Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 10/06/2023: Wordle for Gemini



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • 🔤SpellBinding: AGHNRUY Wordo: ???
      • Making/Meeting

        Last year I managed to download my entire LiveJournal archives. My last post there was over a decade ago, and for at least five years my posting had slowed to every few months (at best), but all in all I wrote there for eleven years. Kind of incredible. Everything I said, and others, dumped to text and XML. Hard to read, so often I explore by means of grepping a name, or a phrase.

        In addition to this, I've got an almost-complete archive of my old HTML journal, the handwritten kind, gathered in pieces from the Wayback across three or four of my old sites whose robots.txt allowed crawling.

        [...]

        But then there are the handful of places that did stick, or click, or however you want to look at it. For me those include dialup BBSs, online journals, the forum for fucked up teens when I was 18 (and whew, that last one's complicated). But also: the people of the poetry community on Twitter, something good in the sludge of that site. Then, geminispace.

      • writing as a writer

        Think of stuff. Write it down. If blogging, hit "Publish", too.

        Do this with no time compartmentalization nor boundaries (either time-wise or word-wise) every day. Seven days a week, most weeks. Birthdays/Xmas: optional (for me, the holidays themselves are optional, and now the writing part, too, but...)

        This is how I see writing.

      • Saturday afternoon at the MP

        On my way home from running some errands I decide to take a detour via The Midnight Pub. Its hot, there is no need to hurry. I scan the messages on the board. Uh, ~jack has been "redacted". Hmmm. Digital suicide? I wonder. And there is some mention of plausible looking word frequencies. Sigh. "Is there still some place without the new shiny technology ..." I ask myself.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • gsettings command

        One of the things I find annoying about Ubuntu Desktop defaults is that when I open a new application it opens in the upper left corner. I then drag it to the center screen and start working. It's amazing how a small inconvenience can grind on you over time. When I've search the net for changing this behavior the usual suggestions are "install gnome-tweaks". This seems ham-handed. I think continue searching and eventually find the command below. So I am making a note of the command here in my blog so I can find it latter.

      • Excel Scottish Land Tax calculator

        Me and my partner are in the process of buying our first house. In Scotland, property transactions are subject to Land Tax[1]. Land Tax is calculated based on the property price and is based on tiers. The first 145k is free, then 145-250k is subject to 2% tax, 250-325k is 5% and so on. For first time buyers the tax free amount is raised to 175k.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Wordle for Gemini published

          First, pardon my english but I want to get the word out. Since I saw winter's comments about how NYT was transforming Wordle's experience into a crappy one, I remembered I still have in this capsule my own clone that works over Gemini and it is simple enough to have anyone put it on their own. Mine works with a spanish word dictionary, but you can have it generate the database with *any* word list. It will take care of the client certificates to keep a way of a session and track if you've already solved or not the current word and pick a new one when 16 minutes have passed.

        • How Online Ads Work

          Gemini tries to avoid the worst of the web, and for most people ads and tracking are high on that list.

          But, there is a lot about how ads work that is not common knowledge.

          You almost certainly know what online ads look like; you may even have clicked on them from time to time—possibly by mistake. You might have considered what information is flying around in the cloud to support those ads. You’re less likely, I think, to have considered how much money changed hands, and between whom.

      • Programming


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
Slopfarms Slopping Away at "Linux" and Spreading Microsoft Misinformation
Slopfarms don't comprehend this as they lack actual comprehension, they're just parrots
GitHub the Company Has, in Effect, Just Died (Time to Look for Alternatives)
To Microsoft, what's left of GitHub after dismantling/folding it is some "training set" (people's code, without permission to "train" i.e. misuse under the guise of "GenAI" plagiarism)
Linux Foundation Says "Housekeeping", "Hung", "Normal", "Native Feature/Support" and "Girl/Girls" Are Offensive Words
Bombing people is OK, just use the right "terms"
It Looks More Like Microsoft GitHub Layoffs
GitHub is just losing loads of money
 
