Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Low Confidence Day

    I think my period is coming because I’m having a low confidence day and feel irritable. I’m hyper aware of my body and what my goals are and I feel like I don’t know how to get there. I gained back the 15 pounds I lost last fall and it’s soul crushing. Just a vent.

  • I just read Little Brother

    Cory Doctrow [sic] is an author with some fairly impressive talent. A number of years ago I had a chance to listen to him present a keynote. I don’t remember exactly when or where, and I don’t even remember if I attended the keynote! I was rather unimpressed by keynote speakers around that time because otherwise technical/hacker conferences were becoming too politically biased, lacking technical content, and losing sight of educating the public of anything other than their political angle. I now regret that I either didn’t attend, or if I was present, that instead of listening to the keynote, I was likely planning what talks I would be attending at that conference or what friends I’d be meeting up with nearby.

    I knew he was a well-known author, but I hadn’t actually read anything he had written. Someone in the Gemini irc/xmpp chat mentioned the book and dropped a link. I followed the link, grabbed the text, and it patiently waited for me in a terminal while I did other things. Then over the course of the next day and a half or so, I read the novel.

  • Cosmic Betrayal

    Lies.

    The promises that were once made,

    words that were supposed to be meaningful,

    lies are they all.

    The day it got uncovered,

    the way he got rejected,

    all hopes of the human,

    fake was it all.

• Technology and Free Software

  • 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 3)

    While I was focused on Ubuntu as a desktop solution, another GNOME+Debian product had appeared and was shaking the small free software world: Maemo.

    It will come as a shock for the youngest but this was a time without smartphones (yes, we had electricity and, no, dinosaurs were already extinct, please keep playing Pokémon instead of interrupting me). Mobile phones were still quite new and doing exactly two things: calls and SMSes. In fact, they were sold as calling machines and the SMS frenzy, which was just a technical hack around the GSM protocol, took everybody by surprise, including operators. Were people really using awkward cramped keyboard to send themselves flood of small messages?

    Small pocket computers with tiny keyboard started to appear. There were using proprietary operating systems like WinCE or Symbian and browsing a mobile version of the web, called "WAP", that required specific WAP sites and that nobody used. The Blackberry was so proprietary that it had its own proprietary network. It was particularly popular amongst business people that wanted to look serious. Obama was famously addicted to his Blackberry to the point that the firm had to create a secure proprietary network only for him once he took office in the White House. But like others, Blackberries were very limited, with very limited software. Nothing like a laptop computer.

  • a tale of two installs

    I'm spending my Saturday installing/assembling things. Two things, specifically: an elliptical and Sailfish OS on a Sony Xperia 10iii.

    The first one will ensure I have access to a zero-impact cardio option even when the gym is closed, something I sorely need. The second one frees me from Google products on my phone.

    These two processes could not be more different.

    The instructions for installing Sailfish OS on a Sony Xperia 10iii say the process takes about 25 minutes. Reader, it took almost exactly 25 minutes:

  • freeeeee

    I did it. I freed myself from Big Tech. Amazon, Apple, Automattic, Cloudflare (mostly), Google, Meta, Microsoft, Twitter. All out of my life.

    The last big hurdle was my phone, which I fixed today by flashing Sailfish OS to a Sony Xperia 10iii. It works like a dream.

  • Checking installed gui apps from the command line on Haiku OS

    i find myself quite often noodling at the command line in haiku even though it has a great gui that needs more talking about (maybe in a later post).

    after looking a little bit around, the main place to look is under /Haiku/system/apps. here is an example from mine. note one particular tool [1] is something i added as a package.

  • Programming

    • Stack Traces are Underrated

      When something goes wrong in a program, many languages will spit out a stack trace with lots of useful information. Here's an example from one of my Python programs: [...]