Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 12/08/2023: TUI and IBM/Lenovo



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • 🔤SpellBinding: CLNOSUY Wordo: SKIRT
      • Gazing back from “The Universe Next Door”

        Maybe it’s dumb to try to review a 40-year old book that has already had thousands of other readers & commenters weighing in but here we go! And I’m not talking about the contemporary Robert Anton Wilson classic by the same name that was published at around the same time.

        Nope, the book I just read was Jim Sire’s The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog.

        He is a Christian theist who lays out his own worldview and then does brief forays into other worldviews for contrast.

    • Science

      • Occam’s Turtles All the Way

        And the standard non-theist/​pantheist/​atheist/​polytheist answer is, of course, “who created that creator? And the creator of that creator?”

        Ultimately it becomes a matter of semantics.

        Theists define “creation” as the subset of what exists and what’s there that excludes the theistic God and the entire realm of that God, labeling that excluded part as “transcendent”.

        I’m not onboard with that definition. By cosmos I wanna refer to the whole shebang, not just a subset.

        Theism, to my mind, diminishes God so much. Shrinks the idea down from something that encompasses all to this tiny li’l superhero flying around.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Re: TUI music players

        Yeah, that’s just facts. Most TUI things are bad. CLI is where it’s at. mpc, for example, is a good basis for shell scripts & automation. I love it. And since it’s for mpd, you can still connect it to a GUI or TUI app also, to get the best of both worlds.

        He also thinks that a conf file full of comments, including commented-out defaults, is bad. That’s also a good point. With a good editor it’s easy to hide away all comments or to navigate a huge file, ostensibly making the advantages of having those comments outweigh the drawbacks, but not everyone has that and starting from a blank file can often be a lot easier.

      • Games I've played on my brother's PSP back then

        I've never had a PSP myself, but my brother had. He is really one of those guys who has always been into Sony. I think it must have been back in 2007. My dad bought me my first computer a few years ago for christmas and it has been the time when we have got our first internet connection at home. An usb UMTS modem with EDGE/HSPA+ support, 8 mbit/s and a limited data plan of 1.5 gigs a month. Not much but enough to download some demos and funny videos for my brother's PSP every now and then. I've even built him a wiki of his favorite wrestlers (Jeff Hardy, The Hardy Boys, CM Punk, Edge) from WWE/Smackdown.

      • My last ThinkPad

        I've been a ThinkPad user for more than a decade now. I've enjoyed many of them, some for the better, some for the worse. But at the end of they day they all had something in common.

        I'm sorry for the clickbait, but Kai Hendry inspired me to use the same title for my own post. And I'm with him, this is probably my last ThinkPad, for sure.

      • The $50 ThinkCentre M600/M700 tiny series

        A few weeks ago, a friend from a local hackerspace told me about them becoming so cheap the first time. A lot of them are currently being sold from many ebay sellers in Germany. The price? Approximately EUR 50,-

        The ThinkCentre tiny series is the ultra small form factor (USFF) computer sold by Lenovo, while others, such as HP calls them mini or Dell who came up with micro. They are as small as a book but have nearly the same performance as their desktop brothers and sisters. At least when it comes to office work. I've got the M700 tiny which sits right next to my ISP router and I hardly ever notice. They are silent, reliable and just do their job.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Emphasis On

          Still interested in the question of Gemtext and emphasis, I figured I’d gather some data.

          [...]

          But as there’s very little support for it, the more important question is: why?

          To see if data would help answer that, I sampled three sources to check for use of emphasis: news articles on the web, Gemlog entries, and Phlog (Gopher log) entries.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

SLAPP Censorship - Part 156 Out of 200: Brett Wilson LLP Becoming Wilson FC
Now acting almost like one-person shop (lots of staff has fled this past year)
 
