Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 09/08/2023: Risk of Proprietary Web Apps



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • No pedal or to the metal

        Nice looking day on tap out the front with. Occasional vehicles passing. Somehow odd to see them in the school parking lot across the street.

        I wish I could have found a way to stick with the middle-school teaching stint I attempting a couple years ago. My wife had the same kids for different subjects, and I love when either of us is suddenly remembering a specific student, their quirks, wondering how they're doing a couple years later, what directions they'll head post school.

      • Re: On a Modern Mental Illness (Prince Trippy)

        The Prince[1] recently wrote about the "modern mental illness" of being overly-concerned (neurotic) about online privacy. Maybe the same extends to privacy in general, I don't know... but I think it mostly exhibits in the digital world.

        I enjoyed the realization he came to: that it is "an endless game," full of players in various strata, and that the pursuit of a cure is more-than-usually vanity.

      • A First Step into Gardening

        Our house has a fence running around most of the property with a small open section left behind. One corner of the fence has several vines and shrubs that grow thick and tall. These were fairly well-shaped when we moved in, but thanks to intense sunlight and bountiful rain this summer, the shrubs are growing rapidly.

        I know nothing about gardening and plant care, but I'm trying to learn as best I can. I can't identify the plants in the corner of the fence, but I can see plainly that they're overgrown and about to consume the small space next to our shed.

      • Hello world!

        Right when I heard about geminispace I thought I am going to write here about the things I do not want anyone to read. Yes, it sounds kind of weird or stupid (I do not know) but I am kind of "scared" or "ashamed" to write things that my parents or relatives can read.

      • Defending a village against raiders

        There’s actually a pretty interesting example on that page where the party splits. Some characters are “resting”, presumably because their players can’t make it to the next session. That session, some other characters go and investigate a dungeon, return and rest for a few days, go again, fight a big monster and loot it. The session ends after the big monster fight and the loot. The next session, the players who didn’t participate are back and decide to go to the same dungeon! At this point in time, the big monster and all the loot is still there. Now what? You can bend reality and say the monster and loot just cannot be found because the other group will have found it in the future, or you can do what I do: force-extend their rest so that whenever there’s a session, it is “now”. Once the big monster is slain, there’s no adventuring in the same dungeon at some point in the past. The players have the choice to explain what else they were doing in the days until “now”.

      • Calzonia

        There is little point to letting a sourdough starter pizza or calzone dough rise, especially if the starter is short on yeast and long on lactic acid bacteria, or the natural yeast somehow is not the crazy mutant bread type. Also the dough is too soft to use if you rotate the starter in the morning and then want to cook the dough for dinner. One might instead rotate the starter around dinner time, let the dough "rise" for a bit, then shape it and let it dry out overnight, but that's not when I rotate the starter. Instead, rotate the starter, use all the excess with a suitable amount of flour and some oil (or clarified butter) and salt for a pretty dry dough, shape that out, and let it sit somewhere maybe on a cutting board to dry out. This makes it much easier to manipulate without tearing or sticking to the cutting board when you want to move it into the oven.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Can You Purchase A House Without Javascript Or Proprietary Web Apps?

        I'm a free software advocate who tries to compromise as little as possible with my principles, by blocking JavaScript in my Web browser, and by not using non-free Web apps, which in most practical cases amounts to the same thing. I also recently have been trying to purchase a house. So, I have been in a position to test how much of the process can be done without violating these principles, and how difficult it is. If you have no idea what I am talking about, please read this [...]

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Open Offer: I Will Host Your Domain



          When you set up a domain, it will be hosted on _both_ HTTP(s) and Gemini. So you can interleave both html and gmi files in your git repo, and it will all work out. Or you can just leave off one or the other, if you don't care about one protocol.

          Now for the offer: if you're reading this, just shoot me an email and I will give you the passphrase which allows you to use the instance. If you have always wanted to have a personal website or gemini capsule on your own domain, but hadn't wanted to go through the effort of setting up hosting, this is your chance!


