Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 12/07/2023: Weight Tracker for Palm OS Release and Better Gemini Searching



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Watering the Black Walnut Treets

        It's been a dry summer, so far. Forecast keeps calling for rain, but the sky only delivers clouds, mostly.

      • Book Showcase: Citizen of the Galaxy

        I haven’t posted for nearly a week—but never fear, I’m still here!

        Actually I’m on vacation. We’ve been hiking and “swimming”; I’ve been trying not to get sunburned, and mostly succeeding; and trying not to get bitten by insects, and mostly failing.

      • So came the sun

        So the pleasantly rainy/dismal day sadly morphed into a bright sun in a clear blue sky. I say "sadly" because these conditions tend to tempt my wife into insisted we get a whole lotta this/that/other done, and I'm just so shot from much work the last three days that muscles/ligaments literally sorely need a break. Yet I also know too much sedentary leads the selfsame muscles/ligaments into stiffness perdition.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Slow boat to noon

        I recently heard someone pronounce the word 'eunuchs', and it sounded exactly like 'unix' - leading to a mini AHA moment.

        Rainy day. My wife's youngest daughter has work friends (they're all nurses) over to alcohol-assisted decompress downstairs. Fine with me. I'd otherwise likely have been enlisted for varieties of chores by now. Instead I'm polishing the bookmarks list while visiting links I no longer recall, surfing a bit from those starting points.

        I'm also back to being a bit more minimalist on the Chromebook for recently having experienced bewildering CPU usage. I'm mostly working from the Linux-y command line environment provided (I think..) by the "Terminal" app, which means leaning on elinks, amfora, gemget, my scripts, etc., bothering with the Chrome browser only as necessary - which tends to imply gnarly security environs.

      • Weight Tracker for Palm OS Release

        I'm releasing my first Palm OS application, a weight tracker for Palm OS >=3.0. You might be asking a few questions, like how did I write an app for Palm Pilot? And why, when the platform has been dead for 15 years? But first, the app itself!

      • Waiting for Spider-Man

        While chatting with a friend about upcoming games, he lamented about having to wait 2 years for the next Spider-Man game to come to PC. I argued that it could surely not take that long considering how quickly most of Sony's releases have made it to the superior platform. Turns out they haven't. Not even the relatively recent Spider-Man: Miles Morales or Returnal. So it's gonna take 2 years after all.

        But will I really be waiting for it? To me, it feels like waiting is merely a figure of speech these days. For most things that I'm waiting for, there's almost no real waiting happening. Spider-Man 2 is 2 years away and in all that time, there's a lot of life that's going to incessantly keep happening. People are going to come and go. Amazing works of art and entertainment will launch and take my world by storm. I might occasionally remember that Spider-Man 2 exists and check the calendar before noticing other things on it that come out sooner. Stuff that's already been out for a while. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Spider-Man 2 will launch and it too may slip by without catching my attention.

      • Old Computer Challenge 2023 - Day Three

        Today I wanted to do a little more work. I entered the challenge with the plan to spend some time on Scheme.

        In the last year I have done some things in SBCL Common Lisp as well as some things in Elisp, so expanding this with Scheme seems worthwhile. This morning started with a readable display, so I jumped right in.

        On the command line I started "guile3.0 --listen"" and in Emacs I ran ""M-x connect-to-guile"", to get a nice REPL.

      • OLD COMPUTER CHALLENGE: DAY 1
        HOSTNAME: gogglev
        HARDWARE: ASUS eeePC 701
        CPU: Intel Celeron-M ULV 353 @ 630 MHz(900MHz native)
        RAM: 512 MB (1 GB native)
        STORAGE: 4 GB SSD
        OS: AntiX 
        DISPLAY: Shuttle XP17 LCD (LAN Party Edition, w00t!) 
        RELEASED: 2007
        
      • OLD COMPUTER CHALLENGE: DAY 2

        NOTE: "With the disappearance of Blastwave and the removal of free downloads of SunFreeware on 30 September 2013, OpenCSW is the biggest source of Solaris packages. , it had 3739 unique packages for Solaris 10." - gopherpedia

      • Internet/Gemini

      • Programming

        • Garbage collection nowadays

          No, I don't mean the bin man (in UK English).

          I have always believed the prevailing wisdom that GC is more efficient than manual memory managememt. And, in instructions executed, I still believe so.

