Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 26/06/2023: Cypherpunk and Praise of elinks



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • ABCOILD Wordo: PANDA
      • not enough time to live

        if you could earn your living toiling 3 just hours a day, what would you do the rest of your day?

      • As my morning alone time slowly slips away



        and I guess it maybe sorta conforms to some physical sensational whatevers

        but I do feel uncomfortable with food that won't fit the spoon or fork such that there will likely be collateral lip soiling

        one of the most difficult things

      • I got married

        Our wedding ceremony was very nice and reflected us well. No priests or churches, just us and our family and friends.

        Fun were had, went to sauna, saw cute ducklings, listened to wide variety of music together... And I even danced.

      • Too Fast, Too Loud, Too Much

        The growth of this place is straining my equanimity. It's not the amount of people moving here, per se, but rather the built environment 'developers' (what a strange and misleading name for mindless corporate organisms that eat land!) have made to accommodate them. We needed significant density to house this mass influx of humanity, and we got unchecked suburban hell. Hundreds of thousands of wild acres--a precious resource for many peoples over the last 10,000 years--are gone, buried under a hideous sea of identical 4000 square foot houses and big box stores. Malvina Reynolds was mostly right, but it's not little boxes on the hillside, it's pharaonic tombs in three different Richmond-approved colors. And the cars.

      • who lives in Chicago?

        Hello I am leaving to CHI for a year! Does anybody have some tips for living in the CHI

      • catching up (four runs and the upcoming marathon)

        it's been exactly two weeks since my last post and a few things have happened since then. i was mostly busy getting my life back in line, reestablishing my routines that make me feel safe in my own four walls even when my mental is subpar. running has helped me quite a bit to distract myself from the many stressors that rest on my shoulders at the moment. i looked at my calendar this weekend and i almost wanted to cry at just how busy all my upcoming weekends are. but that's just how it is sometimes. it's not like i signed up for things that i don't want to do. quite the opposite. it's just a lot at the moment, really. i'm no good at planning ahead of time and keeping tabs on so many things at once is challenging my grey matter more than i thought.

    • Science

      • The Low-Hanging Climate Fruit

        I’m seeing a lot of “oh it’s great that we discovered these easily-pluggable, low-hanging fruit emitters like methane leaks and diked-out peatlands, yay” and on the one hand, yeah, fixing the low-hanging fruit, the 80/20, the squeakiest wheels is definitively something we’ve got to do…

        …we already knew we were in trouble before we discovered these issues and these sites. We need to fix a lot of the normal stuff too.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • The QOI-Remix Image Format

        I've spent the last couple of days working on an image format, based on QOI, called QOI-Remix or QOI-R. For those who aren't familiar, QOI is a lossless image format created by Dominic Szablewski; the spec fits on a page and it's enormously faster than PNG, while achieving reasonably good encoded file sizes. I thought this was a really good area to be exploring, and one relevant to my own interests and to permacomputing (under the larger umbrella of efficient software.) With that in mind, I did several changes to the image format, adding a little bit of compute overhead but frequently achieving substantial reductions in filesize - and remaining far faster than PNG.

      • TCP Escoteria

        We now resume a dialog already in progress.

        Josephus.— See here, there is a "connected" method to check whether a TCP socket is connected.

        Aloysius.— The peer could close the connection the very next second.

        Josephus.— But I want to know whether the socket is connected right now.

        Aloysius.— This is also not possible; the peer may have already closed the socket, and one cannot tell the difference between the ESTABLISHED and CLOSE-WAIT states.

      • Chrooting into BTRFS

        I was trying to rescue my new Manjaro installation. But, I had never tried chrooting into a BTRFS volume before.

        chroot lets you rebase the file system from a running system (like a live USB flash drive) to the file system of a stopped system (like a broken Linux installation on your hard drive). By changing the root (chroot), utilities run inside the chrooted environment act as if they were being run on the computer that you are troubleshooting. So, if my Manjaro installation is not working, I can use my installation disc, chroot into my system, and run updates, check the logs, or run other utilities. In this way, chroot combines the functioning of the live system with the file system of the broken installation.

      • Quick thoughts on Lemmy

        I’ll jot down some quick thoughts on Lemmy, a Reddit-like service for the Fediverse. When it first was announced a few years ago, I thought “yeah, right, it has a really long way to go” and instead of helping I just sorted it under “vaporware”. But now it’s becoming usable♥.

