self-sown from wind-dropped seed, floating red and white on the green plates of their leaves. Water, for hundreds of years, had silted down into the hollow, and lay there four or five feet deep over a black cushion of mud.

        [...]

        Life, the history of the world, and all individual histories present themselves to us as a series of events, in other words of brief and dramatic acts. A battle, an encounter between statesmen, an important speech, a crucial letter are instants in history. I remember a night near Bahia, when I was enveloped in a firework display of phosphorescent fireflies; their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails.

      • 🔤SpellBinding: EFIYTVS Wordo: XEROX
    • Technical

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Ad-hoc served gemini file

          This file is being served by a bit of nonsense /bin/sh. It uses ncat(1), part of the nmap package, to listen on the right port and wrap the connection using my letsencrypt key. xq came up with the idea and the core server code for an experiment he's running for Kristall. I stole it to make this silly thing.

        • 2023 Week 16/17/18: Status and Photos

          The last few weeks have been dominated by two things: work and moving. At my job, we are engaged in a large upgrade project that takes up almost all of my time each day. In the evenings, I have been helping to pack, move and unpack dozens of boxes and bins. These tasks have left me very little time to engage in Gemini.

          Compounding the issue has been my recent trouble with our ISP. Not only did I post nothing onto my capsule for a week, but the capsule itself was unavailable for the same period. I'm so glad that issue has finally been taken care of.

      • Programming

        • Proportional Coding

          We are told—correctly—that readability of code is of primary importance in large codebases. And yet, most programmers miss a simple trick that can greatly boost readability.

          You might have guessed it from the title: use a proportional font.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Northern Africa: GNU/Linux Measured at Around 5%
by Clownflare
SLAPP Censorship - Part 159 Out of 200: Telling Courts False Information and Spoon-feeding Them Insults, Hoping or Expecting Them to Repeat These Insults
When lawyers trick courts into repeating something false
"AGI" is Decades Old and It Never Found a Viable Business Model or Real, Actually Useful Use Cases
I keep reminding people of local firms (right here in Manchester) doing the same thing the media now calls "AGI"...
 
