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

Gemini Links 04/10/2026: Peace in Outage, Pen Pals, and deGoogling
Links for the day
 
MIT Technology Review (MTR) Reinforces MIT's Role in Promoting Slop (Pyramid Scheme) in Exchange for Money
MIT is a poster boy (or child) of institutional corruption, perverts, and corporate takeover
Many Topics to Cover
Drops in a big ocean
Proving Wrong Those Slop Maximalists and Boosters, GAFAM Says Slop is a Nuisance and Bans/Hides the Slop Submissions
People who say slop in projects is inevitable or even desirable are usually cheaters with self-guilt
Links 04/10/2026: “AI Torture Chamber” and "Aggressive Push to Integrate Hey Hi (AI) Slop Into Schools Is Turning Into a Disaster"
Links for the day
How Microsoft Hides Massive Layoffs From the Media (as Explained by Microsofters)
"rewards" are not exactly rewarding
Brigading Against Women - Part XVII - The Appeal
more to be known towards the end of the year
Links 04/10/2026: Fires Rage in Borneo and Mass Layoffs at Disney
Links for the day
Garrett's Litigation Partner is Unemployed Again
losing one's job
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 03, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, October 03, 2026
Teaser/Taster
Tomorrow morning we'll have an important story regarding "GGG"
Gemini Links 03/10/2026: Book Swaps and Book Crossing, Hidden Figures (2016), Apps and Tools for Research and Writing
Links for the day
Michael Catanzaro Seems to be Missing the Point
Calling people you disagree with "Ostriches" is lazy name-calling
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Turns 41
People who want humans and communities to maintain their software chains (and by extension their digital life) will back GNU
Links 03/10/2026: "Banned Books Week 2026" and "American Journalist Imprisoned as a Spy in Russia"
Links for the day
In Case Anybody Still Believes Microsoft Lunduke Cares About GNU/Linux...
GNU/Linux users aren't bots
Gemini Links 03/10/2026: Speculative Realism, Paper2SlopBot, Joplin, and Offline Experiment
Links for the day
Union Syndicale Fédérale (USF) Tries to Compel the European Patent Office (EPO) to Actually Function Properly
We'll be covering the EPO a lot more soon
Brigading Against Women - Part XVI - When Your Own Colleagues Complain About You Maybe the Problem is You
"if 2 people tell you that you're drunk, you go to sleep"
Links 03/10/2026: Slop-Generated War Songs and "Privatisation Has Failed"
Links for the day
Proprietary Software Giant Microsoft is Quietly Laying Off Lots of Employees, Insider Explains How It's Done
about Microsoft exits
United States: More Than One in Ten Using GNU/Linux on Laptop/Desktop
Clownflare Radar seems to show a similar trend
Brigading Against Women - Part XV - Trying to Put Women in Prisons
We'll soon get to the 'meat' or the 'beef', showing how "Gas The Jews" Lozza helped Garrett a few days after we had sued him in September 2024
A Leap in GNU/Linux Usage, Japan's Share in Particular
One thing that merits attention right now is Japan. It looks like it's adopting GNU/Linux instead of GAFAM.
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 02, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, October 02, 2026
Gemini Links 02/10/2026: Hitchhiking, Dream, Journey of Thoughts, and ROOPHLOCH
Links for the day
IBM in Such a Bad Shape That Silent Layoffs Have Come to India
Make it hard for IBM to hide what's happening
The Mass Layoffs at Red Hat (Secret Layoffs) Not Limited to This Week or to October 1st
Red Hat can shed off 10% of its staff without anyone in the media uttering a word
The Latest "PARTNER CONTENT" at The Register MS is by Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO
Maybe The Register MS can just run ads, not articles, and hope nobody will notice
Links 02/10/2026: Turkey's Censorship of Journalists Grows, "Hong Kong Journalist Arrested After Covering Gathering Linked to 2019 Protests"
Links for the day
IBM's Red Hat is a Slave of Microsoft, It Does Not Compete With Microsoft
As released and shown earlier today in "Red Hat Partner Connect"/redhat.com
Red Hat: Stop Saying Master, It's Racist. Today's Red Hat: "Master Your Skills" and Adopt Slop Plagiarism
IBM is shredding Red Hat to pieces while it keeps humiliating the collective intelligence of communities
Reform UK, Nigel Farage's party/company, admits missing winding-up petition
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
European Patent Office (EPO) Series: A Costa-Benefit Analysis: Has the Asset Become a Liability?
All other things being equal, one could expect the Portuguese political establishment to support Campinos in his reappointment bid. But what if all other things are no longer equal because the former "asset" has in the meantime become a "liability"?
Brigading Against Women - Part XIV - Mastery of Distraction
The finger-pointing actions themselves prove the saying that even an accusation is likely a confession
Links 02/10/2026: "McDonald's Caught Cheating Consumers for Profit" and "It's Not Illegal If You Buy New Laws"
Links for the day
EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part XVII - A Vote for Campinos This Month (Reappointment) Would be an Endorsement of Cocaine
The harder they try to silence critics, the worse it'll get
The Cyber Show on "Career Scientists" (Resellers of Establishment Brands Like GAFAM)
"The "career scientist" - with PhD and research office by their mid-twenties - follows well oiled tracks and institutional signposts, steering away from controversial or "difficult" subjects."
Reporting Court Matters While Preserving Dignity of Staff
There's a high and growing probability we'll take our appeal to the Court of Appeal next year
Broligarchs Speech-Policing, Faux 'Community' or 'Hub' in 'User-Driven' Clothing
Until a broligarch decides to "flag" inconvenient stories
Gemini Links 02/10/2026: Haiku, Microsoft EEE ('Linux' as a Container in Windows), and ROOPHLOCH 2026 Roundup
Links for the day
Microsoft Promised Them Bonuses, Instead They May Get Laid Off
Laid off or paid off?
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 01, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, October 01, 2026
Lots of People Left Red Hat This Week, No Announcement Made of Layoffs
Companies just find ways and excuses not to announce their layoffs