Links 22/01/2025: Democratising Tech Initiative and "Bye Bye Meta"
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Lack of Ability, but Yearning
I've been sorta sad lately about not doing any real programming. The problem really is that I don't have any “itches” that I could scratch by writing a new program. I've pretty much scratched them all, with e.g. gemroff and my custom site generator.
Of course, I still do have plenty of itches. Just that all of them now are completely outside of my programming ability, such as my ideal archiving software[1] or fixing bugs in… somewhere, because I don't even have the skills to debug it and find where in my computer's software stack the issue is occurring. Or really, being honest with myself, my Game Boy Advance game I really want to finish but haven't progressed beyond a prototype of.
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twenny twenny five
hiyerrrrr y'alright! been a while since i posted a gemlog!! i've been slightly more active on my weblog but also not really woops. as consolation i'll be mirroring this post to my blog. so if you're on the web reading this and wondering wtf i'm talking about: don't worry about it babe (okay❤️ yay ❤️)
i don't really have anything to say on here but i've not posted for a lil bit and wanted to say hiii i'm still alive! everyone did retrospectives of 2024 around the new year and i thought about doing that but i had nothing to really say about last year and now it is the 22nd of january which is a bit late for that LOL
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Fixing what is broken
I've been thinking thoughts... scheming schemes, dreaming dreams.
I'm in my early 30s and I've always regretted how I let my mental health be ruined so much it's put me in this awful position. I'm not dying, and right now, finances are a little strained but not by much. I still have a job and work comfortably, and want to look for something more solid soon. But goodness, how stupid was I in my twenties to let all these opportunities go by!
I struggled a lot in college. I took years off. Right now, it might actually be easier to get back in, since UT is offering free tuition for anyone with less than $100K. But before, I wasted so much time. And then COVID hit. And then my mental health took a hit. As always!
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🔤SpellBinding: CLYNOUM Wordo: SWANS
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Panning for Tunes (Jan 2025 Edition)
I'm on a continual quest for new music, and I like to share the really special finds with people who are likely to also enjoy them. Maybe you're one of those people! Here's a few gems from recent times.
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Hold on, this is what I *didn't* want 😕
I had an idea for a Thumby game where you would walk round a town and enter buildings, each of which contained a minigame. After thinking about it for a while, I gave up on it as too much work. All those minigames to implement!
Recently I've been doing escape rooms. It only just occured to me that I'm therefore working on a game where you walk around and play minigames. Damn! That's why it seems so much work.
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cold weather used to not be so bad. now it sucks (for me).
it's 13 degrees fahrenheit outside. sitting here in my dimly lit bedroom, listening to some synthwave. caspro's 'earth town' album to be more specific. it's almost 430a and still have yet to eat dinner. less than 60 days left till spring begins. can't wait for the warmer weather. i used to tolerate the cold weather pretty well. kinda have to, as someone who's been commuting by motorcycle, in southern new york weather, for the past 14 years.
thing is, i don't tolerate the cold weather as well as i did. my brain tolerates it, but my body itself is a different story. why? i ended up having raynaud's phenomenon/syndrome/disease. why? my guess is all these years of riding a motorcycle in the winter while being rather under-geared. i never used heated gear, and my winter gear was essentially lightly insulated cold-weather gloves and the addition of a hoody underneath my jacket. i still don't use heated gear, but i started layering more appropriately. anyways, a few times every winter i'd get frostnip on my hands. my guess is that now my body prematurely goes into protection mode when my skin senses cold weather, and slows down circulation to my hands. oh well. maybe it's psychological and it'll diminish one day.
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Politics and World Events
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The word fascist has long been useless
Oh yes, Mr Trump is officialy a bad politician. No shadow of doubt here. Yet the word fascist is a) probably not appropiate, at least not appropriate yet (we shall see) and b) pretty useless.
Are you old enough to remember the "Antifaschistischer Schutzwall", aka the Berlin Wall? Do you notice the Antis-fascist thingy in there? The Berlin Wall was made to stop you fascists from trying to undermine (obviously unsuccesfully) our little Republic of Workers and Peasants (and intellectuals, but that's obvious). Ever since M and H took power one sneaky way or another the far left has been issuing nazi and fascist party credentials to anybody who would disagree with them, including other people in the far left.
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Liberation
I just experienced liberation
I am shaking I want to cry reality shifted I'm excited
I was afraid a path was being created and then dissolved
I didn't do anything really I kept calm I kept quiet and then... it happened
it felt through the cracks it just disappeared -
The Legacy of Joseph Robinette Biden Junior
Joseph Robinette Biden Junior, known to most people as Joe, is not going to be remembered well by the history books, but he could have been. He made two fatal mistakes. He appointed the Republican Merrick Garland to the office of Attorney General, for no other reason than to troll Mitch McConnell. He also had no business running for a second term.
