Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 22/08/2023: Pokes and Terminal Metronome



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • The passing of Kenneth Evans Jr.

        It wasn't exactly like I didn't know it was coming. He had been going downhill in the last year and COVID didn't do him any favors. He had a number of heart attacks over the decades including a quadruple bypass that he outlived the repair and had to have it done again.

        But, knowing it was happening and having it happen are sometimes two different things. For some of us more than others.

        [...]

        In the end, he made sure we knew that he loved talking to my children and that he was proud of us. He was apologetic for dying in the same year as our mother and was struggling to make sure my brother knew the password to his BitWarden before he passed.

        My dad is the inspiration for my exit planning[4]. He was one of the most well-organized people I knew, even when it came to planning out his death. He had his paperwork gather together, his notes distributed and an archived drive with (almost) everything we needed.

      • A Farewell to Leaderboards

        Some...things...came up today, the result of which was that I ended up making my Duolingo profile private. This has a couple of effects: it stops you from having friends in-app; and, it turns off the leaderboard.

        I was sad for the former, though in my group chat, my Duo friends totally understood the reason: unwanted attention. But turning off rankings and leaderboards? Holy hell. That was amazing. This app is for learning again.

      • Work From Home: Pros and Cons
      • WILDER, an indie magazine about nature (in Portuguese)

        A couple of weeks ago I found this Portuguese[^0] indie magazine about nature called WILDER... and boy it's pretty fucking good!

        They publish around two articles per day, about news or scientific studies. There's a section titled "Que espécie é esta?" ("What species is this?") where readers send observations of their own, and specialists collaborating with the magazine try to determine the species (on a best effort basis) -- it's pretty cool to learn of so many different life forms living around here. And for some weeks now there's been a running series of interviews of those specialists, titled "Embaixadores por Natureza" ("Ambassadors for Nature").

    • Technology and Free Software

      • more pokes

        I was looking for anything that might hint at what went wrong in the commits. I first found a closed issue about windows computers not being able to connect to the bootstrap.

      • poking at the thing

        woke up this morning, booted my computer, and saw veilid-server had been failing to bootstrap. so, ofc I bother someone on the internet with the problem before I actually look into it and get the "did you update it?" response. ofc I had not. I do that. and it still does the thing from before the update, and this is where I started poking. I found that the bootstrap server is bootstrap.veilid.net. appropriate enough. I dig the domain for the A and AAAA records, and ping to make sure they are all pingable.

      • Terminal Metronome

        So today I sat down to practice guitar and I realized that I left both my metronomes at my sister's room. Obviously I wasn't going to get up to go and fetch one, so I picked up a bash spell tome (man SoX) and with a little bash magic, made a basic metronome.

      • Migrating prosody internal storage to SQLite on OpenBSD

        As some may know, I'm an XMPP user, an instant messaging protocol which used to be known as Jabber. My server is running Prosody XMPP server on OpenBSD. Recently, I got more users on my server, and I wanted to improve performance a bit by switching from the internal storage to SQLite.

        Actually, prosody comes with a tool to switch from a storage to another, but I found the documentation lacking and on OpenBSD the migration tool isn't packaged (yet?).

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Hello!



          I'm Day. I stumbled upon Geminispace somehow last week, and thought this would be a good place to get to know everyone :)

          I'm probably going to be treating my profile page? site? as a sandbox for playing with Gemtext, and figuring out how to make fun stuff within the constraints of Gemini, so I might not make too many posts of my own.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Brett Wilson LLP Sent Over 5 Kilograms (or Over 12 Pounds) of Legal Papers! Because Writing About Microsoft Abuses is 'Illegal'.
How do you guys sleep at night? On a big pile of Microsoft money?
Extremism as a Weapon Against GNU/Linux (Microsoft Lunduke)
He ought to know the Halloween Documents. Wasn't he a Microsoft employee when these came out?
 
