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

The Register MS: Turnover Fell by Over a Million Pounds (About 20%) in One Year, Administrative Expenses Rose by Almost Half a Million Pounds, The Register MS Operates at a Loss
This is not a (commercially) healthy publisher
Freedom Is Not Free of Charge, Freedom Can be Very Expensive
Being someone's "slave" is the "default" when no resistance exists
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXX - Swatting by Proxy
Using imbeciles who lie to cops and then dox cops (and already have arrest record and court documents wherein they admit being stoned in front of the cops)
Intel Craters at Taxpayers' Expense (Bailouts for Failing Companies Simple Don't Work)
GOP, which did this, has lost many seats
Mass Layoffs at IBM, Also Outsourcing to India
What IBM does to itself it is doing to other entities as well
 
IBM Compels Workers - Even at Red Hat - to Become "Retired-ish"
Who needs RAs (layoffs, which have been rebranded as "buyouts" like pink slips are generous "gifts") when workers can have their butts kicked every day and WARN Act reporting thresholds are never approached?
Links 06/11/2026: "XBox Is Closer Than Ever to Being Sold Off" and "BuzzFeed Stock in Free Fall"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 06/11/2026: Dao and Dreams
Links for the day
20 Years of Techrights
Celebrating 2 decades of abuses of power being watched (and looking back at key changes)
Linux (and Linus Torvalds) Sleepwalking Into a Binance-Level Catastrophe With Slop 'Code'
Someone should ask Linus Torvalds or his boss (Linux Foundation) if they deem slop, which nobody audits, trustworthy enough to add to every computer out there running the Linux kernel
Vitaly Orlov Weaponises Deep Pockets to Leverage High Court of Justice in London for Censorship and Punishment of Critics
reproduced in full for more exposure and to make censorship harder
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXI - What I Told British Police About Lozza the Same Month Garrett Was Preparing His First Nastygram From 'Hired Guns' Brett Wilson LLP
Lozza and Garrett
Outsourcing at IBM
Cheapening of the workforce is hardly a new problem
Links 06/11/2026: Slop "Companies Race to Lock Down Oil Clients" and Salon Shuts Down
Links for the day
Our Third Decade
Our anniversary is tonight at midnight
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, November 05, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, November 05, 2026
During Strikes and Industrial Actions Lots of EPO Staff Organised Yesterday and Will Do the Same Next Week
There really needs to be a genuine election, not a reappointment
Gemini Links 06/11/2026: Hadestown and "Where Has the Electronics Shop Gone?"
Links for the day
Links 05/11/2026: Rule of Law Vanishing in Turkey, Joshua Wong Still Martyred by Chinese Regime
Links for the day
Gemini Links 05/11/2026: Classical Music, Politics, and Seeed Studio
Links for the day
Like Almost Every Slopfarm, UbuntuBuzz Seems to Have Thrown in the Towel
Linuxsecurity and Linuxiac (to some extent Linuxjournal) are still going, but for how much longer?
EPO 'Midterm' Elections Should Oust the Dictator
Tentatively a failure to secure another (unprecedented) reappointment before Christmas
Secret IBM Layoffs and Increase in PIPs (Silent Layoffs)
The media is failing to do its job
Links 05/11/2026: "Voice is Underutilized" and How Data Centres Lost the Midterm Elections
Links for the day
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXIX - Crime Numbers Regarding GGG (Americans) and Why Those Still Matter
Time does not undo the actions
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXVIII - Telling the Police About the Defamatory Blog Where Posts Targeted My Wife and I (From Across the Atlantic Ocean)
Two years ago we spoke to cops a lot
The Register MS is Losing Money Again, Based on The Register MS
Selling out didn't pay off for very long
There Are No "Layoffs" Anymore, Layoffs Got Rebranded
We're entering bizarre times when layoffs are said to be "down" (according to the regime that suffered a 'bloodbath' in the election) because companies quit using the term "layoffs"
Gemini Links 05/11/2026: Rivers of London, Soul Cakes, STMicroelectronics, and Slop
Links for the day
The Register MS Has Just Published Fake Article With "AI" 84 Times in the Page Because It Was Paid to Do This!
Astounding number of mentions of "AI" (84 in total)
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, November 04, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, November 04, 2026
Links 04/11/2026: Slop Helps Break Laws and Scam Altman Pretends Chatbots Are Persons
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/11/2026: Abacus and Spare IT Equipment
Links for the day
Viet Nam and Thailand at High Adoption Levels of GNU/Linux, Other Nations Nearby Are No Exception
Helen Chiang and her colleagues say it's a "clown show" at Microsoft
Richard Stallman on What It's Like to be Threatened by Strangers With Software Patents
We hope that some EPO insiders will take time to listen to this talk
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXVII - Tasteless, Tactless Time for "Virtue-Signalling" (When Your Actions Are Much Like the GOP's)
Violence by cops isn't a "leftist" thing
Stealth Layoffs at IBM (PIPs and Bailouts)
string of reports or unverified hearsay
United Arab Emirates: GNU/Linux at Over 8%
According to statCounter
As XBox Goes Out of Business Helen Chiang Adds Insult to Injury
XBox sales are worst in 25 years
Steven Vaughan-Nichols is Slop
Just look at this
The Register MS is "Hosting a Dinner" for Sponsors
Remember that The Register MS keeps publishing spam about "AI"
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXVI - A Potent Microsoft Threat to Administration of Justice Globally (Not Just Fair Elections)
Breaking into machines to cover up one's own crimes
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXV - When One Does Not Understand Security (Nor Ever Pursues Security)
One might therefore conclude that Garrett is a proponent of American back doors
Links 04/11/2026: "Democratic Establishment" Wins Big and "Pentagon Sued Over Hegseth’s New “Future of Warfare” Committee Led by Musk"
Links for the day
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXIV - Women as Hostages, Even Spouses
First he put his own spouse behind bars by accusing the spouse of what he himself seems guilty of
A Geminispace Tally
That's not the Web, it is an alternative to it
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXIII - Shooting the Messenger is a Presidential Tactic
why our ministers are looking for ways to fix the law.
Andy's Latest Writings About Proton CEO Andy Yen, "JavaScript Required", and Slavery in Technology
Andy (of The Cyber Show) has some new material
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXII - Malfunctions Reported in Windows Voting Machines (as Usual)
"There are always problems," Ryan told us
Gemini Links 04/11/2026: GoAccess, Adopting Gopher, and Twisty Passages
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 03, 2026
IRC logs for Tuesday, November 03, 2026
"The Judge Accepted That Mrs Schestowitz Had Been the Subject of a Vicious Campaign of Online Harassment"
That's consistent with how they men treat women