Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 11/07/2023: Old Computer Challenge and Mastodon Blog Comments Automation



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Chorale

        Except it isn't really a chorale, more like four voice harmonic practice, except it isn't really harmonic practice as not much attention is paid to chord progressions nor are fancy chords used (except in passing). What is going on here is some counterpoint, Dorian mode (-ish), vague modulation to dominant, and a some harmonic sequences, in particular the ground bass from Pachelbel's Canon which is a -4 +2 sequence though can be modified with inversions so the bass line is somewhat less jumpy and not so bleedingly obvious.

      • Sinclair A-Bike

        I once owned this thing [1]. It was around 2008, I think. It was the second, updated model with larger (inflatable to 90 psi) wheels.

        If I remember correctly I was very unsatisfied with it - it wasn't as small as I expected and it was rather uncomfortable when carried in its dedicated backpack. But as a bike it was quite a disaster. It rode well only on ideally flat surfaces (like corridors in buildings). And I wasn't able to climb anything (there are no ideally level surfaces in the real world). The final problem was that one of plastic parts broke after a few weeks of use. So I sold it.

    • Politics and World Events

      • Abdullah Öcalan, And All the Other Political Prisoners Must Be Released!

        Abdullah Öcalan, also known as Apo (“uncle”), is born 4 April 1949, in eastern Turkey. He is a founding member of the militant Marxist-Leninist “Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)” in 1978, which was based in northern Syria from 1979 to 1998 as a sanctuary, and led part of the Kurdish political movement from there.

        During the 1980s, the Turkish state began a program of forced assimilation of its Kurdish population. In protest against this fascist act, the PKK began an armed rebellion against the Turkey, and in connection with it began attacking its military forces.

      • Why I am an Anarchist

        Like so many others, I used to think that anarchists were violent pricks who enjoy throwing Molotov cocktails and destroy property. As usual, the propaganda machine _reverses_ reality completely.

    • Science

      • Agfa Click II

        I have got this old film camera. It wasn't expensive. Actually it is an interesting piece of German engineering. It's fairly simple, it's made mainly from plastic materials (including its faux leather case) yet if produces relatively nice images [1].

      • Thinking about how to teach logic

        I'm starting my full-time teaching load in a little under three months and while I was full of confidence and vigor before now a lot of the self-doubt is creeping in.

        I'm teaching multiple sections of the intro to computer science class, CS 160, and CS 250 the intro to math/logic for CS. I'm also supposed to work on revising CS 205, the intro to C and assembly programming class so I can start teaching it the following term. That one is the one I'm weakest on in terms of practical experience but, I mean, I still know this stuff I just need to practice specifically x86-64 programming instead of risc ISAs used in teaching compilers classes such as MIPS. I'm rusty on C but not incompetent at it, if you get what I mean.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Going online forward

        That reminds me of how as a kid (roughly 50 years ago) I'd hide notes/messages in library books: sometimes in the cover flaps, sometimes in the spine, sometimes just between pages. It would surely be nice to know if any were ever found.

        Makes me wonder if I can shift my posting motivation from "to meet and interact with interesting others" to "to bless others with serendipitous finds"? Because the former seems essentially impossible.

      • I give you: Serendipitous Finds

        Since I obviously suck at being texturally edgy in ways engendering interaction, I'm shifting my motivation for writing to reporting on placing messages on paper scraps, 3x5" cards, etc. in somewhat hidden public places, making such messages what I want to call "serendipitous finds".

        I'll likely post their content, and then go on to report on whether or not a message has been found. That'll be obvious if/when a message is gone. But I suppose I should place things in ways recognizable to me as having placed by me in case people carefully re-place them. So I should also log the details of their placement to make evidence of having been found unambiguous.

