Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 28/08/2023: Manipulating PDFs and Synapse Room Cleaner



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Sunday, Complicated

        We've been playing Yahtzee with the in-laws for well over three years, now: a pandemic activity that became just a standard weekly thing. Two more games today (two Ls for me), but a neat little surprise as well. During the pandemic, meetings for free accounts didn't have limits; then a limit of 40 minutes was added, forcing us to split things up and do two calls.

        Now, today, another surprise: free accounts now have to wait ten minutes between meetings.

        So we got around it by jumping between accounts and doing it that way, but whew, what a pain in the butt. And I get it, they want to convert some of the endless free accounts people are using, but it's a no from me. So I'm going to look at other options. Needs to be easy enough to be launched from a tablet by a cou

      • Billsmugs's Photography: Photos (38)
      • 🔤SpellBinding: CLMOSUY Wordo: DUFUS
    • Politics and World Events

      • History Of The World Part III

        So the lion and the dolphin had come to opposite views (across the channel, for one); the French had the placid sediments of Paris (where else?) and the aqueous dominated. The British had been at the highlands (these sometimes more unicorn than lion) and Italian volcanoes, probably for a change of weather. This account simplifies or distorts; Neptunism actually originated in Germany. And some Neptunists did end up in Edinburgh. Moreover, it was an Italian studying volcanoes in Italy who booted Plutonism—but see how easy it is to cast this as English versus the French? There was a notable political contrast at the time; certain ideas in France had proven too radical (the reign of terror, the calendar system, etc) so a more conservative approach was supported in England, which bled into the sciences. This was Burkean conservatism, not the modern things that happen to have the same name. Radical change also found support in Catastrophism, assisted by various stories of floods, or to solve the Neptunist problem of where did the magic water go? What happened to that process? Not all flood myths are negative, by the way. Consider Egypt and the Nile.

      • The state will not save us from climate catastrophe

        CW: Bad vibes about the future in here. Go ahead and skip this one if you’re looking for hopefulness.

        I don’t understand why smart people keep fooling themselves about what the state is, and what it’s capable of.

        The state is a tool for imposing minority rule on a majority. Full stop. Well-meaning people have been deluding themselves about using the state to achieve benevolent ends since the 18th century. It will never happen. It can never happen. That’s just not what states are for.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Manipulate PDF files easily with pdftk

        I often need to work with PDF, sometimes I need to extract a single page, or add a page, too often I need to rotate pages.

        Fortunately, there is a pretty awesome tool to do all of these tasks, it's called PDFtk.

      • Some explanations about OpenBSD memory usage



        I regularly see people reporting high memory usage on OpenBSD when looking at some monitoring program output.

        Those programs may be not reporting what you think. The memory usage can be accounted in different ways.

        Most of the time, the file system cache stored in-memory is added to memory usage, which lead to think about a high memory consumption.

      • Synapse Room Cleaner

        After running my Matrix Synapse server for several years, joining and leaving several large rooms, and playing around with bridges, my server accumulated quite a few orphaned, empty, and broken rooms. Software developer wisdom says: "Why spend 10 minutes doing something if you can automate in 10 hours?". Thus, I built a small web-based tool that lets you get and/or delete rooms from your Synapse server.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Re: The Devil's Advocate

          Slondr just about summed up exactly how I feel about Gemini and how it should move forward.

          In short, this is working. Warts and all, it's working. Maybe there are some things to fix. Maybe we'll eventually fix them, and maybe we'll just continue. But I can't help but feel like Gemini is a roaring success by the only measure that really counts - there actually is a community here that is growing, vibrant and (mostly) healthy.

        • Fire Update

          There's been more smoke again for the last few days, but rain is in the forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday.

          The 12mm of rain we had last Tuesday was the most we'd had all year. Some parts of the Bush Creek fire got over 20mm, so that was good. On the other hand, a typical summer used to bring 3 or 4 really hard rainfalls, which doesn't seem to be happening any more.

