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

As Expected, Facebook Collapses, Microsoft Hides Massive Debt
GAFAM is a giant mountain of debt
Staff of EPO Cautions Against Unlawful Weaponisation of PIPs Against Industrial Actions That Protest Corruption
PIP-like sanctions against anybody who does not toe the line of Cocaine King?
IBM, Running Out of Things It Can Sell, is Selling Software Patents
IBM is not just pathetic; it's actively harmful because it lobbies for software patents and spreads software patents around
The 'Church' of Moglen/Stallman
'reunion' with Eben Moglen
Microsoft Has Fallen to #3 in Singapore
There are many technically talented people in Singapore or overseas workers who lodge in Singapore
 
Overshoot Day Sites That Contribute to the Problem
Some of these are not even accessible (at all) without JavaScript
Microsoft May Have Gotten Rid of 8% of Its Workforce This Month
It's hard to know what's really going on because there's no transparency due to NDAs
Links 30/07/2026: "Age of Irrationality", Google Losing Money, and "House of Ellison is on the Brink"
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Gemini Links 30/07/2026: Homeworlds Notes and Manuscript Submitted
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Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 29, 2026
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Felipe Borges (IBM) has just posted a follow-up
Digital Mass Surveillance as a Hallmark of Failed Societies
"small leap forward in tech ethics"
I Found a Typo, Don't Vote!
Social control media isn't good at adding any meaningful signal
Jeremy Sands Explained the Harms of Codes of Conduct
next week the 500th show milestone [is reached]
Tonight's Earnings Report From Microsoft and Facebook ('Meta') Will be Faked Because They Hide Almost a Trillion Dollars in Debt
The US economic system is only as honest as the people who govern it
The Vacuum Syndrome
Parables help
The Only Old People Who Can Survive IBM Are the CEO and His Circle of Enablers
very similar to what's happening at the EPO
Microsoft Layoffs Aren't Done Ahead of the Need to Tell Shareholders About "Efficiency" (Tonight)
Microsoft layoffs won't be "Done" until what's left of Microsoft is "None"
Microsoft Lacks Growth. Ahead of 'Results' The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) Finds Merit in Allegations Slop is Microsoft's Excuse for Price Hikes (Piggybacking Vendor Lock-in).
At this stage it's not hard to see why many nations gravitate away from Microsoft
Parliament leaks confidential cult inquiry witness contact list (COFG Victoria)
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Troll-Feeding is Time-Wasting
in social control media
WordPress is Technical Debt
There are a number of technical tasks underway and maybe some testing (this coming weekend or later)
Will Red Hat Still Exist in 2027 or Just Become a "Brand" at IBM?
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Call for IBM Whistleblowers
If you work for IBM and have something material (like balance sheets) to prove financial misconduct, please try to 'touch base' and establish a secure communication channel we can both use
EPO Series on EU and Pan-European Corruption, Vote-Rigging, Extending Beyond the EPO Itself
By Saturday it will be August already, so we'll start preparing for Rianne's birthday
SLAPP Censorship - Part 133 Out of 200: Lies by Omission
As usual, the other side wants people to ignore how much they lost
European Patent Office (EPO) Series: Streamlining the Decision-Making Process
Negrão was one of 17 applicants for the position but he somehow managed to end up as the sole candidate on the shortlist prepared by the Management Board in June 2020
Links 29/07/2026: "Hugging Face Has a Deepfake Nudes Problem" and "$1.5B Anthropic Copyright Infringement Ruling" (Plagiarism is Not "Training")
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Comments on Today's Judgment
It hopefully helps clarify what actually happened
Thank You, Andy
Burnham and "Tech Rights"
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SRA has become known (even notorious) for inaction
Inevitable Politics
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Not Only "Loonies Take on Farage"
pretending that the opposition to the right wing is "Loonies"
Brigading Against Women - Part I - Bypassing the Legal System by Threatening Companies in Another Continent
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IBM is Trying to Turn Debt (Borrowed Money) Into Fake Growth and It'll Worsen Matters
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Microsoft Relies on Misleading Narrative of Studios Going 'Independent'; in Reality There Are Mass Layoffs in Them
This is not a good narrative for Microsoft
Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 28, 2026
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Gemini Links 29/07/2026: Arosa, Tired Tuesday, and Constellation Browser
Links for the day
In IBM, PIPs and RAs (Layoffs) Have Become Almost the Same Thing, Workers 'Expire' With Age (Seniority, Experience) and Empathy is Punishable by Termination
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Zero "layoffs" to report
Gemini Links 28/07/2026: “Strategies Against Algorithms” and DIYers
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Microsoft wrongly and very arrogantly assumed that users would tolerate everything it throws their way
GNU/Linux in Afghanistan Reaches 7%
For many years it was stuck at less than 1%
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She was rewarded for conspiring against EPO staff, as usual
What I Explained to Police About Blackmail and Death Threats via Burner Accounts (a Practice Which Generally Constitutes a Crime)
Today I've communicated several times with police
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UK tech sector missing from democratic process
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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That is what they are trying to tell us and the companies that employ us
IBM: An Old Company That Hates Old People
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Strict Policy on Violence and Violent Language
This matter is now being escalated to law firms
Avoiding Discrimination Against People With Disabilities
work underway to improve the system which runs the sites
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Gemini Links 28/07/2026: Ethics, GIMP Script-Fu, SMTP Versus Gemini, and Proposal for Better TOFU
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Our system has fixes triaged
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bringing up the topic is the real problem, diversity itself is a taboo subject
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