Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 20/08/2023: Free Pens, Gemini Clients via SOCKS5 (e.g. TOR)



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • malahide fossils

        i vist the malahide coast regularly when i am near Dublin. i managed to run and swim 5 days in row, despite the choppy and sandy water. no jellyfish this time, thankfully.

      • 🔤SpellBinding: ADELRTX Wordo: IMPEL
      • Knee

        My meniscus in right knee raptured while sitting on the chair in the office. Happed in mid of July. No way to move and very painful. Needed surgery fast. Took a week to get to arthroscopy. Now it is a month after the surgery. I spent that time mostly laying on the sofa with laptop /work / or iPad /entertainment/.

      • #5

        A few minutes before 15:00 today I got shot #5, booster #3. It was at a small clinic just like last time, with no fanfare, but there were more people getting their shots this time. Maybe people have found out the numbers are going back back up, but news is unfortunately pretty thin.

        The clinic this time was much farther from home. I had tried to reserve a slot earier during vacation but couldn't find any at a place near home. This place I went to today was the closest I could find near a train station. I did not want to have to take a bus out into the middle of nowhere, especially on the way home.

        [...]

        I guess for the entire world the virus is a thing of the past, but not for me. I shall remain vigilant until it really is finally gone. If that ever happens.

      • anger and fear regarding becoming a teacher



        Principal tells us to dress up for the next day of training. I get all gothed up in deep purple with my highest wedges and i feel divine. someone in the booth at the superintendent's speech played "too sexy" as my building's staff were walking in; suddenly i distinctly felt like i'd been set up to be used as eye candy and felt incredibly gross. I e-mailed the principal about it, then he surprises me in my classroom while I was preparing for the week ahead.

        He proceeded to talk an apology at me for about five minutes. He said he wasn't gonna be able to sleep at night with this hanging over his head, so he had to come right away. I don't doubt that, but I don't think for the reasons he intended to get across. He said he didn't choose the music and it's not at all what he was going for but that he really regretted how it all came together. He didn't ask me one question or stop to hear me speak at all. Shakes my hand and leaves.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • On-Call Culture and the Human Aspect: Prioritising Well-being in the Realm of Reliability

        Site Reliability Engineering is synonymous with ensuring system reliability, but the human factor is an often-underestimated part of this discipline. Ensuring a healthy on-call culture is as critical as any technical solution. The well-being of the engineers is an important factor.

        Firstly, a healthy on-call rotation is about more than just managing and responding to incidents. It's about the entire ecosystem that supports this practice. This involves reducing pain points, offering mentorship, rapid iteration, and ensuring that engineers have the right tools and processes. One ceavat is, that engineers should be willing to learn. Especially in on-call rotation mixing SREs with other engineers (for example Software Engineers or QA Engineers), it's difficult to motivate everyone to engage. QA Engineers want to test the software, Software Engineers want to implement new features; they don't want to troubleshoot and debug production incidents. It can be depressing for the mentoring SRE.

      • Everything's on fire / No XMPP, no Robbie Robertson

        We're between several wildfires. The smoke is absolutely miserable, burnt embers are dropping all over, and the communities about 10 km away are on evacuation alert. We've loaded up the car, just in case. I've done a lot of work on this house, but it can burn. Everything is temporary.

        Robbie Robertson died last week. Attentive readers of this phlog will remember a misleading phlog title a couple of years back.

      • Booklet printing

        I found how to prepare a PDF into a printable booklet (aka brochure or pamphlet) PDF! (Again!) The booklet pages will be half the size of the print paper -- e.g. with an A4 paper printer the booklet will be A5.

        For whatever reason I find it extremely hard to understand how to operate the printer... If I put the paper this way, how will it come out? Should I flip it to print the other side? Should I rotate? Who knows! It's not the first time I've gone through the whole process of (re)learning these things, but, like a dumbass, I never documented it. All is about to change! Brace yourself!

      • Free Pens

        At my office there was a box of free pens and I helped myself to three of them. I love free pens. I doubt that I will ever have a need to purchase a pen because I have so many that I have acquired through the past several decades.

