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

SLAPP Censorship - Part 158 Out of 200: Making Alliances With Men Arrested for Strangling Women Was Always a Terrible Strategy
They work for American slop companies
 
Links 22/08/2026: Prince Harry, Elton John and Others Pay High Price for Frivolous Litigation in the UK
Links for the day
'Voluntary' Mass Layoffs at IBM/Red Hat
IBM does not want people to notice what truly goes on there
Another Round of GAFAM Layoffs, This Time Apple
Now Apple "is shutting down an entire Vision Pro team focused on developing gaming features for the mixed-reality headset."
Gemini Links 22/08/2026: The Bodyguard (1992), Minimalism, Backups, and IPFS
Links for the day
Links 22/08/2026: TikTok Settles With Feds, Harms Caused by Social Control Media Gaining Attention
Links for the day
New Data Shows Microsoft's XBox is Really Dying
XBox is a "burning platform"
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 21, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, August 21, 2026
Sources-First Publication
Thank you for keeping us on track
Ubuntu is Not Linux
I was one of the first users of Ubuntu
Links 21/08/2026: Outrage Over Politicians Who Support Slop-Feeding Data Centres, "America Is About to Get More Expensive"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 21/08/2026: Rain Coming Back and "Small Internet"
Links for the day
Mass Layoffs at IBM, But Mostly in Secret (PIPs and 'Voluntary' Redundancies)
Gerstner laid off a record number of people; Krishna tries to find 'innovative' new ways to cause workers to leave
Slop-ware: Nobody Knows What Code Goes Into Linux and Most Developers Cannot Understand the Rust Code (Even If They Tried)
So nobody is in charge
The Slop Pyramid Scheme (Not Boon!) Isn't Good for GNU/Linux, Even If the Plagiarism Engines (Framed as "Training" or "Intelligence") Almost Always Run GNU/Linux
We need the slop pop - we need the bubble to pop
North America: GNU/Linux Measured at 13%-15% Every Night
many (north) Americans use GNU/Linux at home and are using it to access the Web in the small hours of the morning
Links 21/08/2026: "Silicon Valley’s Billionaire Cults Are Coming for Democracy" and "Who’s Raking it in as the National Debt Explodes?"
Links for the day
SLAPP Censorship - Part 157 Out of 200: What is a 'Defamation Troll'?
"Defamation Mill" also
Northern Europe Leads the Pack in Abandoning Windows After Threats Made to Greenland (Says Clownflare Data)
Clownflare has a vast trove of data, so it cannot be easily dismissed as pure nonsense
Clownflare: In Past 12 Months Microsoft Windows Fell From ~80% to ~75% on Desktops/Laptops in Asia
Microsoft is deep in debt
Secret Layoffs at Microsoft, Apparently More Sites Will Shut Down Entirely
vindicates us and serves to affirm what we've said for over a month
The State of Slopfarms About "Linux" in August 2026
The Web needs serious cleanup, which curation can help deliver
IBM Offers Workers Some Money to Fire Themselves, It's Called "Next Step" and It's Allegedly 'Extended' (Not Enough Fools Have Fired Themselves)
Will IBM executives - including the CEO - ever be held accountable?
£5 Million Unsolicited/Undisclosed Bribes and What That Means to British Politics
It still remains unknown (disclosure denied) who helps fund the £1 million lawfare against us
[Satire] Pocock, Binface & nobodies vs Farage: defamation before UK High Court
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
The IBM Censorship Team, PIPs (Silent Layoffs) in IBM Europe
There seem to be many de facto layoffs going on at IBM right there
SLAPP Censorship - Part 156 Out of 200: Brett Wilson LLP Becoming Wilson FC
Now acting almost like one-person shop (lots of staff has fled this past year)
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 20, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, August 20, 2026
Gemini Links 21/08/2026: "Ensmallening the BigWeb", "Rust Dependencies"
Links for the day
Links 20/08/2026: 'Linux' Foundation Promoting Slop Hype for Money (Hype as a Service), Malaysia’s Exports Jump 38% Year-on-Year
Links for the day
Gemini Links 20/08/2026: A "Break From Routine" and "Modem Was the Problem"
Links for the day
Clownflare Reckons GNU/Linux is on Almost 1 in 10 Laptops/Desktops in Western Europe
Western Europe and China are leaving more of GAFAM behind them
Looking Ahead at September
Rianne and I look forward to a productive September
Links 20/08/2026: Facebook "Ran Ads for an App That Promised to Nudify Female Politicians" and Facebook Faces "Social [Control] Media Addiction Trial"
Links for the day
Clownflare Sees GNU/Linux at 16% Market Share on Desktops/Laptops in Tajikistan
in Tajikistan it seems like adoption of GNU/Linux is exceptionally high, based on a very large data set associated with Web access
The Demise of Social Control Media Continues
Entering (anew) social control media in 2026 seems foolish
SLAPP Censorship - Part 155 Out of 200: Throwing Stones in Houses Made of Glass
character-assassination-as-a-service
Gemini Links 20/08/2026: Planners, Pantsing, Vinylyssee
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 19, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, August 19, 2026