Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 20/08/2023: Free Pens, Gemini Clients via SOCKS5 (e.g. TOR)



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • malahide fossils

        i vist the malahide coast regularly when i am near Dublin. i managed to run and swim 5 days in row, despite the choppy and sandy water. no jellyfish this time, thankfully.

      • 🔤SpellBinding: ADELRTX Wordo: IMPEL
      • Knee

        My meniscus in right knee raptured while sitting on the chair in the office. Happed in mid of July. No way to move and very painful. Needed surgery fast. Took a week to get to arthroscopy. Now it is a month after the surgery. I spent that time mostly laying on the sofa with laptop /work / or iPad /entertainment/.

      • #5

        A few minutes before 15:00 today I got shot #5, booster #3. It was at a small clinic just like last time, with no fanfare, but there were more people getting their shots this time. Maybe people have found out the numbers are going back back up, but news is unfortunately pretty thin.

        The clinic this time was much farther from home. I had tried to reserve a slot earier during vacation but couldn't find any at a place near home. This place I went to today was the closest I could find near a train station. I did not want to have to take a bus out into the middle of nowhere, especially on the way home.

        [...]

        I guess for the entire world the virus is a thing of the past, but not for me. I shall remain vigilant until it really is finally gone. If that ever happens.

      • anger and fear regarding becoming a teacher



        Principal tells us to dress up for the next day of training. I get all gothed up in deep purple with my highest wedges and i feel divine. someone in the booth at the superintendent's speech played "too sexy" as my building's staff were walking in; suddenly i distinctly felt like i'd been set up to be used as eye candy and felt incredibly gross. I e-mailed the principal about it, then he surprises me in my classroom while I was preparing for the week ahead.

        He proceeded to talk an apology at me for about five minutes. He said he wasn't gonna be able to sleep at night with this hanging over his head, so he had to come right away. I don't doubt that, but I don't think for the reasons he intended to get across. He said he didn't choose the music and it's not at all what he was going for but that he really regretted how it all came together. He didn't ask me one question or stop to hear me speak at all. Shakes my hand and leaves.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • On-Call Culture and the Human Aspect: Prioritising Well-being in the Realm of Reliability

        Site Reliability Engineering is synonymous with ensuring system reliability, but the human factor is an often-underestimated part of this discipline. Ensuring a healthy on-call culture is as critical as any technical solution. The well-being of the engineers is an important factor.

        Firstly, a healthy on-call rotation is about more than just managing and responding to incidents. It's about the entire ecosystem that supports this practice. This involves reducing pain points, offering mentorship, rapid iteration, and ensuring that engineers have the right tools and processes. One ceavat is, that engineers should be willing to learn. Especially in on-call rotation mixing SREs with other engineers (for example Software Engineers or QA Engineers), it's difficult to motivate everyone to engage. QA Engineers want to test the software, Software Engineers want to implement new features; they don't want to troubleshoot and debug production incidents. It can be depressing for the mentoring SRE.

      • Everything's on fire / No XMPP, no Robbie Robertson

        We're between several wildfires. The smoke is absolutely miserable, burnt embers are dropping all over, and the communities about 10 km away are on evacuation alert. We've loaded up the car, just in case. I've done a lot of work on this house, but it can burn. Everything is temporary.

        Robbie Robertson died last week. Attentive readers of this phlog will remember a misleading phlog title a couple of years back.

      • Booklet printing

        I found how to prepare a PDF into a printable booklet (aka brochure or pamphlet) PDF! (Again!) The booklet pages will be half the size of the print paper -- e.g. with an A4 paper printer the booklet will be A5.

        For whatever reason I find it extremely hard to understand how to operate the printer... If I put the paper this way, how will it come out? Should I flip it to print the other side? Should I rotate? Who knows! It's not the first time I've gone through the whole process of (re)learning these things, but, like a dumbass, I never documented it. All is about to change! Brace yourself!

      • Free Pens

        At my office there was a box of free pens and I helped myself to three of them. I love free pens. I doubt that I will ever have a need to purchase a pen because I have so many that I have acquired through the past several decades.

        Yes, I can obtain pens at work. Our office has a modest supply cabinet including boxes of pens. However, it is the surprise pens that I chance upon outside of work that delight me the most. These are the pens that I see in hotel or bank lobbies, or trade shows, or conferences.

      • A PSP Update

        This is something I had been completely overlooking until a couple days ago. The PSP officially had a good collection of classic PS1 titles that it was capable of emulating, and thanks to community tools it's possible to convert any other PS1 title that wasn't officially supported and play it on the PSP.