      • Christina's 5 questions

        written on GPD Win 1 via PuTTY as first daughter mumbles herself to sleep: "this a-way, this a-way" (from the song 500 Miles)

      • My Computer Challenge

        I am not actively participating in Solene's "Old Computer Challenge"^ this year--I only heard about it yesterday evening and am not in a position to go all in at the moment. However, I do want to follow the spirit of the challenge this week by reducing my energy and technology footprint.

        There are two ways I'm approaching it. The first is using a smaller machine with more limitations and requiring more active configuration, and the second is reducing the amount of content I passively consume.

      • OCC Update

        All my notes regarding the old computer challenge are now here...

      • Day 2

        I'm a bit busy today celebrating my birthday so I won't have time to do anything for the challenge, but I'm writing this from the old computer.

      • (No) Old Computer Challenge

        I just have spent a nice half of hour by reading of other people' Old Computer Challenge Entries [1]. Pretty interesting but some computer - while really old by today standards - dot's seem to be old to me.

      • Pin-Bored

        Some weeks ago, I submitted a support request to change my Pinboard username. I still haven’t heard back!

        And today, I happened to run across people on HackerNews (yeah, I know) talking about how Pinboard has been broken for them, how their paid archival functions haven’t been working (I don’t have an archival account, so I didn’t notice that), how the owner, Maciej, has been completely incommunicado on the Pinboard blog for *years*... And yet every time someone makes a complaint on HN, he’s right there in the comments with some snarky response.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Announce: OMG [dot] Pebcak [dot] Club certificates changed!

          This is a brief announce to let anyone know that for a colossal pebcak I deleted my VPS, and therefore I had to create a brand new VPS and to create new self-signed certificates.

        • Server updates and Gemini with lowdown

          What I’ve been up to since the last blog posts in this server? Not much, but there’s been changes. Notably it’s running off some old bottom-tier Intel Celeron laptop from ~2007 now instead of the Raspberry Pi 2B as some minor-ish enough updates has been causing it to no longer boot properly, and this issue wasn’t even new, I’ve known it since the last 2 years when trying it with Alpine Linux and wondering why that happens also. This time it’s Debian so I guess better to just throw in the towel with that hardware and just use the laptop I had laying around instead. It was already having troubles anyway before that and giving “illegal instructions” errors when just trying to setup some files for some few packages during apt install. It’s probably the SD card issue, or maybe armhf architecture is too niche and left underlooked, or both, but for sure I don’t want to deal with it anymore. I can at least say that laptop was able to do a major upgrade from Debian 11 bullseye to 12 bookworm sucessfully, so it certainly doesn’t have that issue. I did managed to hastly move some services and datas over to the laptop, only leaving out setting up a Gopher server mostly because I still haven’t bothered to have my site generator setup to do Gopher yet, and the Debian repository, cause I somewhat can’t be bothered to set that back up.

        • Mastodon Blog Comments Automation

          When I post here I usually also put the link out on Mastodon where people will sometimes comment. I've always done this by hand but, since I know just enough bash to be dangerous, I recently started thinking of ways to automate this step for me and also link back to the Mastodon post from the original blog post while I'm at it.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Microsoft Debt Rose Almost $50 Billion Since We Moved to Debian
GAFAM has a new name for debt
European Patent Office Management Mocked for Trying to 'Bribe' Staff With a Little Food
The Office is having a crisis; a little breakfast treat won't solve it
The Corporate Media Intentionally Overlooks How Google's Debt Trebles in Just Over a Year
We'll soon see how much more money Microsoft has borrowed
(Trigger Warning) Jeremy Bicha & Debian-Edu, TecKids, Ubuntu incest scandal at DebConf25
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
The Corrupt Lecture the Non-Corrupt - Part X - Deliberately Violate European Patent Convention (EPC), Tolerate Cocaine Use in Management, Hide That From Staff and Stakeholders
The "Alicante Mafia" (as staff calls it) is a disgrace to Europe
Apparently Last Day for Nearly 1,000 Confluent Workers IBM Laid Off Last Month
IBM is a dying company pretending to be strong because of its age
 
