Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 03/08/2023: Illusionary Democracy and All Things Illegal



  • Personal/Opinions

    • 🔤SpellBinding: AIMNTUY Wordo: RETRO
    • Appenzell

      OK, so what's the deal with Appenzell? We already heard that their history is related to St. Gallen. You need to look at the map of St. Gallen: Appenzell is completely surrounded by St. Gallen. Appenzell is mountainous. St. Gallen rules over the lands by the Bodensee to the north, the wide Rhine valley to the east, and the Thur valley to the south.

    • Zürich

      I’ve lived in the Canton of Zürich for 30 years. When I was 18, my father and my stepmum left for Indonesia for two years and when they came back I didn’t want to be there so I moved out when I was twenty or so, to Zürich, to live in shared apartments like many other students did. And then I just never went back to Aargau.

    • St. Gallen

      St. Gallen is an abbey with a famous library. It’s really very nice. Apparently it was founded by an Irish missionary. This dude was 612; the monastery was founded by St. Othmar in 720; the Magyars attacked in 926 and subsequent years. The books were moved to its books were removed to Reichenau to keep them safe. To quote Wikipedia: “Not all the books were returned.” Just saying.

    • Aargau

      A few days ago I started reading up on the Swiss cantons, creating a post on fedi based on those Wikipedia articles. I'm reposting these posts on the blog because they're starting to grow on my.

  • Politics and World Events

    • Illusionary Democracy

      There’s so much to unpack here that I’ve been struggling to formulate a single coherent post on the topic, so I’m going to ignore 95% of the problem and just go for something about which I feel on thoroughly safe ground.

  • Technology and Free Software

    • All Things Illegal

      It is a logical fallacy to assume that since the State is evil, _all_ laws it enforces are likewise, evil. However, _many_ laws are in fact, are fruits of the poisoned tree. While I will focus on the US, many of the issues mentioned apply universally.

    • Internet/Gemini

      • Rebuilding my gopher server

        So here's something not to do: don't blindly flail at a system upgrade on your server!

        A couple of nights ago, I decided to upgrade gopher.visiblink.ca. It runs Raspberry Pi OS on a Pi Zero W. Raspberry Pi OS is based on Debian and the /etc/apt/sources.list file uses the same codenames as Debian.

        So, without going to the Raspberry Pi OS homepage to check on the latest version, I just assumed that it was Debian 12 "Bookworm" and went ahead with the regular steps toward a dist-upgrade. It turns out that the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS is Debian 11 "Bullseye." Ouch.


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



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