Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 02/09/2023: Fediverse and Feeds



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Limiting improvisation

        I was asked why I suggest limiting improvisation in the blorb playing style. Great question! Here’s my answer.

        I’ll first clarify one thing and then explain why there’s this limitation.♥

        Ah, for “wallpaper” stuff you can make up stuff as much as you want! They’re like “what color is her towel” and you go “it’s a light yellow”. Maybe your notes say “The desk is full of uninportant papers. Hidden under the rug is a key” and the players start looking at papers and you can start making up geneologies and transaction accounts to your hearts contempt. That stuff happens all the time, room descriptions should be short & sweet knowing that you can make this sort of thing up.

        It’s only for “salient” things—the core main things the players and their characters are interacting with—that there’s a limit. For example, the other day I ran a module that said “the desk is full of important documents. GM’s choice”. That violated this principle. If the documents are so important, they shoulda been specified before the session began. (It'd had been OK if the module had said upfront that "DMs, you need to specify the documents on page 277" but it did not.)

      • 🔤SpellBinding: CEMNOYP Wordo: OASES
      • Across The Spider-verse



        The amazing visual style of the first movie is back—and even a little improved. The story hops between “dimensions”, giving the artists a chance to play; and in some segments they are spectacularly successful.

        The one criticism I have in this department is that the device of dropping incidental text into the frame—comic book style—is not used as much as in the first movie. That’s a shame; I like it. It still works well when it is used.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • listing data with TableDb

        These two things will cause it to dump... something or another. I kind of expected them to be the IDs of the locally stored DHT keys. but they aren't. unless they're encoded in some other way. on my computer they all started with VkxEM

        that VkxEM seems to be the start of a base64'd binary blob that starts out with "VLD0" I guess the key names are stored pretty packed.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Issue using ZNC with multiple accounts and SASL

          I have been using different bouncers on different IRC networks since I got more into IRC again (with SDF and Tildechat) in the beginning of this year and switched between a ZNC and a Soju-based bouncer and I am actually using both right now since I don't want to change the configs that are working, both are working quite well, so I am not sure if I am preferring one over the other.

          When configuring ZNC I had a rather random issue that caused the nickserv or SASL authentication to fail on some irc accounts and I couldn't really figure out why and when manually authenticating via Nickserv it always worked, also using cert auth usually works. Since most bouncers and irc networks are up for a long time, this is not really an issue and I simply thought, it is an intermittend issue that happens every Blue Moon (which was actually last week).

        • Fedi is like email

          I love email.

          Email has a lot of the same problems fedi has. It’s used by some very bad people, there’s not a lot of moderators, there’s spam and bad faith servers that you need to block on the instance level, if you get kicked off a server or a server operator folds you need to migrate your address and that’s a 🐝, the protocol is also really complicated these days with many layers and spec addons, it’s difficult to find a place and crowd that’s good for you etc.

          Fedi also has some of the same advantages as email: no-one owns it, it can be used for all kinds of things, it’s free etc.

        • Re: Why I don’t use the Fediverse

          Yeah, the clones do have a lot of the same problems. Mastodon is akin to tinylogs, and Lemmy is like a discussion site or Usenet type thing. (Although with more bugs.) For example, there is a currently defunct app that makes Lemmy look and feel like a phpBB site (except you get access to all of Lemmy).

          I guess my typical approach to this stuff is trying to think back at what worked? Email, discussion sites, mailing lists. If something works like it did in that era it might be fine, if it works differently then there might be some risks.

        • Re: Creating a atom feed file to submit to antenna

          I also use Atom for Antenna (because then I can have time stamps, not just dates), and Alex’s guide above is good, go check it out if you do wanna use Atom, but just know you can also just make a gmisub file and only use it for Antenna.

          That is much easier, for people who don’t wanna have to fiddle with the Atom format.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Freedom, Not Fame, is His Goal
pursuit of money can be not only tiring but also involve abandoning one's freedom
Getting Better After 20 Years
Exactly two months from now this site is turning 20
Gemini Links 07/09/2026: Music Composition, Free Stuff, and Self-hosting Git Repos
Links for the day
 