Cloudflare Sees a Quarter of Requests in China Coming From GNU/Linux Today
Will 23% ever be the average for GNU/Linux rather than a mere peak?
You Can Lose Some Battles and Still Win the War
Winning or losing isn't something for a scoreboard
GNU/Linux Usage Measured at 23% in Russia Today
the average was almost 10%
Things Not to Fear Missing Out on
Life is too short to pay attention to social control media
Gemini Links 23/08/2026: Exercising Again, Tackling Phone Addiction, and Putting Graal Online Back Online
Links for the day
PIPs and Lawsuits: On the Future of IBM Trying to Spit Out Its Own Staff at Minimal Cost
"I'd rather be laid off than be put on a PIP"
France: GNU/Linux Averaging at 7%, Peaked at 14% Today
When will 14% be the average?
Links 23/08/2026: Water Crises, Illegal Tariffs, and Carney Confronts US Over Patent Imperialism
Links for the day
Links 23/08/2026: Slop "Children's Stories Contain Bizarre Patterns" and "Butterflies at the One Garden"
Links for the day
Microsoft is in Double Trouble in Singapore
Android+GNU/Linux+ChromeOS are near 20%
The Slop Industry Bribed the Media to Pretend It Has Something New and Revolutionary. Now It Bribes Politicians Too. Anything to Avoid Scrutiny and Regulation.
borrowed money has long been used to bribe the media
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 22, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, August 22, 2026
Microsoft to Its Workers in April-May: You're Too Old, Go Away. Microsoft in August: Young People, Go Away.
What does this company even sell anymore?
Clownflare Data US-Centric
We are assuming that for national security reasons not many sites in Chinese (or based in China) outsource their traffic to Clownflare
Gemini Links 22/08/2026: Broken Car, Devuan, and Thundermail
Links for the day
Links 22/08/2026: Prince Harry, Elton John and Others Pay High Price for Frivolous Litigation in the UK
Links for the day
'Voluntary' Mass Layoffs at IBM/Red Hat
IBM does not want people to notice what truly goes on there
Another Round of GAFAM Layoffs, This Time Apple
Now Apple "is shutting down an entire Vision Pro team focused on developing gaming features for the mixed-reality headset."
Gemini Links 22/08/2026: The Bodyguard (1992), Minimalism, Backups, and IPFS
Links for the day
SLAPP Censorship - Part 158 Out of 200: Making Alliances With Men Arrested for Strangling Women Was Always a Terrible Strategy
They work for American slop companies
Links 22/08/2026: TikTok Settles With Feds, Harms Caused by Social Control Media Gaining Attention
Links for the day
New Data Shows Microsoft's XBox is Really Dying
XBox is a "burning platform"
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 21, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, August 21, 2026
Sources-First Publication
Thank you for keeping us on track
Ubuntu is Not Linux
I was one of the first users of Ubuntu
Links 21/08/2026: Outrage Over Politicians Who Support Slop-Feeding Data Centres, "America Is About to Get More Expensive"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 21/08/2026: Rain Coming Back and "Small Internet"
Links for the day
Mass Layoffs at IBM, But Mostly in Secret (PIPs and 'Voluntary' Redundancies)
Gerstner laid off a record number of people; Krishna tries to find 'innovative' new ways to cause workers to leave
Slop-ware: Nobody Knows What Code Goes Into Linux and Most Developers Cannot Understand the Rust Code (Even If They Tried)
So nobody is in charge
The Slop Pyramid Scheme (Not Boon!) Isn't Good for GNU/Linux, Even If the Plagiarism Engines (Framed as "Training" or "Intelligence") Almost Always Run GNU/Linux
We need the slop pop - we need the bubble to pop
North America: GNU/Linux Measured at 13%-15% Every Night
many (north) Americans use GNU/Linux at home and are using it to access the Web in the small hours of the morning
Links 21/08/2026: "Silicon Valley’s Billionaire Cults Are Coming for Democracy" and "Who’s Raking it in as the National Debt Explodes?"
Links for the day
SLAPP Censorship - Part 157 Out of 200: What is a 'Defamation Troll'?
"Defamation Mill" also
Northern Europe Leads the Pack in Abandoning Windows After Threats Made to Greenland (Says Clownflare Data)
Clownflare has a vast trove of data, so it cannot be easily dismissed as pure nonsense
Clownflare: In Past 12 Months Microsoft Windows Fell From ~80% to ~75% on Desktops/Laptops in Asia
Microsoft is deep in debt
Secret Layoffs at Microsoft, Apparently More Sites Will Shut Down Entirely
vindicates us and serves to affirm what we've said for over a month
The State of Slopfarms About "Linux" in August 2026
The Web needs serious cleanup, which curation can help deliver
IBM Offers Workers Some Money to Fire Themselves, It's Called "Next Step" and It's Allegedly 'Extended' (Not Enough Fools Have Fired Themselves)
Will IBM executives - including the CEO - ever be held accountable?
£5 Million Unsolicited/Undisclosed Bribes and What That Means to British Politics
It still remains unknown (disclosure denied) who helps fund the £1 million lawfare against us
[Satire] Pocock, Binface & nobodies vs Farage: defamation before UK High Court
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
The IBM Censorship Team, PIPs (Silent Layoffs) in IBM Europe
There seem to be many de facto layoffs going on at IBM right there
SLAPP Censorship - Part 156 Out of 200: Brett Wilson LLP Becoming Wilson FC
Now acting almost like one-person shop (lots of staff has fled this past year)
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 20, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, August 20, 2026
Gemini Links 21/08/2026: "Ensmallening the BigWeb", "Rust Dependencies"
Links for the day