      • Cypherpunk

        My general principle is that private conversation between known entities (like friends & fam) is usually a good thing and something humanity is well adapted to (since that’s how offline has worked for millenia) while anonymous immutable persistent broadcast is danger zone and unlike anything previous generations have had to deal with. Even a skeevy bathroom wall can be cleaned up or painted over.

      • Re: Framework Laptop

        Whenever I read a Gemlog entry that I think I might want to reply to, I bookmark it for later.

      • Old School Stylish

        Old School Stylish (OSS) is an interesting zine supplement of 28 pages (counting both covers) for Old School Essentials (OSE). OSS drops the class system and instead lets characters pick up “styles”, which are small collections of capabilities. As they adventure they can find and acquire (with suitable effort) more styles. Everything, from hit points to spells to thief capabilities to Armour Class, are part of styles. Characters can have multiple styles active, and can switch out styles for other ones they have learned. By default characters still have levels, but there is a option for dropping levels as well. As you might guess from the cover image this zine takes inspiration from martial arts and cultivation media. OSS offers a lot of ideas for how to acquire styles in play, from petitioning masters to learning a style by observing special circumstances. It provides several tables to help you come up with interesting ways for characters to learn styles. It also suggests that the players NOT use the book to select styles for their character, but leave it up to the DM to place styles to be found in the world, which I thought was interesting.

      • Simplicity and Debian Lenny

        I'm enjoying the simplicity of Debian v5 (Lenny) on the old desktop [0]. I realized shortly after the install that I didn't have to rely on the DVDs I had burned to install packages on this box, I could take advantage of the Debian archive mirror itself, which works with Lenny and this sources.list

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Hi all, Loving this already :)

          What a wonderful BBS this is. I was able to sort out an error on adding a certificate within minutes ! Great job, Skyjake

        • How I Operate My Capsule

          The rise of community-oriented services on Gemini, especially Bubble, has helped introduce more people to the protocol than ever before. Recently I've seen several different newcomers looking for more information on how to set up a capsule and have a more independent presence on the platform. I'll share how I do that in this log.

          This is not meant to be a guide, but rather a non-technical overview of how my capsule is set up, and it's written for an audience that is not as tech-savvy. It goes more into concepts than the particulars of the technology behind them. My hope is that recent arrivals to Geminispace can find this document, see what goes into operating my capsule, and get a better sense of how easy it can be.

        • In praise of elinks

          As I spend more time in text-based tools on the command line, I've become quite appreciative of the elinks browser. I've been building various portable Raspberry Pi based computers over the last while and I've realised that web browsers like Chromium and Firefox are the bottlenecks in terms of performance, because they are so resource-hungry. Netsurf is a nice alternative, but works quite poorly if using a touch-screen input, for example scrolling is quite finicky.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

