Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 12/07/2023: Weight Tracker for Palm OS Release and Better Gemini Searching



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Watering the Black Walnut Treets

        It's been a dry summer, so far. Forecast keeps calling for rain, but the sky only delivers clouds, mostly.

      • Book Showcase: Citizen of the Galaxy

        I haven’t posted for nearly a week—but never fear, I’m still here!

        Actually I’m on vacation. We’ve been hiking and “swimming”; I’ve been trying not to get sunburned, and mostly succeeding; and trying not to get bitten by insects, and mostly failing.

      • So came the sun

        So the pleasantly rainy/dismal day sadly morphed into a bright sun in a clear blue sky. I say "sadly" because these conditions tend to tempt my wife into insisted we get a whole lotta this/that/other done, and I'm just so shot from much work the last three days that muscles/ligaments literally sorely need a break. Yet I also know too much sedentary leads the selfsame muscles/ligaments into stiffness perdition.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Slow boat to noon

        I recently heard someone pronounce the word 'eunuchs', and it sounded exactly like 'unix' - leading to a mini AHA moment.

        Rainy day. My wife's youngest daughter has work friends (they're all nurses) over to alcohol-assisted decompress downstairs. Fine with me. I'd otherwise likely have been enlisted for varieties of chores by now. Instead I'm polishing the bookmarks list while visiting links I no longer recall, surfing a bit from those starting points.

        I'm also back to being a bit more minimalist on the Chromebook for recently having experienced bewildering CPU usage. I'm mostly working from the Linux-y command line environment provided (I think..) by the "Terminal" app, which means leaning on elinks, amfora, gemget, my scripts, etc., bothering with the Chrome browser only as necessary - which tends to imply gnarly security environs.

      • Weight Tracker for Palm OS Release

        I'm releasing my first Palm OS application, a weight tracker for Palm OS >=3.0. You might be asking a few questions, like how did I write an app for Palm Pilot? And why, when the platform has been dead for 15 years? But first, the app itself!

      • Waiting for Spider-Man

        While chatting with a friend about upcoming games, he lamented about having to wait 2 years for the next Spider-Man game to come to PC. I argued that it could surely not take that long considering how quickly most of Sony's releases have made it to the superior platform. Turns out they haven't. Not even the relatively recent Spider-Man: Miles Morales or Returnal. So it's gonna take 2 years after all.

        But will I really be waiting for it? To me, it feels like waiting is merely a figure of speech these days. For most things that I'm waiting for, there's almost no real waiting happening. Spider-Man 2 is 2 years away and in all that time, there's a lot of life that's going to incessantly keep happening. People are going to come and go. Amazing works of art and entertainment will launch and take my world by storm. I might occasionally remember that Spider-Man 2 exists and check the calendar before noticing other things on it that come out sooner. Stuff that's already been out for a while. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Spider-Man 2 will launch and it too may slip by without catching my attention.

      • Old Computer Challenge 2023 - Day Three

        Today I wanted to do a little more work. I entered the challenge with the plan to spend some time on Scheme.

        In the last year I have done some things in SBCL Common Lisp as well as some things in Elisp, so expanding this with Scheme seems worthwhile. This morning started with a readable display, so I jumped right in.

        On the command line I started "guile3.0 --listen"" and in Emacs I ran ""M-x connect-to-guile"", to get a nice REPL.

      • OLD COMPUTER CHALLENGE: DAY 1
        HOSTNAME: gogglev
        HARDWARE: ASUS eeePC 701
        CPU: Intel Celeron-M ULV 353 @ 630 MHz(900MHz native)
        RAM: 512 MB (1 GB native)
        STORAGE: 4 GB SSD
        OS: AntiX 
        DISPLAY: Shuttle XP17 LCD (LAN Party Edition, w00t!) 
        RELEASED: 2007
        
      • OLD COMPUTER CHALLENGE: DAY 2

        NOTE: "With the disappearance of Blastwave and the removal of free downloads of SunFreeware on 30 September 2013, OpenCSW is the biggest source of Solaris packages. , it had 3739 unique packages for Solaris 10." - gopherpedia

      • Internet/Gemini

      • Programming

        • Garbage collection nowadays

          No, I don't mean the bin man (in UK English).

          I have always believed the prevailing wisdom that GC is more efficient than manual memory managememt. And, in instructions executed, I still believe so.

