Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 26/06/2023: Cypherpunk and Praise of elinks



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • ABCOILD Wordo: PANDA
      • not enough time to live

        if you could earn your living toiling 3 just hours a day, what would you do the rest of your day?

      • As my morning alone time slowly slips away



        and I guess it maybe sorta conforms to some physical sensational whatevers

        but I do feel uncomfortable with food that won't fit the spoon or fork such that there will likely be collateral lip soiling

        one of the most difficult things

      • I got married

        Our wedding ceremony was very nice and reflected us well. No priests or churches, just us and our family and friends.

        Fun were had, went to sauna, saw cute ducklings, listened to wide variety of music together... And I even danced.

      • Too Fast, Too Loud, Too Much

        The growth of this place is straining my equanimity. It's not the amount of people moving here, per se, but rather the built environment 'developers' (what a strange and misleading name for mindless corporate organisms that eat land!) have made to accommodate them. We needed significant density to house this mass influx of humanity, and we got unchecked suburban hell. Hundreds of thousands of wild acres--a precious resource for many peoples over the last 10,000 years--are gone, buried under a hideous sea of identical 4000 square foot houses and big box stores. Malvina Reynolds was mostly right, but it's not little boxes on the hillside, it's pharaonic tombs in three different Richmond-approved colors. And the cars.

      • who lives in Chicago?

        Hello I am leaving to CHI for a year! Does anybody have some tips for living in the CHI

      • catching up (four runs and the upcoming marathon)

        it's been exactly two weeks since my last post and a few things have happened since then. i was mostly busy getting my life back in line, reestablishing my routines that make me feel safe in my own four walls even when my mental is subpar. running has helped me quite a bit to distract myself from the many stressors that rest on my shoulders at the moment. i looked at my calendar this weekend and i almost wanted to cry at just how busy all my upcoming weekends are. but that's just how it is sometimes. it's not like i signed up for things that i don't want to do. quite the opposite. it's just a lot at the moment, really. i'm no good at planning ahead of time and keeping tabs on so many things at once is challenging my grey matter more than i thought.

    • Science

      • The Low-Hanging Climate Fruit

        I’m seeing a lot of “oh it’s great that we discovered these easily-pluggable, low-hanging fruit emitters like methane leaks and diked-out peatlands, yay” and on the one hand, yeah, fixing the low-hanging fruit, the 80/20, the squeakiest wheels is definitively something we’ve got to do…

        …we already knew we were in trouble before we discovered these issues and these sites. We need to fix a lot of the normal stuff too.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • The QOI-Remix Image Format

        I've spent the last couple of days working on an image format, based on QOI, called QOI-Remix or QOI-R. For those who aren't familiar, QOI is a lossless image format created by Dominic Szablewski; the spec fits on a page and it's enormously faster than PNG, while achieving reasonably good encoded file sizes. I thought this was a really good area to be exploring, and one relevant to my own interests and to permacomputing (under the larger umbrella of efficient software.) With that in mind, I did several changes to the image format, adding a little bit of compute overhead but frequently achieving substantial reductions in filesize - and remaining far faster than PNG.

      • TCP Escoteria

        We now resume a dialog already in progress.

        Josephus.— See here, there is a "connected" method to check whether a TCP socket is connected.

        Aloysius.— The peer could close the connection the very next second.

        Josephus.— But I want to know whether the socket is connected right now.

        Aloysius.— This is also not possible; the peer may have already closed the socket, and one cannot tell the difference between the ESTABLISHED and CLOSE-WAIT states.

      • Chrooting into BTRFS

        I was trying to rescue my new Manjaro installation. But, I had never tried chrooting into a BTRFS volume before.

        chroot lets you rebase the file system from a running system (like a live USB flash drive) to the file system of a stopped system (like a broken Linux installation on your hard drive). By changing the root (chroot), utilities run inside the chrooted environment act as if they were being run on the computer that you are troubleshooting. So, if my Manjaro installation is not working, I can use my installation disc, chroot into my system, and run updates, check the logs, or run other utilities. In this way, chroot combines the functioning of the live system with the file system of the broken installation.

      • Quick thoughts on Lemmy

        I’ll jot down some quick thoughts on Lemmy, a Reddit-like service for the Fediverse. When it first was announced a few years ago, I thought “yeah, right, it has a really long way to go” and instead of helping I just sorted it under “vaporware”. But now it’s becoming usable♥.

      • Cypherpunk

        My general principle is that private conversation between known entities (like friends & fam) is usually a good thing and something humanity is well adapted to (since that’s how offline has worked for millenia) while anonymous immutable persistent broadcast is danger zone and unlike anything previous generations have had to deal with. Even a skeevy bathroom wall can be cleaned up or painted over.