IBM Works for Microsoft
Hours ago in IBM.com
Microsoft May Already Be Shutting Down More Gaming Studios
the writings are on the wall: XBox is in disarray.
European Patent Office (EPO) Series: The EPO's Brussels Liaison Officer
It would appear that in January 2020, Pellegrino was induced by Campinos to jump ship from the EUIPO and take up his current position as Brussels Liaison Officer for the EPO
European Patent Office (EPO) Receiving Section (RS) and Elimination of Many Roles
Open letter to Mr Rowan (VP1) and Mr Aledo Lopez (COO) [...] Does the EU leadership intend to tolerate this?
Microsoft's XBox is Disintegrating, Executives Are Quitting
We're basically witnessing the slow-motion "end of XBox"
Gemini Links 15/06/2026: Slop Code Benchmarked, Wireguard on NixOS and Guix
Links for the day
Links 15/06/2026: More Own Goals for the Slop Industry, Palantir Trouble in UK
Links for the day
Apple Wants Everybody to Forget About "Vision Pro" Because It Was a Giant Flop
worthless gadgets with no obvious use case/s
The Cyber Show is Adopting 'Book Form' (or Long Form Publications)
Andy and Helen nowadays invest more time in making their site faster
Richard Stallman's Software Freedom/Digital Sovereignty Tour in Europe
As things stand at present, the vast majority of people have their interactions controlled/policed by GAFAM
Estimates of Scale of Microsoft Layoffs, Will Likely Happen "in Batches"
"Heard 10 to 15 percent eventually but idk date."
IBM Has Put Red Hat on a Poor Diet of Slop, Now Fedora and Red Hat Suffocate or Choke on It
Over the weekend we saw more people leaving the company
Estimates of Microsoft Layoffs: 3,000 Staff to be Culled Just in Gaming, How Many in Other Divisions?
Now the XBox division has its own "fall guy", but it is a woman
Straw Man Arguments Against Rust
If anything, it teaches the importance of auditing packages
Tesla Debt Rose Sharply, Sales Declined, Wall Street's Claim of Tesla "Value" is Merely a Fairytale (and Not Just Tesla)
We would gladly sell land on Mars to anyone who honestly believes a company that loses money is somehow "worth" trillions in Wall Street
Stop Calling Losses "Investment"
XBox is losing money, it is a sinkhole
For Justice We Need More Speech, Not Less Speech
When you attack something you are just giving that something a bigger platform
SLAPP Censorship - Part 107 Out of 200: Keeping Law Accessible to Everybody
We'll have stories related to this in the future
Links 15/06/2026: Slop "Beg Bounties", Wall Street Fakes 'Worth', and Arkansans Saved PBS
Links for the day
Gemini Links 15/06/2026: Dating Oaks, Simulation, and Theremin
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 14, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, June 14, 2026
Links 14/06/2026: Energy Cost and Reality Strikes at Heart of Slop Bubble, 75 Data Center Build-outs "Successfully Blocked"
Links for the day
Microsoft CEO Says XBox is Not a Sustainable Business
"Now, we have to turn this into a sustainable business," he said about XBox
MElon (MUSK, Elon) is a Trillionaire Like Penguins Are Mammals
Have media outlets told the truth?
Unlikely Heroes
One personal hero who is not alive (anymore) is Navalny
Bruce Schneier Was Probably Wrong About Slop
Right now politicians who openly speak in favour of slop are committing "political suicide"
SLAPP Censorship - Part 106 Out of 200: 100 Kilograms of Legal Papers
When one party's communications and filings weigh at about 3 KG of paper and another's... at about 100 KG of paper
Links 14/06/2026: More Google Layoffs, Wall Street Deems Companies That Lose Money "Worth" Trillions
Links for the day
Gemini Links 14/06/2026: "The Universe is a Hologram", "Matrix Brain Download", and "Happy 0th Year"
Links for the day
European Patent Office (EPO) Series: Battistelli's "Baltic Crusader"
Gilles Requena, Battistelli's erstwhile "Baltic Crusader" and the loyal servant of his successor Campinos
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 13, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, June 13, 2026
Links 13/06/2026: University of Nottingham Confirms Data/System Breach, Courts Fuming at Fraudulent Lawyers Who Fling LLM Slop at Them
Links for the day
Gemini Links 13/06/2026: World Cups and 做人
Links for the day
Microsoft's XBox "Bloodbath" Seems to Have Already Begun (Informally), Studios Allegedly to Face Shutdowns, Layoff Notices Handed Out, 100% Layoffs in Some Cases, 10% in Others or on Average
So is a complete closure/shutdown imminent? (Compulsion Games in this case)
Discussing Morale at IBM and Conversations Regarding IBM Layoffs (Disguised as Other Things)
Trolling can be a form of censorship
European Patent Office (EPO) Series: All the President's Men
Gilles Requena,Patrice Pellegrino, and Sandro Mendonça
SUEPO Elections Coming Up, Union Leaders at Europe's Second-Largest Institution (EPO) to be Determined Soon
The staff union of the European Patent Office (SUEPO) is having an election soon
SLAPP Censorship - Part 105 Out of 200: When Bad Legal Advice Results in Your Client, Dale Vince, Ordered to Pay £600k - or 801,930 United States Dollar (USD) - to the Person Frivolously Sued (Lord Bailey of Paddington)
"A judge has ruled that Dale Vince must pay punitive costs to Lord Bailey of Paddington, the Tory peer, over the 'unexplained abandonment' of his" SLAPP
How Long for Can American Taxpayers Justify Bailing Out Microsoft?
How many times need the American taxpayers give Microsoft money for vapourware that's neither necessary nor delivered?
IBM is Importing/Exporting Corporations' Regime of Censorship (Hiding the Wrongdoing) to Free Software Communities
Is IBM protecting criminals in the name of "manners"?
Links 13/06/2026: Microsoft’s XBox Crisis and "Apple Deepfakes"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 13/06/2026: Why Humans Are Mostly Right Handed and "Getting Things Done"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 12, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, June 12, 2026