          However, hardware in the past 10/20 years has improved drastically (cache sizes, number of cores, SSD), with the noted exception of main RAM access times. And GC is very efficient in time, but there is a persistent, high, cost in space (I've seen figures of 4-8x). And to get performance out of modern hardware, you really want to keep your working set in cache. So perhaps hardware changes mean the prevailing wisdom is no longer valid.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

They Say That People Are Afraid of or Worried About "Hey Hi", But the Worriers Should be the Fools Who Invested in It
At the end of the day nobody should worry more than those who invested their money in this bubble
Throwing Away "Old" Computers (Mozilla and Other Climate Deniers)
Mozilla is not leftist
 
Xubuntu Site Compromised
Let's hope it is not a security breach
Links 10/09/2025: Retaliation at Facebook and Microsoft Reveals Almost 100 Security Holes
Links for the day
Gemini Links 10/09/2025: Annihilation of Self, The Future Eaters, and Leaving Academia
Links for the day
Harassment evidence: franceinfo's Clara Lainé report on Ubisoft prosecution
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 10/09/2025: Microsoft Layoffs in "RTO" Clothing and Windows TCO, GitHub TCO
Links for the day
Blaming Everything on China
TikTok works for China. GAFAM works for fascists.
People Get Tired of "Hey Hi" (AI), Unlike the Subservient Money-Obsessed Media That Gets Paid to Pretend This Bubble Still Matters
"crash will be way bigger than dot.com burst in 90s. and that was Internet, actually transformative technology, not this expensive AI toy with direct dependency on the energy input which is not scalable"
Brett Wilson LLP Accepts That the Serial Strangler From Microsoft Filed a Case That Also Implicates My Wife (Everything is Connected)
They used to pretend that there were two separate cases
10 Reasons to Disable (or Enable) UEFI Secure Boot
Tomorrow the "trusted corporation" Microsoft will see a certificate expire
Gemini Links 10/09/2025: Hospital and Large Feeds
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 09, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, September 09, 2025
The Bluewashing of Red Hat is Being Completed, Many Staff Understand They'll be Made Redundant
Jim AllowHurst (Whitehurst) is meanwhile promoting Microsoft's agenda from within other companies
statCounter Sees GNU/Linux Exceeding 10% in Bulgaria This Month
What can Microsoft still do to stop GNU/Linux?
Dark Patterns
Microsoft saying "security" is like a Convicted Felon in the White House saying "law and order".
It's Almost Fall (Autumn)
To "Facebook prison" you are bound
Bruce Schneier About "Secure Boot"
Bruce Schneier isn't a fan of "Secure Boot"
Links 09/09/2025: Microsoft Mass Layoffs Again and "RTO" (Timed Like It Serves as a Distraction From the Mass Layoffs)
Links for the day
RMS Told Microsoft to Stop 'Secure Boot' (He Even Went There to Say That), But They Didn't Listen
Dr. Stallman (RMS) assumed that speaking to sociopaths would work
What Richard Stallman Told Me About 'Secure' Boot in 2012
"if the user doesn't control the keys, then it's a kind of shackle"
Those Who Helped Microsoft Weaponise "Secure Boot" Against GNU/Linux and BSDs Are Fleeing
Microsofters doing what they do best: they evade accountability
Simple is Better, Simplicity is Power
That is "the advantage of having commodity GNU/Linux systems," an associate notes
Much Ado About Nonsense
Microsoft Lunduke is still all dramatisation and sensationalism
Current Events in France
It needs to dump Microsoft and other GAFAM (US) giants, move to Free software
Further Media Cut-downs
media reporting about the media being cut
Links 09/09/2025: US-Korea Tensions and Meta Whistleblowers
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/09/2025: Moon Eclipse and ROOPHLOCH Reports
Links for the day
Links 09/09/2025: “Torrents of Hate” and Political Crisis in France
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/09/2025: "Dedigitizing" and Forgejo on FreeBSD
Links for the day
Google News (Not Just Google Search) Lets Itself by Gamed by One Slopfarm - to the Point Almost Half of "Linux" News is Bot-Produced Plagiarism (LLM Slop With Slop Images)
That says a lot about what Google thinks of quality, even in Google News
Bill Gates-Funded Media Inadvertently Refutes the Microsoft Lie That in 2025 Microsoft Had Just Two Waves of Layoffs
There were about 12 rounds of layoffs so far in 2025
Official SUSE Blog Still Uses LLM Slop (Bots) to Make Fake Articles (Marketing)
The company is all about sound bites
Companies Realise That Slop Doesn't Work as Advertised, Accordingly Dump It
"Hype dims as a country-wide survey of US corporations shows a sudden drop-off in AI use among firms with more than 250 employees."
Microsoft-Funded Lawsuits Against Critics of UEFI 'Secure Boot'
Remember that no company (or law firm) ever survives collaborations with Microsoft
