Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Back At It

    Well, that was a nice two-week vacation, but now I guess it's done. We had my in-laws over for most of the Christmas week - played a lot of card and board games, watched a lot of NHL and World Junior hockey games - then the second week was mostly ours. Got together with friends, bummed around the house, just kind of did whatever. The weather made this easy: for most of the last week, we've been stuck in a miserable cold snap. The dogs haven't been walked since...Wednesday, I think? Maybe Thursday? And even then, bundled up in their little red coats and the walks shortened in respect of how cold it was, even then.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ABDIJRL Wordo: GAPED

• Politics and World Events

  • Asking for change, politely

    It seems to me that when the powerful are terrible people and the weak are trying to articulate their anger, to organize, to get a mass movement going, asking them to politely make their case and letting other people make up their mind is not OK. By telling people not to fight for their rights but to just politely make their point and then shut up one aligns with the powerful, one dismisses the methods of resistance.

    To get a feel for absurd this is, I remember a cartoon I once saw where American natives gave the conquistadores a list of complaints; where black Americans gave white Americans a list of civil rights they were asking for; and so on. And in all cases, the oppressor answered, "oh, that's not fair!" or something to that effect and instituted the necessary changes.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Security Theater

    An aspect I think you are discounting is the effort required to implement the mitigations. While plege() [2] and unveil() [3] are simple to use, their implementation is anything but. Just from reading the man pages, it appears there are exceptions, and then exceptions to the excetions, that must be supported. What makes Linux or OpenBSD different than other pieces of software, like openssl [4]?

    Sure, such things help overall but as you state, there are tradeoffs—and a big one I see is adding complexity to an already complex system. And in my experience, security makes it harder to diagnose issues (one exaple from work—a piece of network equipment was “helpfully” filtering network traffic for exploits, making it difficult to test our software properly, you know, in the absense of such technology).

  • Fully Java-less Android development on... Android itself

    As I already hinted in my last post of 2024, I was going to dive into some Android stuff. And the things I have already learned actually turned out to be very friendly if you know what you're doing. But one question still bothered me: could all this be done without any PC at all, on the tablet or even the target smartphone I was developing my tool for? Well, the answer is yes. While things like AndroWish definitely are cool and somewhat liberating, the ability to develop standalone GUI applications and compile them into ready-made .apk packages on the device itself is another level of self-sustainability. So, today, I'm going to tell you how this can be done without having to write a single line of Java code or XML markup. The only caveat as of now is that all this is only fully possible on the 64-bit ARM architecture (aka aarch64). Well, although I don't usually advocate for switching to new hardware, moving to a 64-bit CPU might be a worthy upgrade after all.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • BBS Archives: December 2024 (1.1 MB)

      All posts and comments made on BBS.