Alleged Manager at IBM Says "[t]here are likely to be a lot (and I meant, A LOT) of RAs before December."
"We’re getting pressure from above to put some team members on PIPs."
Links 07/09/2026: Amazon Cargo Plane Crash, .org/.net/.com Domains Considered Risky
Links for the day
Gemini Links 07/09/2026: Cheese, Text-based Life, and Icons in Swaybar
Links for the day
Links 07/09/2026: Slop Trashes Memory of Parton, Flock Surveillance Infuriates Everyone
Links for the day
EPO Hiding Cocainegate and Abandoning Transparency (Even Access to Very Basic Information is Denied)
The EPO isn't just becoming like a private for-profit corporation. It's also becoming more secretive.
Richard Stallman Has Resurrected Lost Updates
We didn't ask about it
SLAPP Censorship - Part 174 Out of 200: Cascading Scandals and a Path Towards Much-Needed, Long-Awaited Reform
Reform the UK's law, not "Reform UK"
EPO's Gema Requena Sempere (PD People) Contacted Regarding Children With Disabilities
In the coming week we may be in fruitful contact with some media regarding EPO scandals
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 06, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, September 06, 2026
People Who Enforce the GPL Banned From Linux Foundation Board (After Bribes From Prolific GPL Violators), Now They're Banned From Giving Talks at Events
about the "LF" ('Linux' Foundation)
Gemini Links 06/09/2026: The Slop Plagiarism 'Holy War' (Hype, Scam, Scheme), Burning CD-Rs, and Hardcopy Mono
Links for the day
Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Inaction and Incompetence - Part IV - Insufficient Resources in the Face of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) by Lawyers
it's about 120KG
OpenStreetMap is the Future, Dictatorship is the Past
OpenStreetMap helped us check maps for transport, various overlays with addresses, and there was 0% reliance on GAFAM or "Google" anything
Silent Layoffs, Cool-down, and Cool-off: How GAFAM and IBM Operate (the Law Doesn't Apply to Them)
Laws? What laws?
How Strikes at the European Patent Office Are Seen by Striking Staff in Berlin, Germany
We have some more EPO scandals to cover later this year and next year
Association for Computing Machinery Cites Techrights in Relation to GemText and Gemini Protocol
published yesterday, Open Access
Links 06/09/2026: More XBox Trouble (Microsoft Unrest, Many Silent Layoffs This Month), John Duffy as Next USPTO General Counsel
Links for the day
Gemini Links 06/09/2026: Avoiding 'Smart' 'Phones' and Setting up Gemini for the First Time
Links for the day
Links 06/09/2026: Sabotage by Slop and "What Happens If 'Open' 'AI' Dies?"
Links for the day
How Back Doors Became the 'Normal' or 'Norm'
"We also allowed a lethal monoculture to fester"
Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Inaction and Incompetence - Part III - The SRA is Vastly Worse Than Brits Realise, We Have a "Wild West" in London
In the next part we'll begin looking at correspondence with the SRA
SRA and Manslaughter: How the SRA Contributed to Agony in Proprietary Software Scandals With Clear Misuse of "Without Prejudice"
Trying to prevent the public from finding out the criminal stuff that went on, resulting in many deaths
Canonical (or Ubuntu) Rejecting IRC Isn't the Widespread Trend
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) adoption still growing by some yardsticks
SLAPP Censorship - Part 173 Out of 200: Two Years
It was exactly 2 years ago that we filed lawsuits against Garrett
Linux of America
We could not help but notice GNU/Linux in North America yesterday
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, September 05, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, September 05, 2026
Gemini Links 06/09/2026: Internet Limiting (Limited Time Allotted) and Solar MiniServer
Links for the day
Eight Months of Strikes in EPO, Organised by the Staff Union (SUEPO) Also in Berlin
In Berlin, only one member of staff voted against the action plan
Links 05/09/2026: "Let’s Stop Buying New Phone" and 'Open' 'AI' (Proprietary Slop) Drowning in Lawsuits
Links for the day
Gemini Links 05/09/2026: Polarization, Warped Maps, and Emacs rectangle-number-lines
Links for the day
Software Freedom, Even If Difficult to Attain Due to Outside Pressure, Does Make You Happier
Peer pressure and opinionated employers can make friends and staff more miserable if they dictate bad software
You Can Run GNU/Linux on a Desktop/Laptop for 1,000+ Days Nonstop
To me, the long uptime is a way of "marketing" GNU/Linux as robust and stable
Profiting From Global Warming (and Making More Money the More You Cause Warming)
Unregulated bank and pyramid scheme
SLAPP Censorship - Part 172 Out of 200: The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Complicit in the SLAPPs by Inaction (Didn't Even Study Any Evidence, Only Wasted Time and Budget)
"SRA placed into special measures due to 'disappointing standard of leadership'"
China Does Not Need American (US) Products Like GAFAM's
China has abundance of technical things it can leverage to preserve its autonomy
RMS Didn't Make Enough Backups
Making backups is important
Refresher: Why EPO Staff is on Strike This Year (Aside From the EPO Acting Like a Corrupt, Above-the-Law, For-Profit Corporation That Violates Its Own Charter)
One core issue at the EPO is erosion of purchasing power
Gemini Links 05/09/2026: Fireflies, Shore Pine, and ASCII Art
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, September 04, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, September 04, 2026