In New Letter Sent to Chair and Heads of Delegation of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation the Staff Union Explains How to End European Patent Office Strikes
If Campinos continues to behave as he does right now, the Council can show him the door
Links 01/05/2026: Poems and Continuous Privacy Policy
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 30, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, April 30, 2026
Google News Sloppy Again
Today was disappointing
SLAPP Censorship - Part 62 Out of 200: Garrett and Graveley Issue Astounding Copy-Paste Masterpiece Asserting Publicly-Accessible Embarrassing Facts Must Remain Hidden
Are Garrett and Graveley twins separated at birth but joined by GNOME and Microsoft?
Links 30/04/2026: Barrage of Lawsuits Against Slop, Microsoft's Stock Crashes
Links for the day
Microsoft Says Mass Layoffs Are Coming and Puts a Price on Them
Microsoft will shrink
Upgrade Successful
we had a downtime of only 1-2 minutes overall (for two reboots)
Links 30/04/2026: Slop Industry Cannot Keep Up With Bills, "The World Is Getting Too Hot to Feed Itself"
Links for the day
Then Come the DDoS Attacks
Is someone trying to 'kill' Techrights?
The Register MS Running Spam Pieces for Huawei, a Banned Company
Money does not excuse bad behaviour
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, April 29, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Gemini Links 30/04/2026: Outdoor Time, Old Computers, and Joining Geminispace
Links for the day
In Past 6 Months IBM Lost About 100 Billion Dollars in 'Value' While Debt Ballooned to 70 Billion Dollars
Welcome to a universe of fake finances and phony accounting based on fictional assets with made-up 'worth'
Dr. Andy Farnell on Weaponising Morality Against Technofascism and Slop
It's longer than a "tweet", so social control media addicts are likely mentally unfit to read it
Six Months
Techrights will be around (and active) for a very long time to come
If We Move Everything to Devuan...
IRC, Git, Apache and so on
Why We Publish "The Corrupt Lecture the Non-Corrupt"
We intend to report the facts, fearlessly, until real and lasting solutions are reached
SLAPP Censorship - Part 61 Out of 200: Garrett and Graveley Must Understand That Reporting Women's Issues in the United States of America (“the US”) is Not Impermissible
when you cover Microsoft corruption and have real effect
Weeks After Mass Layoffs of Red Hat Engineers We Learn of European "Buyouts" and Layoffs at IBM
At Microsoft, they tell us there are merely "buyouts", but they don't tell us what happens if you say "no!"
OS Upgrade Tentatively Scheduled for Tomorrow
We have some contingencies in case the upgrade goes wrong
Campinos is a Lame Duck President This Year at the European Patent Office (EPO)
The strikes are not ending. If anything, they intensify further.
Links 29/04/2026: LLM Chatbot Usage Goes Down Sharply (as Do Stocks Associated With Them), Microsoft's Circular Financing Accounting Fraud at Risk
Links for the day
Gemini Links 29/04/2026: Returning to an Exodus and Farewell APU
Links for the day
Slop Has a Long Way to Go Before It Gets Basic Facts Right
Please do not rely on slop for anything
The Corrupt Lecture the Non-Corrupt - Part IX - European Patents That Are Illegal (But Serve Non-European Monopolists in Exchange for 'Quick Cash')
People who shamelessly violate the European Patent Convention (EPC) have the audacity to lecture workers on "ethics"
Canonical is Selling You, Ubuntu is a Data-Collecting Platform
Canonical is looking for money in the wrong places
Links 29/04/2026: "Snowden Affair 13 Years Later" and "Landmark Data Center Pause"
Links for the day
Seems Like Only Techrights Covered IBM Laying Off About 33% of Confluent Staff
How can such a large round of layoffs evade today's media?
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, April 28, 2026
IRC logs for Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Gemini Links 29/04/2026: Bad Diet, New Middle Ages, and Temperature Model
Links for the day