Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 11/07/2023: 'Getting into Flash' and Waning World Wide Web



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

    • Technology and Free Software

      • BESM Multiverse and Uresia: Grave of Heavan arrived!

        My physical copies of the BESM Multiverse Maps, BESM Multiverse, BESM Uresia: Grave of Heavan, and Ikarion Gate, the BESM Multiverse LitRPG novel arrived today. I really like having physical books for things that are information dense: settings or rules; I find it helps my comprehension when learning the material. (I'm this way about technical material as well: I try to get computer books in print as well.)

      • Having fun with NixOS

        I decided to run NixOS on my personal laptop, replacing an Arch Linux installation that I've had for years. The idea of a declarative OS has a strong appeal to me, since I'm a big fan of declarative languages — SQL probably being the main one.

        [...]

        On the other hand, I realized I don't have to install pyenv in order to create isolated Python environments for development. I can just use a Nix shell to spawn a new Python version where I do my development.

      • Software and services I use
      • Day 1

        First day of the Old Computer Challenge. I've spent most of the day at work so I've been using new computers for that. For travel, I'm trying to reduce the amount I use my phone as it's more powerful than the limit. I've now booted up the old computer and the WiFi is failing to connect. Not sure why. I may have to reboot.

      • Getting into Flash

        So I'm slightly younger and I got into flash in two ways. Firstly, I """"obtained"""" a copy of Macromedia Flash 5 on CD. But more importantly, secondly, I only got into it because of Newgrounds. It was the early 2000s and Newgrounds was where it was at. Watching videos playing games I loved it.

        So yeah. It's 2000 and somehow a CD ended up on my desk with a marker scribbling of "Flash 5" on it. The interface for flash was a paint canvas and it primarily was an animation platform (I guess). You had a timeline where you could drop in different pieces of art and even animate using keyframes. You could type into the web "stock sound library" or something of that nature and find just an archive of stock, royalty free: punches, gunshots, etc. It was glorious.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Japanese

          Anyone interested in forming a study group to go through the Genki books for learning Japanese? I'm interested in meeting weekly, perhaps via Discord or another client, if you prefer.

        • Retiring geomaticblog.net

          Vicente[2], Pedro-Juan[3], and me started this blog in 2006[4]. Back then blogs were the best way to create content and share knowledge. It was the times of RSS, Google Reader, social bookmarking through `del.icio.us`, and pictures on `Flickr`. Very different from these days of micro-blogging, quick videos, influencers moving from one platform to another chasing their viewers' attention and money, newsletters under paywalls, etc.

          [...]

          I will keep the blog code and content on a GitHub repository at https://github.com/jsanz/geomaticblog/[9] where we have posts in Markdown since 2007, and everything is hopefully for ever available in the web archive at https://web.archive.org/web/20130801000000*/http://geomaticblog.net/[10]. I will probably copy my posts to my website[11].

        • We Can't Go Back to What We Had: Olia Lialina's "From My to Me" and the Loss of the Personal Web

          Despite being active on the web for more than twenty-five years, I had never heard of Olia Lialina. A net artist, professor, and archivist, Lialina has written extensively about the web-that-was. In the mid to late 1990s, she created the art piece "My Boyfriend Came Back From the War". Stark, high contrast white-and-black images and text playing out across frames, the art piece (to me) echoes the sorts of ideas and techniques I'd see in twine-based hypertext years later.

          [...]

          As a researcher with the One Terabyte of Kylobyte Age archive (which holds GeoCities sites "built and abandoned by amateur webmasters between 1995 and 2009), Lialina is in a unique position, sitting on what could well be the largest archive of GeoCities sites outside of the Wayback. And as an artist and amateur webpage creator herself, Lialina has seen designs coalesce, colours harmonize, and the enthusiasm associated with those days, with the creation of something innately personal, slowly fade away.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Proud to Host Free Software Talk by Richard Stallman
ahead of Monday's talk
Slopwatch: Anti-Linux Machine-Generated FUD (LLM Slop) From GBHackers, CybersecurityNews, and Guardian Digital, Inc (Google News Promotes Slop Plagiarism, Misinformation)
Companies that lie try to drown out the signal with falsehoods
Report About February Mass Layoffs at Microsoft (Third Wave of Microsoft Layoffs in 2025) Comes Back From the Dead
Yesterday we wrote about an article in CRN (reporting Microsoft layoffs) being removed without any reasons specified
Links 21/02/2025: Myanmar Scam Centre and Disruptions at USPTO
Links for the day
 
The Streisand Effect is Real
So don't be evil. Also, don't strangle women.
Links 21/02/2025: Linux Foundation Openwashing, Microsoft Copilot Goes Down
Links for the day
Links 21/02/2025: Doomscrolling and European Ham Radio Show
Links for the day
Links 21/02/2025: TikTok Layoffs, WebOS Software Patents in Bad Hands
Links for the day
Gemini Links 21/02/2025: Web Browsers, Mechanical Shortcuts, and Internet Hygiene
Links for the day
Richard Stallman 'Only' Founded the FSF
there's no reason to be upset at the FSF for keeping their founder in the Board
Techrights Disconnected From the United States Two Years Ago
Did people really need to wait for the US government to become this hostile towards the media before recognising the threat?
Before Trying Censorship by Extortion the Serial Strangler From Microsoft Literally Begged Us to Delete Pages
This is very clearly just a broad campaign of intimidation
Hype Watch: Weeks After Microsoft Disappointed Investors With "Hey Hi" It's Trying Some "Quantum" Hype (Adding Impractical Vapourware to Accompany This Hype and Even LLM Slop in 'News' Clothing)
Remember "metaverse"? What happened to media hype about "blockchain" and "IoT"?
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 20, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, February 20, 2025
gbhackers.com is Not Hackers, It's LLM Slop Outputs (Fake 'Articles') That Attack 'True Hackers'
A site called linuxsecurity.com keeps doing this and now we see the slopfarm gbhackers.com doing the same
Gemini Links 20/02/2025: Law of Warming and Cooling, Health, and Devlog
Links for the day
linuxsecurity.com Continues to Spread Lies or Machine-Generated FUD (Microsoft LLMs Likely the Source) About OpenSSH and Linux
this LLM problem is global
Links 20/02/2025: Microsoft Infosys Layoffs and IRS Layoffs (Good News for Rich Tax Evaders)
Links for the day
IBM Layoffs in Europe Already Happening or Underway (UK and Spain). They Try Not to Call These "Layoffs".
"CIO" in particular was repeatedly mentioned lately, as was Consulting
People Who Came From Microsoft Demanding Removal of Articles About Them, About Microsoft, and About Microsoft GitHub is "Generous" (According to Them)
Imagine choosing a law firm that borrows money in the same year just to avoid overdraft in the bank!
Possibly a Third Round of Mass Layoffs at Microsoft in 2025 ("Cloud Solution Architects, Customer Roles"), Report Removed or Censored
This is literally the top story for "microsoft layoffs" right now
Instead of 'DoS Protection' Cloudflare is Allegedly Conducting 'DoS Attacks' on Users of Browsers Other Than Firefox and GAFAM's DRM Sandboxes (Chrome, Safari and Others)
If you value the Web, you will avoid Cloudflare
Mixing Real With Fake in One 'Article' (by "Director of Content, Help Net Security")
From what we can gather, he got machines to generate some slop for him
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, February 19, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, February 19, 2025