Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 04/08/2023: Gemini Client Preferences and FreeBSD Minimum Desktop Guide



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Heaviest Of Them All

        Alas, the fate was sealed And 'twas decided that he ought to live in peril And to roam in vain For an eternity unknown Until his undoing cometh.

        And to be forgotten both above and under the earth. Thus was decided for him And thus it shall be ...

      • Head in Pisces

        Her cracked lips are leaking. Both eyes still work, but cannot grasp the damage. The skeletal fingers tip-toe from her shoulder up the neck, looking for the point of impact. There it is, a screwdriver through the throat, barely missed the trachea. The hand grabs the handle.

        "What the fuck are you doing?!" The shattered blade exclaims through a flooded speaker in its hilt. She spits into her other hand. Oily blue mixed with blood reflecting the hot orange light of antique lightbulbs in the ceiling. "Don't fucking pull it out, stop!"

      • The Moments We Feel Alive

        When I was a kid, I’d sometimes have the clarity to realize how truly meaningful or special a moment was.

        Once, a friend from a previous town had come to visit for the summer. We spent the days in the woods, exploring or building forts, and the nights inside playing PlayStation. I knew the summer would be over in the blink of an eye, my friend would return to his town and I might never see him again. But I had a trick.

        It’s going to sound odd, but I would squeeze my tear ducts with my thumb and pointer finger and massage them. Yes it’s strange, but this would give me a moment of clarity, a moment where I felt truly in the moment, instead of being swept away by time. I would feel my mind clear, the weight of life lifted from my head. I’d do this often, trying to remember moments like that summer.

      • As the evening comes to a close

        But for a few unavoidable exceptions, if something doesn't load in elinks, I consider it not worth my time. There are plenty of good reads in Gemini, and simple personal websites some of those authors create. Ain't got time to watch a page load, jump around so that I wind up clicking on the wrong links, suddenly displays an overlay or popup requiring a click to make it go away, etc.

      • Taking time off

        So I kind of have August off? And it's flipping wild, tbh, because I don't think I've ever intentionally taken more than a couple of days off at a time in my life.

      • Do I know how to be happy?

        I think one of the cruelest things anyone has ever said to me was a decade ago when I was dating someone who had spent a lot of time telling me I needed to open up, needed to learn to rely on them, &c. and then when I was talking about how hard shit was in grad school they got quiet and said

      • 🔤SpellBinding: ADEFITX Wordo: CONEY
      • Midnight Poll I

        It's not that I stopped having dreams. But I stopped remembering them. Perhaps they weren't so special anymore.

        Maybe it's because I became busier with life, and at the end of the day I was too tired to keep thinking, let alone remember.

      • I wish there were more garbage in this world

        Oh my gosh, how I loved "Garbage 2.0"!

        Kinda makes me wonder if we might have some favorite bands/albums in common, given you're almost exactly a generation younger than me, but I was a huge fan of much 1990s music.

        This is, I never had anyone my own age to communicate with about it, because most people my age are often insanely stuck up about the music of "our" times/day.

        I rarely whip out the CDs anymore, so I've forgotten a lot of band, album, and song names. And it's not *just* because I'm lazy, having been coddled by Alexa so quickly playing what I want/need with little to no fuss. But it's that we're generally too busy doing things requiring focus to have great songs trying to kidnap that focus. I'm not nearly as capable of doing things to music as I thought I used to be.

    • Politics and World Events

      • Re: Cost of the Right Thing

        France I recall being pretty car centric but there were plenty of walkable areas, and often good public transportation options. "The United States is a unique outlier" when it comes to car-slaughter, and public transportation generally ranges from "lol" to "no". Or, let's play granny frogger on that six-lane stroad! How bad varies by location; a tourist from Florida was quite happy that those sitting in cars were not actively trying to murder him on his bicycle; we were chatting at some intersection in Seattle, maybe it was the Elliot and Western mess, in the usual car exhaust with all the usual noise pollution.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Fingering vending machines

        This section was absent in the original RFC (RFC742, from dec. 1977), which was an incredibly succinct document. It was, however, present in both RFC1194 and RFC1196 (both from late 1990), with a slight variation on the final sentence:

        Vending machines should NEVER NEVER EVER eat requests. Or money.

      • FreeBSD minimum desktop guide

        I'm not going to cover the installation process, but it is worth noting you might want to add your user to groups 'wheel operator video'.

        The few services I use by default are local_unbound, powerd and ntpd. local_unbound caches dns requests and needs no configuration, powerd adjusts cpu frequency as is needed and enables hibernation and suspending, ntpd makes your clock synced.

        Once it's installed, I get the handbook from the post-installation menu. One benefit is that this will also set up pkg and save you 10 seconds, when you install packages for the first time.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Joining a google group (?) from a non-google email

          I recently had the displeasure of needing to join a (non-usenet) google group. Google doesn't make this easy to find anymore, but they do allow you to subscribe from a non-google account.

        • My Gemini Client Preferences

          The ideal would be to have an actual SOCKS5 interface built-in to the client, like the Firefox Web browser has. I haven't yet come across a gemini client that has SOCKS5 support. So, I've had to use torsocks. The tricky part is torsocks doesn't work well with all clients. In particular, Lagrange has this problem where, if I try to run it on top of torsocks, the feed reader occasionally crashes and causes the whole application to freeze up. At one point, I actually patched Lagrange to disable the feed runner from running, but I found it was easier just to delete all my feeds from the Lagrange feed reader, and load the feeds up using my gmisub aggregator instance. But if the client had proper SOCKS5 support, I wouldn't have to deal with torsocks at all.