Personal Attacks From Rust People Serve to Confirm They Have Lost the Argument
"The discussion I find around the net so far has no technical merit and centers around ad hominem"
Physical Meters and Purely Mechanical Meters Aren't Dumb; It's Dumb to Mock or Dismiss Them as Antiquated
I've learned a lot this week, both online and over the telephone
"AI" Hype or LLM Slop is Not About Efficiency, It's About Lowering Standards
It does not seem like IBM is genuinely committed to the same goals (or commitments) as the original Red Hat
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, August 12, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, August 12, 2025
GitHub Will End Up like XBox and Skype
It is not likely that the XBox franchise will survive the next 5 years
Stones Thrown in Glass Houses
Projecting? You bet!
As Europe Gets Increasingly Serious About Software Freedom and Digital Sovereignty It Needs to Enforce a Ban on Software Patents ASAP
many councils in Europe move to Free software and US policy/companies cannot be trusted
Windows 12 in Bahrain (Microsoft "Market Share" Down to 12%, an All-Time Low)
They really ought to get away from Windows even faster
The Web Needs 'Pest Control' When It Comes to LLM Slopfarms
The goal is to discourage more sites becoming slopfarms
Microsoft Can Now Stop Reporting the GitHub Layoffs (Even When They Happen)
GitHub's original staff will see the true cost of becoming "b0rged" - something that Microsoft earned a bad reputation for
How to Get Very Bad or Even Malicious Code Into Linux? Write it in a Language That Linus Torvalds and Most Other Linux Developers Don't Understand.
One point nobody brings up is, what if code gets committed while evading audits and scrutiny?
Links 12/08/2025: Wikipedia Fails at UK High Court, Perlmutter Still Fights to Squash the Slop Lobby
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/08/2025: Field Recording and Digital Legacy
Links for the day
Links 12/08/2025: WinRAR Zero-Day, SonicWall Does More Harm Than Good
Links for the day
Links 12/08/2025: More Sabotage of Underwater Cable Ahead of Russian Alaska Summit
Links for the day
Richard Stallman Will Not Miss Microsoft GitHub, It Was Only Good at Harvesting a Lot of Code for Plagiarism-as-a-Service
investors are apparently willing to lose money for buzzwords
Links 12/08/2025: Science, Hardware, and Ukraine Excluded From Negotiations About Its Future
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/08/2025: Meditation, OpenStreetMap, Smolweb, and More
Links for the day
Google News is Dying: Most of Its Top Stories Now Are LLM Slop With Slop Images (i.e. 100% Fake 'Content')
Google News has been drowning in this sort of stuff for quite some time
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, August 11, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, August 11, 2025
Our Predictions Were Right: GitHub Dying as Losses Pile Up (as a Company It Cannot Continue to Exist, It's Not 'Free Hosting')
GitHub always lost money
Links 11/08/2025: Meritless Twitter Suspensions and Disney Scraps Deepfake Dwayne Johnson
Links for the day
Gemini Links 11/08/2025: Upgrading Debian Bookworm and Better Quality PDFs From Gemini Pages
Links for the day
Currys PCWorld Lied a Decade Ago, 10 Years Later It Still Effectively Voids Your Warranty for Installing GNU/Linux Despite It Being Increasingly Mainstream
Microsoft gatekeepers
Team GNOME Has Libeled Me for Nearly 20 Years
we are not dealing with sane people
Experience With Airlines in 'Web Sites' and in 'Apps'
In a lot of ways, Stallman Was Right about what JavaScript would turn out to be
Open Does Not Mean Free
wiser to ask if some program is freedom-respecting
The Register MS Takes Money From Companies Banned by the Biden and Trump Administrations (National Security Risk)
today's sponsor
Sabotaging GNU/Linux PCs (and Users) is Not a 'Joke'
maybe cruelty is the very objective
How We Process Screenshots of Slop to Suitably Tag Them as Slop
everything is a single command
Links 11/08/2025: Data Breaches, Politics, and Climate
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, August 10, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, August 10, 2025
Gemini Links 11/08/2025: Tea Caffeine Hot and Super ZZ Zero
Links for the day