Microsoft-Sponsored Propaganda Site Has Removed False 'Hit Piece' About Dr. Stallman (With Fake and Misrepresented Imagery) But Only After 4 Years
So they only removed that page some time around 2025, i.e. about 4 years after it had been published
Always Check Your Inputs
Garbage in, garbage out. Or wrong assumptions, wrong corollary.
Dan Neidle Said That Tax Evasion Facilitator Mr Zahawi (Working to Silence Bloggers Through Brett Wilson LLP) Targeted Not Only Him (But The Others Kept Quiet)
"Mr Neidle said after repelling Mr Zahawi he was contacted by bloggers and tweeters who had received similar threats. They deleted their work “and in most cases never commented publicly on anything again”."
SLAPP Funding Transparency Urgently Needed in the UK and Elsewhere (in Practice, Not Just in Theory)
Writing about crime - including Microsoft crime - is not a crime
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 09, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, July 09, 2025
Elodie Bergot Still Doing Illegal Things at the EPO, Based on the Local Staff Committee Munich
They keep taking away from the staff while compelling the staff to do illegal things
Gemini Links 09/07/2025: Extreme Testing and Golang Documentation in Geminispace
Links for the day
Vice President of the European Patent Office (EPO) Complains That Techrights Gives Visibility to Legal and Technical Issues at the EPO
"Follow-up on enquiries relating to Dir. 1218 and 1001"
Slopwatch: linuxsecurity.com and Various Slopfarms That Lie About "Linux" and Are Promoted by Google News
Google does not seem interested in tackling this problem
Links 09/07/2025: War Updates and Microsoft Moving to India to Cut Costs
Links for the day
GNU/Linux Was Always a 'Movement' of Inclusion of Tolerance
Even the licences themselves remove access barriers
Links 09/07/2025: "Subprime AI Crisis" and "OpenAI May Be in Major Trouble Financially"
Links for the day
Huge Piles of Legal Papers ('Paper DDoS') Do Not Impress Judges and Regulators
they just make judges and regulators even more suspicious of the eagerness to resort to 'paper DDoS'
Lunduke Isn't Even Hiding His Anti-Linux Agenda (From "Linux Sucks" to "Linux is Pedophiles")
just trying to make a lot of trouble
Some People Use Computers to Get Actual Work Done
Tolerance and inclusion must extend to acceptance that some people don't agree with you, might never agree with you, and imposing what allegedly works for you on them is unreasonable
Example of "Old" Things That Still Work
The notion that something being "old" implies it must be discarded is typically advanced by those looking to sell more of something
Some Scheduled Maintenance Later Today
Typically the most vulnerable service during short interruptions is IRC
Computers Are Just a Tool
People don't get married because they love weddings, folks don't join the army because they love war, and most drivers don't drive to work because they love cars
Apple Way Past Its Prime
Apple deserves a decline
The FSF's SysOps Team Recovered From Serious Hardware Issue Within Hours
About half a day ago I noticed that all/most GNU/FSF sites were not reachable and thus reached out to a contact for any details
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 08, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, July 08, 2025
Slopwatch: Turning Bugs Into FUD About "Linux", Getting Basic Facts Wrong
all the screenshots are of fake articles; we don't want to link to any
Technical Reasons, Not Politics: With Wayland "it feels a lot like Linux from 20-25 years ago, which is horrendously frustrating, because it feels like we wasted one or two decades of progress and stability"
Lately, quite a few benchmarks were published to show Wayland compares poorly compared to what we had
PCLinuxOS Recovering From Fire
It looks like a nightmare scenario, where even backups onsite get destroyed
Links 09/07/2025: More Heatwaves, Officials Culled in Russia
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/07/2025: XScreensaver and Resurrection
Links for the day
Links 08/07/2025: "Cyberattack Deals Blow to Russian Firmware" and "Cash Remains King"
Links for the day
FSF40 T-shirt message
by Alex Oliva
Gemini Links 08/07/2025: Creativity, Gotify with NUT Server, and Sudo Bugs
Links for the day
More on "Lunduke is Actually Sending His Audience to Attack People"
"pepe the frogs"
Links 08/07/2025: Sabotage of Networking Infrastructure, Microsoft XBox Game Pass Deemed “Unsustainable”
Links for the day
Dalai Lama Succession as Evidence That Determined, Motivated People Can Reach Their Nineties
And we need to quit talking about their death all the time
Many Lawyers (for Microsoft) and 1,316 Pages to Pick on a Litigant in Person Who Exposed Serious Microsoft Abuses
Answers must be given
Gemini Links 08/07/2025: Ancillary Justice and Small Web July
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 07, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, July 07, 2025