          Solderpunk mentioned in his latest phlog post that he has started worrying about summer in advance.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

IBM is Becoming "Garbage In, Garbage Out" (GIGO) "Just like Arvind and Krabanaugh." (CEO and CFO, Respectively)
There are some decent new comments about IBM this morning
If Your Company Lost About 30% of Its 'Value' in 3 Months, Then Maybe It Was Never Worth What You Claimed
Does that make sense?
Pleroma is Dying
The last social control media that I joined was Pleroma
Asia and Social Control Media
statCounter reckons it's down from over 10% to just 3% since it began tracking those things
Anonymous Threats Against My Wife and Against Yours Truly
Promoting GNU/Linux and condemning people who attack GNU/Linux is not a crime
Decades-Long Microsofter (Darryl K. Taft) and TIOBE Conflate Microsoft GitHub (Proprietary) With FOSS in Microsoft-Sponsored 'News' Site
We do not intend to do a lengthy debunking because we covered this subject several times in the past
Microsoft Cuts Continue, Visitor Center in Redmond Shut Down
This goes on and on, leading up to the next giant wave of mass layoffs
 
Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 13, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, February 13, 2026
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IBM is an enigma. To Wall Street is claims to be doing extremely well, but insiders tell the complete opposite.
Links 13/02/2026: "Cofounders Fleeing MElon’s xAI" and IOC Opposes Solidarity With Ukraine's Fallen
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Gemini Links 13/02/2026: Square Function with Diode Network and Calls Against Discord
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Links 13/02/2026: SUSE Uses Microsoft Internally, MElon's Company Helps Turn Epstein Files Into Child Abuse (After the Pornography Scandals)
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African Browser Choices Show a Growing Problem in the World Wide Web
World Wide Web (WWW) becoming little but a transport layer for a particular proprietary application (Google Chrome) [...] we're back to the late 1990s
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If you want something stable and predictable, then stick with GNU, the GPL, and GCC
Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and SRA Failing to Curb SLAPPs Against People Who Expose Wrongdoing
We'll soon show messages that we transmitted to politicians
Beware the Latest IBM SPAM, IBM is Already Down "After Hours"
After a harsh day in Wall Street IBM's shares area already down again (after trading hours)
Radicalism in Our Communities is Mostly Corporate, Not Grassroots
Infiltration and systematic destruction can be shallowly painted as "inducing manners"
Life Gets Better After Social Control Media
Don't become part of these experiments
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Are Americans getting fed up with social control media and quitting in droves?
Back Doors and Fake Security
They've militarised everything, even people's home computers
Cost-Cutting and Book-Cooking at IBM
It's like cutting salaries by more than 50%
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 12, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, February 12, 2026
Mainstream Media Intentionally Ignoring EPO Strikes
“EPO on Strike!”
Jeffrey Epstein crypto disclosure: uncanny timing, Bitcoin demise, pump-and-dump, ponzi schemes
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 12/02/2026: Avoiding Coffee, Trying Ubuntu, and "Open Source Robot"
Links for the day
Microsoft Slop CEO Speaks of Layoffs
They will go along with the "replaced by AI" baloney
In Systematic Contempt of the British High Court, Brett Wilson LLP Spent Two Years Lying to Courts and Breaking Rules Against Us
We criticise Brett Wilson LLP quite lot because of its conduct
IBM Kyndryl as "Aggressive “Enron” Accounting"
IBM Kyndryl continues to nosedive today
Relationships evidence: Tiago, Tassia, Thais, Antonio & Debian favoritism, nepotism
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Debian pregnancy cluster: why it is public interest
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
IBM Bubble Deflating After James Kavanaugh's Accounting Trick With 'Toxic Assets' Comes Under SEC Scrutiny
If something goes up based on false speculations, bonus numbers and self-serving lies, then it'll come back down, eventually...
The EPO's Corruption and Violation of Rules is Spreading to the United Kingdom (Software Patents)
Yesterday a letter was sent to the chief regarding salaries while reminding him of the next strike, which is only 11 days away
State of the Slop, Slopfarms Containment
Slopfarms still exist this year, but their visibility is limited
IBM Continues Tanking Today, Already $58+ Lower Than Recent High, Insiders Explain Why
The same CFO from the inception of Kyndryl is still the CFO at IBM
Links 12/02/2026: Pushback Against, "NATO Is Expected to Step Up Arctic Security"
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Links 12/02/2026: "Microsoft Just Forked Windows" and Windows Notepad is a Giant Security Hole
Links for the day
Put Criminals in Prison, Not People Who Report the Crimes
Can people be sent to prison for opposing crime?
Windows Has Become Increasingly Irrelevant
There's a very massive wave of layoffs coming Microsoft's way
Our Most Successful Year Ever
The hired guns in London are eager to turn the UK into another China
Slopfarms Waning, But Not Extinct Yet
Metrics show that usage of LLMs is declining
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, February 11, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, February 11, 2026