      • Re: Framework Laptop

        Whenever I read a Gemlog entry that I think I might want to reply to, I bookmark it for later.

      • Old School Stylish

        Old School Stylish (OSS) is an interesting zine supplement of 28 pages (counting both covers) for Old School Essentials (OSE). OSS drops the class system and instead lets characters pick up “styles”, which are small collections of capabilities. As they adventure they can find and acquire (with suitable effort) more styles. Everything, from hit points to spells to thief capabilities to Armour Class, are part of styles. Characters can have multiple styles active, and can switch out styles for other ones they have learned. By default characters still have levels, but there is a option for dropping levels as well. As you might guess from the cover image this zine takes inspiration from martial arts and cultivation media. OSS offers a lot of ideas for how to acquire styles in play, from petitioning masters to learning a style by observing special circumstances. It provides several tables to help you come up with interesting ways for characters to learn styles. It also suggests that the players NOT use the book to select styles for their character, but leave it up to the DM to place styles to be found in the world, which I thought was interesting.

      • Simplicity and Debian Lenny

        I'm enjoying the simplicity of Debian v5 (Lenny) on the old desktop [0]. I realized shortly after the install that I didn't have to rely on the DVDs I had burned to install packages on this box, I could take advantage of the Debian archive mirror itself, which works with Lenny and this sources.list

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Hi all, Loving this already :)

          What a wonderful BBS this is. I was able to sort out an error on adding a certificate within minutes ! Great job, Skyjake

        • How I Operate My Capsule

          The rise of community-oriented services on Gemini, especially Bubble, has helped introduce more people to the protocol than ever before. Recently I've seen several different newcomers looking for more information on how to set up a capsule and have a more independent presence on the platform. I'll share how I do that in this log.

          This is not meant to be a guide, but rather a non-technical overview of how my capsule is set up, and it's written for an audience that is not as tech-savvy. It goes more into concepts than the particulars of the technology behind them. My hope is that recent arrivals to Geminispace can find this document, see what goes into operating my capsule, and get a better sense of how easy it can be.

        • In praise of elinks

          As I spend more time in text-based tools on the command line, I've become quite appreciative of the elinks browser. I've been building various portable Raspberry Pi based computers over the last while and I've realised that web browsers like Chromium and Firefox are the bottlenecks in terms of performance, because they are so resource-hungry. Netsurf is a nice alternative, but works quite poorly if using a touch-screen input, for example scrolling is quite finicky.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

When Everybody Has a Right/Access to An Attorney/Lawyer (But Some Get Funding From Malicious American Corporations to Spend a Million Dollars on Many Lawyers and Several Barristers)
And send about 75 KG of legal papers to the residence of the "opponent"
European Qualifying Examination (EQE) Being Reduced to Pieces of Papers One Can Buy, Patent System Rapidly Losing Its Legitimacy
Welcome to the "new Europe"
IBM Cannot Even Do Payroll, Now a "Legitimate Target" of Iran
Missiles or not, it seems like IBM systems will be targeted more by cybercriminals
 