        Yes, I can obtain pens at work. Our office has a modest supply cabinet including boxes of pens. However, it is the surprise pens that I chance upon outside of work that delight me the most. These are the pens that I see in hotel or bank lobbies, or trade shows, or conferences.

      • A PSP Update

        This is something I had been completely overlooking until a couple days ago. The PSP officially had a good collection of classic PS1 titles that it was capable of emulating, and thanks to community tools it's possible to convert any other PS1 title that wasn't officially supported and play it on the PSP.

        I never had a PS1 growing up, but I did play a couple PS1 games thanks to the PS2's backwards compatibility and a lot of my favorite PC games were also available on PS1. Lately I've been playing a lot of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 which was a childhood favorite. I've also been playing a bit of Re-Volt, an RC car racing game that's harder than I remember, and Spider-Man, whose PC demo I would play over and over.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • How to run gemini clients via SOCKS5 (e.g. TOR)

          After some discussions on the IRC channel, I decided to try how running a gemini client would work with SOCKS5 to be able to connect via TOR (though the same has other uses) and I found that most clients do not support SOCKS5 directly.

        • Re: Emergency Notifications, Mastodon, the Climate Crisis

          One of the links in the post is to lemmy.world about how the Dutch government is starting a Mastodon server. But that lemmy.world link is down right now.

          Fedi’s tech is still pretty flaky and unreliable. Posts go missing all the time. I don’t wanna slag Lemmy because I know they’re working hard. And it’s not just them that have issues, it’s the entire ActivityPub world.

        • How to reply to Lemmy posts from Mastodon

          If you got an account on Mastodon, Homecamp, Akkoma, Misskey, Pixelfed or similar during the big Twitter migration and you wanna reply to a post on Lemmy or kbin, read on!

          If you don’t have any Fedi account at all yet, you’re living the blessed life. Good on you!♥ Bookmark this page and return here once you’ve been on Fedi a few weeks and have gotten comfy and wanna branch out to the threadiverse. Or, if it's the threadiverse itself that's appealing rather than the seedy world of microblogging, just make an account on Lemmy or kbin instead and in that case you don't need this tutorial. You might need a reverse tutorial if you wanna interact with people from Mastodon or Pixelfed or whatever, but I don't know how to make one since I don't know how Lemmy looks from the inside!

          For us in gemspace, there is actually a Fediverse on Gemini thing that’s awesome, it’s called Tootik, but this tutorial doesn’t apply to it yet since it can’t fetch posts by URL as far as I know. I don’t know for sure, but I believe you can still subscribe to Lemmy and kbin groups from Tootik. I’ll edit this section if I find out more.♥

      • Programming

        • Mixed feelings about Rust

          Now, I was not intending for this post to see a wide audience. I have no way of knowing how many people read what I write there, but based on the lack of feedback I'd guess not many. This time, it was picked up by Rust weekly, from whence it hit HackerNews. You know how they say never read the comments? I read the comments, which were overwhelmingly negative of course.

          [...]

          Another of my criticisms was Rust macros. I said flatly that they were a mistake. I stand by that. Zig's use of 'comptime' shows that a fully developed language and compiler level type reflection scheme can completely, and cleanly, replace not only macros but a lot of other metaprogramming pains. Generics are a breeze with good type reflection. You can move even more classes of bugs from runtime to compile time. Heck, the comptime concept enables Zig to have their build system written in Zig.

          Now, around this same time, @thecompiler was getting ready to present a keynote address at RustConf. Certain members of the Rust core team took it upon themselves to turn this into an awful mess, by reaching out to the conference organizers and implying that the core team had decided as a whole that his talk was not a good fit for the keynote. Did I mention that @thecompiler was one of the editors of the C23 standard, and a massive presence in the programming community? He was insulted and it became a scandal.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Dystopian Trends in Technology Make Richard Stallman More Relevant Than Ever
It's good to see him attracting vast audiences
Richard Stallman (RMS) Announced His Talk Less Than 24 Hours Before It Took Place and Still Filled Up the Auditorium at Sapienza Università di Roma
Photos from yesterday evening [...] It looks like it was a very successful event
 