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fascist states of america
i'll cut to the chase. on monday this week, the united states became a fascist nation, and unlike the stereotypes of leftists like me i don't use that word lightly. donald trump is a fascist, elon musk is a nazi, and the rest of cabinet are no better.
there are dark days ahead for anyone in the usa who isn't a straight, white, cisgender man. project 2025 seems to have something in store for everyone, and that's just the beginning.
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Leasehold, forfeiture and rent-strikes
This is a quick note to myself about a problem in landlord-tenant activism.
It's a long-established tactic to withhold rent. I once led a successful rent-strike myself. But the use of rent-strikes in the leasehold sector is quite dangerous.
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Science
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Recently I have been reading papers by Uwe Naumann
He's one of the senior researchers within the field of AD (Automatic Differentiation), which I have also been interested in for the past few years. I quite enjoy reading his papers, although they come from a very different tradition (numerical computing) than me, and so some concepts or phrasing are alien to me. It is not that Uwe Naumanns's writing is funny or poetic or elegant in the way that e.g. is the case for SPJ's papers - I think he just writes about that nice boundary between theory (or really, mathematics) and practical matters that I also enjoy. A lot of the papers read like a person explaining this neat tool he made, which is a style I quite enjoy.
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Star Log - Stargazing 2025-01-20: Orion
We have had mostly cloudy skies this week, but the cover broke for a little while last evening, and I was able to get in about 30 minutes of stargazing before heading to bed. The temps were fairly comfortable last evening, around +16 ℉, which was nice. I've learned not to spend much time agonizing over what to target for the sketch. I just quickly find something that looks interesting and is in a convenient viewing angle and direction. Using the SV407 wide angle binocs, I noticed a little triplet of stars near Orion, which I later learned were φ₁, φ₂, and λ Ori. Then I sketched them using the 12x60 binocs. This sketch is from my front yard:
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Technology and Free Software
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Democratizing Tech Initiative
The goal of this initiative is to democratize the internet by making self-hosting of internet content easier. This goal overlaps with the goal of SIS, which is to make managing smallnet servers of different smallnet protocols easier. The types of internet content that could use democratizing include: search engines, proxies, media serving and hosting (audio, video, books, etc.), wikis, source code repositories, and textual publications (blogs, microblogging, social networks, etc.).
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Democratizing Tech Initiative
AuraGem should be back up! The cable box outside my house was completely messed up, so a person from the ISP had to come out and fix it.
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The Michelin 3-star restaurant of computer code
A few months back I wanted to write this article about Asahi Lina's complaints trying to incorporate Rust code into the Linux kernel—something you're ostensibly able to do, but apparently very much in spite of the old-school contributors who haven't been making it easy.
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Removing EXIF Data 📷
When I upload images for my gemlog, I like them to be well-compressed with a maximum dimension of 800 pixels on the long side.
Also, I like all the identifying EXIF information (including the location) to be stripped.
So I wrote a shell script to do the dirty work, with a dependency on ImageMagick.
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“The standard you walk past is the standard you accept”
There's a phrase: “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept”. It's used to suggest that if you don't speak up about certain problematic behaviours, you're implicitly conveying that they're acceptable.
i've been thinking about this phrase a lot in recent times, not least due to a recent exchange i had on an ICT forum.
As part of a discussion around certain software systems, i raised a pet topic of mine: entitled and bullying behaviour from FOSS[a] users towards volunteer devs / maintainers / packagers, which often leads to volunteer burnout and communities losing such people as contributors. In particular, i noted that i myself have been negatively impacted by such behaviours.
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Internet/Gemini
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Bye Bye Meta
I nuked most of the content from my Facebook account today, and completely destroyed my Instagram account. But tomasino, why were you on Facebook? Great question, nerds.
Iceland runs on Facebook. It's really weird. Well, not really if you consider that Iceland has been at the top of the charts of the most online citizens in the world almost nonstop since gopher came on the scene. It was number one for most of that time, but never really lower than 4th on the list. People here are really, really connected, and the circles are quite homogeneous. It's estimated that 91% of all Icelanders are on Facebook. And that causes some problems (obviously).
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Blog Questions Challenge 2025
Why Did You Start Blogging In The First Place?
It was February 2021 and remote university classes were still in full swing thanks to covid. I had just recently created my first Mastodon account and it was a time of discovering lots of different ways that people were keeping the internet fun.
One of those ways was the gemini protocol, which was seeing a rise in popularity at the time. It introduced me to the idea that having your own space on the internet can be really simple and doesn’t exactly need to be professional. In fact, it seemed you didn’t even need a good reason for it.
I had gotten a small Digital Ocean VPS for a web development course the previous semester. I still had a lot of leftover student credit with them, so I hadn’t shut it down but wasn’t really using it for anything. I ended up turning it into a gemini server where I published posts about nothing much in particular. It was fun and I didn’t have much more of a reason than that. Looking back, I think my own standards for my writing have gotten higher as my writing has slowly improved.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.