Friday the 13th & Debian Developers afraid to nominate in DPL elections
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 13/03/2026: Chatbot "Pentagon Contract" (Bailout) and Secret Service Ditches Slop Pusher
Links for the day
Priorities in 2026
2026 is an interesting year
Willis Towers Watson (WTW) Producing More Propaganda for EPO "Cocaine Communication Managers"
The Local Staff Committee The Hague (LSCTH) has this new paper about Willis Towers Watson (WTW) and its annual EPO-sponsored propaganda, pretending all is well when things are clearly dire
Head of Microsoft Office and Microsoft 360 is Leaving Microsoft Amid Problems and Mass Layoffs
Microsoft is like a "legacy" company
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, March 12, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, March 12, 2026
Gemini Links 13/03/2026: "Someone to Take Over Antenna" and Random Seed/RNG
Links for the day
By Expanding to Advocacy of Ponzi Schemes and Bill Epsteingate (Sex Trafficking), Linux Foundation Revenue Grew to $220,730,594, But Salary of Linus Torvalds Not Even in Top 10 Anymore!
true!
In the Name of Transparency, Today We Show Our Defence and Counterclaim
already uploaded by the other side
Links 12/03/2026: Heating Bills to Soar, "Banks in Gulf Evacuate Their Offices"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/03/2026: On Phone Anxiety and Bjorn "Looking for Someone to Take Over Antenna"
Links for the day
Cultification: best candidates avoiding Debian leader elections
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Richard Stallman (RMS) et al Cited in 'Nature' (Journal/Site) Today, "CODE beyond FAIR"
Under Open Access
The Register MS, on Verge of Collapse, Keeps Promoting a Ponzi Scheme for China
Publishers that participate in this simply don't care about their readers
Overview of False Narratives and Lies Used to Lower Salaries at the European Patent Office (EPO), Abandoning Patent Quality and the EPC
Many of the latter slides are the same as Munich's
Links 12/03/2026: Atlassian Layoffs, GAFAN Covering up Slop-Induced Outages, "Age-verification in Operating Systems and the Internet"
Links for the day
The EPO's President, Who Covers Up Cocaine Use, is Trying to Suppress Communication Between EPO Staff Under the Guise of 'Privacy' (and in Defiance of a Court Ruling)
Why does Europe's second-largest institution: 1) curtail communication among staff (including union) and 2) go out of its way to avoid obeying a court order from ILOAT in Geneva?
Exactly One Week Before Next EPO Strike, Media Intentionally Not Mentioning EPO Strikes
One form of propaganda technique/s involves the systematic suppression of certain topics, or of particular "narratives"
Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 10 Out of 200: Showing Public Tweets is Not a Privacy Violation, But This Isn't About Justice, It's About Censorship
It's time to put a stop to this abuse of process (which is what the Judge deemed it to be last year)
Suicide of disgruntled employee? Bus fire at Kerzers / Chiètres, Switzerland, at least six dead
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, March 11, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Gemini Links 12/03/2026: "on Urbit" and the True Cost (or Criticism) of "Social Control Media"
Links for the day
Slop About "linux" in Google News
Once people recognise that those sites are fake it's hard to 'unsee' what they are
An American War on GNU/Linux, Software Freedom, and British Investigative, Science-Based Reporting - Part V - Attempts to Take Down and Suppress Criticism of Back Doors Controlled by Microsoft and the American Government
The cost of maintaining illusions
IBM's Payroll: Cannot Even Pay the People What They're Legally Entitled to
How financially-stressed is IBM at this point?
Slides From the European Patent Office (EPO) Explain Why They're Striking, How They're Striking, and What Comes Next
A week from now the strike will go ahead
GAFAM Datacentres Are Facilities of War, So Risk of Downtime by Missiles or State-Sponsored Cracking Has Vastly Increased
How safe is your business in "clown computing" or DCs marked as some "legitimate targets" at wartime?
Companies That Take Away Blood and Sweat From the Community to Sell a Ponzi Scheme to Everybody
We need Free software that is run by communities
1,234 People Gather Online to Plan Next EPO Strikes and Other Industrial Actions
yesterday an online gathering orchestrated the next moves by EPO staff
Links 11/03/2026: Fake Videos Swarm YouTube, "Ukraine Can Now Manufacture ‘China-Free’ Drones"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 11/03/2026: Lagrange for iOS and Android and "Turning a Folder of Git Repos Into Project Launcher"
Links for the day
Kafkaesque: Unlawful Activities in the UK to Cover Up Unlawful Activities in the United States of America
Why is bribery and even extortion seen is OK? Because rich people do those things?
Former IBM Executive, Ron Hovsepian, Doomed S.u.S.E. (SUSE)
SUSE is like a child nobody wants to raise
Quiet Layoffs or Silent Layoffs Alleged at Microsoft
Will some investigative journalists do their job now and ask Microsoft tough questions?
After a Long Lull LinuxTeck (linuxteck.com) Came Back Only as a Slopfarm
Unlike Linuxiac, LinuxTeck wasn't very active in recent years
Links 11/03/2026: EPO and USPTO Software Patents Thrown Out Again, Copyright Concerns Over Slop (Plagiarism Using Buzzwords)
Links for the day
Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 9 Out of 200: 5RB Barrister Does Not Even Know the Name of His Own Client (That He Was Paid Well Over $200,000 to 'Speak' or 'Cover' for)
If you assault women in the United States, there's a barrister available for you in the UK
IBM's Fedora is Now Led by GAFAM Slop
The official word of Fedora is partly slop
IBM 'Dinobabies' Speak Out
"They want newbies out of school at a much cheaper rate"
Links 11/03/2026: "Drill, Baby, Drill" and Social Control Media Recognised as Threat to Democracy
Links for the day
5 Years Since Freenode Conflict
IRC isn't going away
A Week Ahead of Next EPO Strike the Staff Representatives Show the Administrative Council That the Office Lost the Best Staff, It's No Longer Attractive
the message circulated regarding the open letter to the Administrative Council
Jeff Bezos as an Individual Said to Have Enough Capital to Buy IBM
Assuming a market capitalisation of 234.70 billion
Starting Soon: Another New Series About Richard Stallman
There are some inside stories we can tell
Gemini Links 11/03/2026: School, Code Slop, and "Fancy Weapons"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 10, 2026
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 10, 2026