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Links 29/10/2025: Amazon Kept "Data Center Water Use Secret", "Abuse of Power" Against Media
Links for the day
Gemini Links 29/10/2025: "My Hardware Specs" and "Goodbye Debian…"
Links for the day
EPO Cocainegate: Feedback and Clarifications
Part III will come out soon
Links 29/10/2025: "US Military Is Destroying the Planet Beyond Imagination" and Boat Strikes Deemed Unlawful
Links for the day
Quality Comes First (Techrights Search)
It's generally working already, but we wish to polish it some more
Techrights Party Countdown
Late next week we'll be holding a party near our home
European Parliament and Council Directive on Privacy is Vanishing
"edited / censored some time more recently"
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 28, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Slopwatch: The March of Slopfarms, From UbuntuPIT to Linux Journal and to Various Fake Sites Still Promoted by Google News
It's so worrying to see what the Web has become
Links 29/10/2025: CISA, Ukraine, and Amazon Problems
Links for the day
[Teaser] The EPO's Spokesperson, a Cocaine User, Fancies Young Women
How's that for "optics" in the EU and Europe's second-largest institution?
How Will António Campinos Respond to the EPO's 'Cocainegate'?
That's the same thing we saw and still see when the press deals with enablers and partners of Jeffrey Epstein
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part IV: There Cannot be Free Software Without Free Press and Free Information
One day, one can hope, more people will recognise that for Software Freedom we need free press and free thinkers
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part III: Principled Stance Is Never Cheap
Protecting the truth and insisting that the general public is made aware of things that really happened isn't cheap
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part II: Because Scarcity of Accurate Information Breeds Collective Ignorance
we too will strive to share information that's aggressively suppressed
Gemini Links 28/10/2025: More New Arrivals at Geminispace, xkcd on "Document Forgery"
Links for the day
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part I: Defence of the Truth
This year we make a very strong, firm statement for truth, even if that means explaining our work to the top media judge in the country
Links 28/10/2025: Meta and Fentanylware (CheeTok) Age-Restricted Down Under, "Britain Needs China’s Money"
Links for the day
Links 28/10/2025: Mass Layoffs at Amazon and Charter to Cut 1,200 Jobs
Links for the day
The Cocaine Patent Office - Part II: The Person Who Planted Paid-for Fake News for the European Patent Office (EPO) is a Cocaine User, Friend of António Campinos, Now on Record as Having Been Arrested
Background: High-level manager at the European Patent Office caught in public with cocaine, arrested
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 27, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, October 27, 2025
Google News Drowning in Slop (and Slopfarms That Hijack About Half the Results)
Google News seems to be drowning in this stuff
Gemini Links 28/10/2025: "How to Maximize Your Positive Impact" and ASCII Art and Artist Attribution
Links for the day
PETA and Activism
Being staff or volunteer in PETA isn't easy
Big Blue, Huge Debt
debt will soar again
Links 27/10/2025: Mass Surveillance Sold as "AI", People Reluctant to Lose Physical Media
Links for the day
Parties and Milestones Again
we've begun putting up about 40 balloons
Techrights' 19th Anniversary: Bronze
Time to go back to preparing for this anniversary
Our Latest European Patent Office (EPO) Series Will Last Several Weeks, Will Ask the EPO Management and the European Union (EU) Very Difficult Questions
If nobody loses a job (or jobs) over this, then the EU basically became no better than Colombia or Nicaragua
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, UbuntuPIT, Brian Fagioli, and Google News
We focus on stories that are fake or LLM slop that disguises itself as "news" about Linux
Links 27/10/2025: Wikipedia Vandalism, Bruce Perens Opens up on Childhood
Links for the day
This Site Could Not be Done by LLMs Even If It Wanted to (Because It's Not a Parrot of What Other Sites Say)
LLMs have no knowledge or deep understanding
Microsoft is Disloyal Towards Its Most Loyal Employees
Against its most faithful enablers
19 Years, No Censorship
No factual information is ever going to be removed, more so if it is in the public interest
We Are Not a Conventional Site, That's Why They Hate (or Love) Us
Throughout the week this week we'll be focusing on the EPO
Following the Line of Cocaine All the Way to the Top
Even a million denials and spin-doctoring won't distract from the core issue
The Cocaine Patent Office - Part I: António Campinos Brought Corruption and Nepotism to the EPO, Then Came the Cocaine
High-level manager at the European Patent Office (EPO) caught in public with cocaine, the Office has some answering to do
Purchasing/Possessing Computers Isn't the Same as Controlling Computers
Let's strive to put computers back under the control of their users, no matter who purchased these (usually the users)
Gemini Links 27/10/2025: Alhena 5.4.3 and Fixing Bash
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 26, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, October 26, 2025
Thankfully We've Made Copies of More Interesting Data From statCounter
If statCounter (the Web site or the 'webapp') vanished overnight, we'd still have something left of it
More Silent Layoffs at IBM/Red Hat
when the media counts such layoffs or presents tallies the numbers are very incomplete