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People who loathe scholars have an agenda in mind that, unlike that of reasonable people, revolves around controlling people
Belated New Article About Last Thursday's Lecture by Richard Stallman in Helsinki, Finland
there are good reasons to pay with cash, not limited to privacy
Attacking Richard Stallman Has Become 'Career Suicide'
If you're going to viciously attack somebody, make sure your arguments are rock-solid
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The capacity of the place is about 900
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Imagine wanting to find what Torvalds has just said or what has just been released
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interest in Software Freedom must have grown
Over at Tux Machines...
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Gemini Links 14/10/2025: Ada Lovelace Day, Sony CLIE PEG-TG50 Review, Why to Avoid Network Solutions
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The EPO's War on Techrights Was a Massive Mistake
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General-Purpose Computers to Become Growing Area of Coverage
Without them, we have little left for controlling our lives
"They missed a great opportunity to shut up." -Jacques Chirac
Brett Wilson LLP has been trying to cheat the legal system many times
Harassment evidence: Switzerland, overcrowded fitness and yoga centers, incompetence and racism in accident response
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Vincent Danjean & Debian NXIVM collateral, blackmail risks
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
In Sweden This Past Friday Richard Stallman Explained Why Copyleft is Important
And he didn't have to 'bash' BSDs, either
IBM Layoffs Due to a Lack of Money and Company Debt Rising by Almost 10 Billion Dollars in 6 Months
IBM didn't buy Red Hat for any ideological reasons; it was a fast "cash grab" for revenue
Forbes Already Stopped Being a News Sites. Now It's a Spam and Propaganda Platform for "Paying Partners" (Companies).
news from Forbes became very scarce
Is the Second-Largest Institution in Europe (EPO) Gradually Becoming More Like a Sweatshop?
Underpaid, unqualified, inexperienced and incompatible people are already recruited to replace veteran examiners
The Register MS Has No FOSS Coverage Anymore
The Editor in Chief is like a Microsoft plant
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Links for the day
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Microsoft Does Not Deny That Large Retailers Like Walmart, Costco and Target Are Giving Up on XBox (and Not Stocking It)
No doubt XBox is in trouble and rumours suggest that more mass layoffs are imminent
We'll Encourage Richard Stallman to Talk About Software Patents at the EPO Next Week When He Visits Munich (EPO Headquarters)
Go listen to Richard Stahlmann
Investigative Journalism Protects Society From Corruption, Crimes Against Women, Assaults on Civil Society
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Swiss pimp usurping reputation of legendary Tissot boss Francois Thiébaud from France (BaselWorld, SWATCH Group SA)
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Paris 'Love Nest' & Debian Outreachy: from Lycée Lakanal to ENS Cachan, Cr@ns, nepotism
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Richard Stallman to Give Public Talk in 3 Hours, Then in the Technical University of Munich (Germany) Next Week
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Arnaud Parreaux lost case defending rogue employer
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Mathieu Elias Parreaux declared bankrupt in Switzerland
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Breakdown of the Rule of Law and Patent Law in the European Union (EU)
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Slopwatch: UbuntuPIT and Google News
It seems abundantly clear that Google News and Google in general participates in the slop epidemic
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Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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Richard Stallman (RMS) Has Announced His Talk in Rome Less Than 20 Hours in Advance (and on a Sunday)
Why did he wait until the night before?
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Go have a look
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Microsoft as a Golden Cage
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Weekend Discussion About How IBM's Bluewashing of Red Hat Will Cause "Enshittification" for Users
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Richard Stallman's Talk 25 Hours Away, Aula Magna Palazzo del Rettorato (CU001), Sapienza Università di Roma (Piazzale Aldo Moro, 5)
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Gemini Links 12/10/2025: Watches, the Depression of 2026, Gamboling with Odds
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Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Lucas Nussbaum & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 12/10/2025: "Palm Computering", Further Exploration of Slide Rules, and Key Takeaways from The Well-Grounded Rubyist
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Tomorrow: Founder of the Free Software Foundation and of GNU/Linux, Richard Stallman, Speaks in Roma (Rome), Italy at 4PM
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