          However, hardware in the past 10/20 years has improved drastically (cache sizes, number of cores, SSD), with the noted exception of main RAM access times. And GC is very efficient in time, but there is a persistent, high, cost in space (I've seen figures of 4-8x). And to get performance out of modern hardware, you really want to keep your working set in cache. So perhaps hardware changes mean the prevailing wisdom is no longer valid.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Slopwatch: Brian Fagioli, Google News, and Other LLM Slopfarms
Why does Google News keep promoting these fake articles?
Links 29/10/2025: Amazon Kept "Data Center Water Use Secret", "Abuse of Power" Against Media
Links for the day
Gemini Links 29/10/2025: "My Hardware Specs" and "Goodbye Debian…"
Links for the day
EPO Cocainegate: Feedback and Clarifications
Part III will come out soon
Links 29/10/2025: "US Military Is Destroying the Planet Beyond Imagination" and Boat Strikes Deemed Unlawful
Links for the day
Quality Comes First (Techrights Search)
It's generally working already, but we wish to polish it some more
Techrights Party Countdown
Late next week we'll be holding a party near our home
European Parliament and Council Directive on Privacy is Vanishing
"edited / censored some time more recently"
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 28, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Slopwatch: The March of Slopfarms, From UbuntuPIT to Linux Journal and to Various Fake Sites Still Promoted by Google News
It's so worrying to see what the Web has become
Links 29/10/2025: CISA, Ukraine, and Amazon Problems
Links for the day
[Teaser] The EPO's Spokesperson, a Cocaine User, Fancies Young Women
How's that for "optics" in the EU and Europe's second-largest institution?
How Will António Campinos Respond to the EPO's 'Cocainegate'?
That's the same thing we saw and still see when the press deals with enablers and partners of Jeffrey Epstein
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part IV: There Cannot be Free Software Without Free Press and Free Information
One day, one can hope, more people will recognise that for Software Freedom we need free press and free thinkers
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part III: Principled Stance Is Never Cheap
Protecting the truth and insisting that the general public is made aware of things that really happened isn't cheap
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part II: Because Scarcity of Accurate Information Breeds Collective Ignorance
we too will strive to share information that's aggressively suppressed
Gemini Links 28/10/2025: More New Arrivals at Geminispace, xkcd on "Document Forgery"
Links for the day
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part I: Defence of the Truth
This year we make a very strong, firm statement for truth, even if that means explaining our work to the top media judge in the country
Links 28/10/2025: Meta and Fentanylware (CheeTok) Age-Restricted Down Under, "Britain Needs China’s Money"
Links for the day
Links 28/10/2025: Mass Layoffs at Amazon and Charter to Cut 1,200 Jobs
Links for the day
The Cocaine Patent Office - Part II: The Person Who Planted Paid-for Fake News for the European Patent Office (EPO) is a Cocaine User, Friend of António Campinos, Now on Record as Having Been Arrested
Background: High-level manager at the European Patent Office caught in public with cocaine, arrested
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 27, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, October 27, 2025
Google News Drowning in Slop (and Slopfarms That Hijack About Half the Results)
Google News seems to be drowning in this stuff
Gemini Links 28/10/2025: "How to Maximize Your Positive Impact" and ASCII Art and Artist Attribution
Links for the day
PETA and Activism
Being staff or volunteer in PETA isn't easy
Big Blue, Huge Debt
debt will soar again
Links 27/10/2025: Mass Surveillance Sold as "AI", People Reluctant to Lose Physical Media
Links for the day
Parties and Milestones Again
we've begun putting up about 40 balloons
Techrights' 19th Anniversary: Bronze
Time to go back to preparing for this anniversary
Our Latest European Patent Office (EPO) Series Will Last Several Weeks, Will Ask the EPO Management and the European Union (EU) Very Difficult Questions
If nobody loses a job (or jobs) over this, then the EU basically became no better than Colombia or Nicaragua
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, UbuntuPIT, Brian Fagioli, and Google News
We focus on stories that are fake or LLM slop that disguises itself as "news" about Linux
Links 27/10/2025: Wikipedia Vandalism, Bruce Perens Opens up on Childhood
Links for the day
This Site Could Not be Done by LLMs Even If It Wanted to (Because It's Not a Parrot of What Other Sites Say)
LLMs have no knowledge or deep understanding
Microsoft is Disloyal Towards Its Most Loyal Employees
Against its most faithful enablers
19 Years, No Censorship
No factual information is ever going to be removed, more so if it is in the public interest
We Are Not a Conventional Site, That's Why They Hate (or Love) Us
Throughout the week this week we'll be focusing on the EPO
Following the Line of Cocaine All the Way to the Top
Even a million denials and spin-doctoring won't distract from the core issue
The Cocaine Patent Office - Part I: António Campinos Brought Corruption and Nepotism to the EPO, Then Came the Cocaine
High-level manager at the European Patent Office (EPO) caught in public with cocaine, the Office has some answering to do
Purchasing/Possessing Computers Isn't the Same as Controlling Computers
Let's strive to put computers back under the control of their users, no matter who purchased these (usually the users)
Gemini Links 27/10/2025: Alhena 5.4.3 and Fixing Bash
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 26, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, October 26, 2025
Thankfully We've Made Copies of More Interesting Data From statCounter
If statCounter (the Web site or the 'webapp') vanished overnight, we'd still have something left of it
More Silent Layoffs at IBM/Red Hat
when the media counts such layoffs or presents tallies the numbers are very incomplete