        • It's feeling like one of those quoting kinds of days

          I'm glad I don't. I'm merely an occasionally humble user of it for giving me a fast path to efficiently putting easily nicely rendered text in others-accessible places where the quality of others in somewhat the same space seemingly defies Sturgeon's Law on a regular basis.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Rewriting Things in Rust
How far would you go?
What Microsoft Reputation Laundering (With a Weaponised Law Degree) Looks Like in a Foreign Continent
You would expect this in uncivilised and primitive countries
Slopwatch: LLMs 'Write' Fake or Distorted 'News' About "Linux"
LLM slop disguised as news
Weeks After Microsoft Bankruptcy in Russia the Company Shuts Down in Pakistan, Too
Last month Windows' share in Pakistan fell to an all-time low
 
Microsoft's MSN Helps Microsoft Spread Lies About the Layoffs' Scale (Well Over 25,000 People Laid Off This Year)
There seem to be monopolies on lies and on truth
The Death of X Has Been Greatly Exaggerated (by Compromised Media)
X.Org Server is alive and well
In 2025 Everything is "AI". Remember Blockchains?
Talk about what companies and things (services, products, software) actually do, not the labels they use
Julian Assange Has Been Free for a Year
Julian Assange and I disagreed on some things
Monopolies and Scalping
Monopolies gravitate towards price hikes
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, July 04, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, July 04, 2025
Microsoft's August Layoffs Wave: "August is Confirmed for Additional Performance Based Cuts"
"August is confirmed for additional performance based cuts from the recent connects along with additional organizational cuts."
Links 04/07/2025: Google Replaces the Web With Slop, "AI Might Kill Us All"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/07/2025: Mindfulness and F1
Links for the day
Rob Musial's June 2025 Additions of Malware in Proprietary Software
Via the GNU Web site this week
Links 04/07/2025: Microsoft's H-1B Visa Applications Show Another Crisis Unfolding, Many More Deep Cuts and Shutdowns Revealed, Complete Microsoft Exits
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/07/2025: A Day To Remember and "Stop Killing Games"
Links for the day
Crime and Corruption at Microsoft GitHub Cannot be Covered Up by SLAPPs in Another Continent
We'll write about this for a long time to come
Slop Videos Are Disappointing Garbage, Nothing New, Just Brute Force up on Display or a Pedestal of Slop
Slop videos aren't a new thing
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 03, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, July 03, 2025
The War on Local Storage (People Hosting Their Files Locally and Privately)
There's nothing wrong with controlling one's computing
What Digital Independence Means
Independence in the digital realms means abandoning platforms like GitHub, not just rejecting proprietary software
NVidia is a Bubble
they temporarily see fortunes and wrongly assume perpetuity thereof
Fedora Does Not Care About Diversity and Inclusion, It's About Optics (Corporate Image)
any notion of inclusion is superficial and misleading
Don't Buy the Excuses for Microsoft's Mass Layoffs
Back in the 90s, Microsoft bought a lot of companies to get and stay ahead
Happy Independence Day to Our American Readers
Maybe tomorrow will be a good opportunity to explain to American people - in terms of concepts, not brands - which tools respect their independence
Slopwatch: Linux Journal, Linuxsecurity, and Google News Getting Even Worse (More Slopfarms Added Which Attack Linux With Bruce-Force SPAM)
Google News is part of the same problem
Links 03/07/2025: More Cuts and Cancellations at Microsoft Revealed
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/07/2025: Favourite Child and Launching WikiGem
Links for the day
GNU/Linux is Replacing Microsoft Windows. But We Need to Eradicate Microsoft, It's a Hub of Crime.
I have been writing about Microsoft since the 1990s when I was in school
Mystery Surrounding the PCLinuxOS Sites and PCLinuxOS Magazine
Let's hope this isn't something major
People and Companies Do Learn Some Lessons From Their Mistakes (Stubborn Ones Don't)
Brett Wilson LLP is an example of one that would rather drown in mistakes
Links 03/07/2025: 'Hey Hi' Slop Ridiculed Some More and Microsoft's Layoffs Tally for 2025 Reaches About 29,000 in Just 6 Months (Almost 5,000 Per Month)
Links for the day
Microsoft Staff Harassing Women, Strangling Women, Telling Women to Kill Themselves and Worse? Not a Problem!
Two women have left Brett Wilson LLP
The Slopfarms Are Losing the Plot (and Google is Propping Up Rogue Sites)
Google is part of the attack on the Web, on information, and on technology
New BetaNews Realises There's No Potential or Future in Slopfarms, Prior Editor Wayne Williams is Back
They realise that slop (so-called "AI") cannot replace humans
Claims That Microsoft Looks for Staff That Works More and Gets Paid Less (or Can Only Code by Grabbing Other People's Code, Under the Guise of "AI")
People can form their own opinion
Richard Stallman Was Right About Reasons Not to Use Microsoft
last updated 2017
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 02, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, July 02, 2025
Gemini Links 03/07/2025: No to Cloudflare and Small Web July
Links for the day