From theregister.co.uk to theregister.com (US) to The Register MS (Run by Microsoft Operatives) and theregister.ai
The best way to break this racket (or cycle of hype and harm) is to break the chains of funding
Open Source Initiative (OSI) Culture of Censorship Necessitates More Speech
The OSI bans dissent or people who merely point out that the OSI is abusive
How to Reach Us Discreetly (Other Than Encrypted E-mail)
We're still managing to maintain a 100% source protection record. We soon turn 19.
LLMs Are Vastly Worse Than a Waste of Energy and the Externalities Are Huge
Worse than just higher power bills for everybody
LLMs Versus Search (Not Replacing Search But Engaging in DDoS Attacks Against Web Sites That Permit Searching)
The state of the Web isn't just bad; it's utterly terrible
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 08, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, September 08, 2025
It's Only the Second Week of September and Already Two Waves of Layoffs at Microsoft, Slopfarms and Microsoft-Funded Sites Spin It as "AI Investments" Rather Than Commercial Failure
A very large third one expected next week
The UEFI 9/11 - Part IX - Shunning Old Computers (in 2023 the Certificate Was Updated/Overridden, Underlying Aim May Be Herding/Forcing People to Get TPM and Other 'Novel' Restrictions)
the "upgrade treadmill"
Rumour: Second Wave of Microsoft Mass Layoffs in September to Commence Third Week of September
That basically answers questions like, "Any specific date or time of the month?"
If Your Machine Still Has "Secure Boot" Enabled, Then Microsoft Has a de Facto Kill Switch (Even If Your Machine Doesn't Have Windows and Never Had Windows)
It is not incorrect to call UEFI 'secure boot' a "kill switch"
Gemini Links 08/09/2025: Reality, ROOPHLOCH 2025, and Writing Another Gemini Client
Links for the day
Updating Firmware is Not the Solution But Only Additional Risk, Disable "Secure Boot" Today
firmware blobs are buggy, secret, impossible to audit, and barely tested
Microsoft Tim's DevClass (Part of The Register MS/Situation Publishing) is Full of Slop
Looking at many sites that are full of slop images is becoming an eye sore and hallmark of text too likely generated by LLMs or 'assisted' (tainted) by them
Microsoft Trying to Fake Demand for Slop. At What Cost?
That's a giant demotion and broken promises
Reddit is Corporate Propaganda
To make matters worse, Reddit ousted many original moderators
Jeff Geerling Shocked to Discover Many Metrics in YouTube Are Fake (His Audience Turns Out to be Much Smaller)
Maybe self-host all videos, don't rely on Google's "FOMO" cheating (addiction based on false assumptions)
Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant and Kryptonite/Garlic to Vampires
Transparency (sometimes described by words like "Sunlight" or "Truth") is paramount
The Register MS Uses Slop in Articles About Slop
we are fairly certain it's slop or CG based on other people's work
Visiting a Web Page or a Public URL Should be Safe, Predictable, and Benign
It's probably too late to "fix" the Web
The Register MS (Situation Publishing) is Paid to Spread Mindless Hype for the "Hey Hi" Ponzi Scheme and That's a Serious Problem
"Sponsored by Zoom."
Links 08/09/2025: Burger King Cracked, Cox v. Sony Analysed
Links for the day
Gemini Links 08/09/2025: Socialist Computer Museum and GAFAM/ByteDance/TikTok-Dominated Net
Links for the day
Links 08/09/2025: Tim Crook Disappoints Apple Faithfuls and Zuckerberg Lies (Financial Fraud) for Cheeto King
Links for the day
EPO Workers Point Out that the EPO is Destroying the Planet Under the Guise of "Hey Hi" (It Also Grants Many Invalid Patents Illegally
On 12 March and 16 June 2025, staff representation met with the administration in the Local Occupational Health, Safety and Ergonomics Committee (LOHSEC) in Munich
Turn Off Microsoft's Restricted Boot ("Secure Boot")
We're still running a series on this issue
Social Control Media Sites Have Become Bot Farms (Not Limited to LLMs and Automation)
linkedin.com was nothing but trouble and losses for Microsoft
Deep in Debt With the Magnitude of Losses Quickly Growing, Microsoft "Open" "Hey Hi" Now Uses Broadcom for Vapourware, Pretending It'll Do OK Next Year
At some stage it'll collapse
You Can Tell Microsoft is in Trouble When Its Own Fans and Staff Blast it
"Microsoft sinks billions into chasing artificial intelligence fads to hype up its share price."
Multiple Undersea Cable Cuts and We're Still OK
Microsoft customers experience problems
Lawyers Who Think They Are Online Assassins Don't Deserve a Licence to Operate
they've become a laughing stock in their "sector"
Microsoft Windows Fell to 3.9% "Market Share" in Bahamas
Based on statCounter
How the European Union (EU) Fell Out of Love With Free/Libre Software
Lots of bribery
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 07, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, September 07, 2025