        I never had a PS1 growing up, but I did play a couple PS1 games thanks to the PS2's backwards compatibility and a lot of my favorite PC games were also available on PS1. Lately I've been playing a lot of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 which was a childhood favorite. I've also been playing a bit of Re-Volt, an RC car racing game that's harder than I remember, and Spider-Man, whose PC demo I would play over and over.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • How to run gemini clients via SOCKS5 (e.g. TOR)

          After some discussions on the IRC channel, I decided to try how running a gemini client would work with SOCKS5 to be able to connect via TOR (though the same has other uses) and I found that most clients do not support SOCKS5 directly.

        • Re: Emergency Notifications, Mastodon, the Climate Crisis

          One of the links in the post is to lemmy.world about how the Dutch government is starting a Mastodon server. But that lemmy.world link is down right now.

          Fedi’s tech is still pretty flaky and unreliable. Posts go missing all the time. I don’t wanna slag Lemmy because I know they’re working hard. And it’s not just them that have issues, it’s the entire ActivityPub world.

        • How to reply to Lemmy posts from Mastodon

          If you got an account on Mastodon, Homecamp, Akkoma, Misskey, Pixelfed or similar during the big Twitter migration and you wanna reply to a post on Lemmy or kbin, read on!

          If you don’t have any Fedi account at all yet, you’re living the blessed life. Good on you!♥ Bookmark this page and return here once you’ve been on Fedi a few weeks and have gotten comfy and wanna branch out to the threadiverse. Or, if it's the threadiverse itself that's appealing rather than the seedy world of microblogging, just make an account on Lemmy or kbin instead and in that case you don't need this tutorial. You might need a reverse tutorial if you wanna interact with people from Mastodon or Pixelfed or whatever, but I don't know how to make one since I don't know how Lemmy looks from the inside!

          For us in gemspace, there is actually a Fediverse on Gemini thing that’s awesome, it’s called Tootik, but this tutorial doesn’t apply to it yet since it can’t fetch posts by URL as far as I know. I don’t know for sure, but I believe you can still subscribe to Lemmy and kbin groups from Tootik. I’ll edit this section if I find out more.♥

      • Programming

        • Mixed feelings about Rust

          Now, I was not intending for this post to see a wide audience. I have no way of knowing how many people read what I write there, but based on the lack of feedback I'd guess not many. This time, it was picked up by Rust weekly, from whence it hit HackerNews. You know how they say never read the comments? I read the comments, which were overwhelmingly negative of course.

          [...]

          Another of my criticisms was Rust macros. I said flatly that they were a mistake. I stand by that. Zig's use of 'comptime' shows that a fully developed language and compiler level type reflection scheme can completely, and cleanly, replace not only macros but a lot of other metaprogramming pains. Generics are a breeze with good type reflection. You can move even more classes of bugs from runtime to compile time. Heck, the comptime concept enables Zig to have their build system written in Zig.

          Now, around this same time, @thecompiler was getting ready to present a keynote address at RustConf. Certain members of the Rust core team took it upon themselves to turn this into an awful mess, by reaching out to the conference organizers and implying that the core team had decided as a whole that his talk was not a good fit for the keynote. Did I mention that @thecompiler was one of the editors of the C23 standard, and a massive presence in the programming community? He was insulted and it became a scandal.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Microsoft-Connected Sites Trying to Shift Attention Away From Microsoft's Megebreach Only Days Before Important If Not Unprecedented Grilling by the US Government?
Why does the mainstream media not entertain the possibility a lot of these talking points are directed out of Redmond?
[Video] 'Late Stage Capitalism': Microsoft as an Elaborate Ponzi Scheme (Faking 'Demand' While Portraying the Fraud as an Act of Generosity and Demanding Bailouts)
Being able to express or explain the facts isn't easy because of the buzzwords
Microsoft ("a Dying Megacorporation that Does Not Create") and IBM: An Era of Dying Giants With Leadership Deficits and Corporate Bailouts (Subsidies From Taxpayers)
Microsoft seems to be resorting to lots of bribes and chasing of bailouts (i.e. money from taxpayers worldwide)
 