[Satire] Pocock, Binface & nobodies vs Farage: defamation before UK High Court
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
The IBM Censorship Team, PIPs (Silent Layoffs) in IBM Europe
There seem to be many de facto layoffs going on at IBM right there
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 20, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, August 20, 2026
Gemini Links 21/08/2026: "Ensmallening the BigWeb", "Rust Dependencies"
Links for the day
Links 20/08/2026: 'Linux' Foundation Promoting Slop Hype for Money (Hype as a Service), Malaysia’s Exports Jump 38% Year-on-Year
Links for the day
Gemini Links 20/08/2026: A "Break From Routine" and "Modem Was the Problem"
Links for the day
Clownflare Reckons GNU/Linux is on Almost 1 in 10 Laptops/Desktops in Western Europe
Western Europe and China are leaving more of GAFAM behind them
Looking Ahead at September
Rianne and I look forward to a productive September
Links 20/08/2026: Facebook "Ran Ads for an App That Promised to Nudify Female Politicians" and Facebook Faces "Social [Control] Media Addiction Trial"
Links for the day
Clownflare Sees GNU/Linux at 16% Market Share on Desktops/Laptops in Tajikistan
in Tajikistan it seems like adoption of GNU/Linux is exceptionally high, based on a very large data set associated with Web access
The Demise of Social Control Media Continues
Entering (anew) social control media in 2026 seems foolish
SLAPP Censorship - Part 155 Out of 200: Throwing Stones in Houses Made of Glass
character-assassination-as-a-service
Gemini Links 20/08/2026: Planners, Pantsing, Vinylyssee
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 19, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Gemini Links 19/08/2026: "Big Boost in Autonomy" and "Answer of E-Mail"
Links for the day
Firefox in Trouble in the US, Down to Lowest Level in 20+ Years
more sites will stop or intentionally neglect Firefox support
Clownflare: More Than 1 in 5 Laptops or Desktops in El Salvador Run GNU/Linux or ChromeOS
Clownflare Radar reckons it's more like 20%+ now
SLAPP Censorship - Part 154 Out of 200: Computer-Generated Legal Filings From Men Who Are Salaried by Mass Plagiarism Companies in Another Continent (America)
This isn't the behaviour of a moral person but of some sort of "crypto bro" or "slop bro"
Fired by IBM for Medical Leave, Rampant Censorship of IBM Critics Explained
We've already caught and showed many cases where thelayoff.com deleted comments that were not even remotely racist
Links 19/08/2026: First Amendment Under Fire by White House of Cards, "Universities Were Forced to Pay Up" for Not Censoring
Links for the day
Gemini Links 19/08/2026: What Friendship Means, Sm0lNet/SmolNet, and New Feeds
Links for the day
Omarchy is Already Dying
Same as the life cycle of slopfarms
No, WSL (Windows With Fake 'Linux') Isn't Growing Faster Than Ubuntu, This Was Disinformation Spread by a Microsoft Propaganda Site, Then Spread by Slopfarms
Be sceptical; Microsoft is truly desperate for anti-Linux spin right now, seeing that Windows is in a freefall
Microsoft's Mass Layoffs Impact the Ability to Run Microsoft
Can Microsoft still run Microsoft?
Microsoft's Active Directory ("AD") and "Entra" Are National Security Threats
Even the US government concluded Microsoft could not be trusted for security; it issued a formal report about it in April 2024
Instant Impact: GNU/Linux Skyrockets to 10% in China Days After Policy Changes
Let's see what the 'aftermath' looks like by year's end
Links 19/08/2026: Timothy James King (AmigaDOS) Dies, GitHub Goes Offline, Finland Wants to Shun Social Control Media
Links for the day
Slop's Achilles Heel: It Increases the Workload, Not Just Costs
Set aside its inability to scale well
Improving techrights.org
Technical debt (like 17 years with WordPress) is something that's better to address early, not later
Mass Layoffs at Dropbox, Blame the Debt, Not Slop Hype
The debt of Dropbox Inc., which isn't an imaginary (estimated) thing, is over 4 billion dollars
Microsoft is 'Angel of Death' to Developers (Even Its Own), 'Voluntary' Layoffs Happening Again
From what we are hearing and reading, there are 'voluntary' layoffs again
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, August 18, 2026
IRC logs for Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Gemini Links 19/08/2026: Shirts, Handwriting, and Fights in Geminispace
Links for the day