Windows in Lebanon: Down to 12%?
latest from statCounter
Links 18/05/2024: Caledonia Emergency Powers, "UK Prosecutor's Office Went Too Far in the Assange Case"
Links for the day
US Patent and Trademark Office Sends Out a Warning to People Who Do Not Use Microsoft's Proprietary Formats
They're punishing people who wish to use open formats
Links 18/05/2024: Fury in Microsoft Over Studio Shutdowns, More Gaming Layoffs
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, May 17, 2024
IRC logs for Friday, May 17, 2024
Links 18/05/2024: KOReader, Benben v0.5.0 Progress Update, and More
Links for the day
[Meme] UEFI 'Secure' Boot Boiling Frog
UEFI 'Secure' Boot: You can just ignore it. You can just turn it off. You can hack on it as a workaround. Just use Windows dammit!
The Market Wants to Delete Windows and Install GNU/Linux, UEFI 'Secure' Boot Must Go!
To be very clear, this has nothing to do with security and those who insist that it is have absolutely no credentials
In the United States Of America the Estimated Share of Google Search Grew After Microsoft's Chatbot Hype (Which Coincided With Mass Layoffs at Bing)
Microsoft's chatbot hype started in late 2022
Techrights Will Categorically Object to Any Attempts to Deny Its Right to Publish Informative, Factual Material
we'll continue to publish about 20 pages per day while challenging censorship attempts
Links 17/05/2024: Microsoft Masks Layoffs With Return-to-office (RTO) Mandates, More YouTube Censorship
Links for the day
YouTube Progresses to the Next Level
YouTube is a ticking time bomb
Journalists and Human Rights Groups Back Julian Assange Ahead of Monday's Likely Very Final Decision
From the past 24 hours...
[Meme] George Washington and the Bill of Rights
Centuries have passed since the days of George Washington, but the principles are still the same
Daniel Pocock: "I've Gone to Some Lengths to Demonstrate How Corporate Bad Actors Have Used Amateur-hour Codes of Conduct to Push Volunteers Into Modern Slavery"
"As David explains, the Codes of Conduct should work the other way around to regulate the poor behavior of corporations who have been far too close to the Debian Suicide Cluster."
Video of Richard Stallman's Talk From Four Weeks Ago
2-hour video of Richard Stallman speaking less than a month ago
statCounter Says Twitter/X Share in Russia Fell From 23% to 2.3% in 3 Years
it seems like YouTube gained a lot
Journalist Who Won Awards for His Coverage of the Julian Assange Ordeals Excluded and Denied Access to Final Hearing
One can speculate about the true reason/s
Richard Stallman's Talk, Scheduled for Two Days Ago, Was Not Canceled But Really Delayed
American in Paris
3 More Weeks for Daniel Pocock's Campaign to Win a Seat in European Parliament Elections
Friday 3 weeks from now is polling day
Microsoft Should Have Been Fined and Sanctioned Over UEFI 'Lockout' (Locking GNU/Linux Out of New PCs)
Why did that not happen?
Gemini Links 16/05/2024: Microsoft Masks Layoffs With Return-to-office (RTO) Mandates, Cash Issues
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 16, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, May 16, 2024
Ex-Red Hat CEO Paul Cormier Did Not Retire, He Just Left IBM/Red Hat a Month Ago (Ahead of Layoff Speculations)
Rather than retire he took a similar position at another company
Linux.com Made Its First 'Article' in Over and Month, It Was 10 Words in Total, and It's Not About Linux
play some 'webapp' and maybe get some digital 'certificate' for a meme like 'clown computing'
[Meme] Never Appease the Occupiers
Freedom requires truth. Free speech emancipates.
Thorny Issues, Violent Response
They say protests (or strikes) that do not disrupt anything are simply not effective. The same can be said about reporting.
GNU/Linux in Malaysia: From 0.2 Percent to 6+ Percent
That's like 30-fold increase in relative share
Liberty in Liberia? Windows Falls Below 10% and Below iOS
This is clearly a problem for Microsoft
Techrights Congratulates Raspberry Pi (With Caution and Reservations)
Raspberry Pi will "make or break" based on the decisions made in its boardroom
OSI Makes a Killing for Bill Gates and Microsoft (Plagiarism and GPL Violations Whitewashed and Openwashed)
meme and more
The FSF Ought to Protest Against UEFI 'Secure Boot' (Like It Used To)
libreplanet-discuss stuff
People Who Defend Richard Stallman's Right to Deliver Talks About His Work Are Subjected to Online Abuse and Censorship
Stallman video removed
GNU/Linux Grows in Denmark, But Much of That is ChromeOS, Which Means No Freedom
Google never designs operating systems with freedom in mind
Links 16/05/2024: Vehicles Lasting Fewer Years, Habitat Fragmentation Concerns
Links for the day
GNU/Linux Reaches 6.5% in Canada (Including ChromeOS), Based on statCounter
Not many news sites are left to cover this, let alone advocate for GNU/Linux
Links 16/05/2024: Orangutans as Political Props, VMware Calls Proprietary 'Free'
Links for the day
The Only Thing the So-called 'Hey Hi Revolution' Gave Microsoft is More Debt
Microsoft bailouts
TechTarget (and Computer Weekly et al): We Target 'Audiences' to Sell Your Products (Using Fake Articles and Surveillance)
It is a deeply rogue industry that's killing legitimate journalism by drowning out the signal (real journalism) with sponsored fodder
FUD Alert: 2024 is Not 2011 and Ebury is Not "Linux"
We've seen Microsofers (actual Microsoft employees) putting in a lot of effort to shift the heat to Linux
Links 15/05/2024: XBox Trouble, Slovakia PM Shot 5 Times
Links for the day
Windows in Times of Conflict
In pictures
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, May 15, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, May 15, 2024