Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • “Well… it’s raining”

    Last week, since my wife had some days off for the Holy Week, I decided to take some of my holiday days too, and we went for a trip to Portugal in our van. We live in Galicia, Spain, so it’s not much of a long trip, but we like to visit every now and then.

    Continuing with our recent tradition of visiting monasteries and churches (check the ‘churches’ tag if you want to read about another recent trip), our plans included visiting the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte… and we had not much more pre-planned, to be honest.

  • 25th April 2025 - Night Manager

    Another book read. This time it was John Le Carre's Night Manager. This is the sort of thing you expect from John Le Carre - spies, intrigue and complexity. It is also rather good.

    The book is set in the early 90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. It marks a change for John Le Carre as he does not have his usual threats to rely on. However, we get something on par with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The story revolves around Jonathan, a night manager in a fancy Swiss hotel. In comes a group lead by a charming lout called Roper and we discover that Jonathan has encountered him before. Cue flash backs.

• Science

  • Global Science & Technology News for Geminispace: This Caterpillar Wears the Body Parts of Insect Prey

    Dubbed the “bone collector,” this caterpillar species sports remains of prey as camouflage while it stalks spider webs for trapped bugs, researchers report in the April 25 Science. The carnivorous caterpillar, found on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, is the first known by scientists to live in spider hunting grounds and fully decorate itself with body parts.

    Relatively few caterpillars eat meat, with about 300 carnivorous varieties out of nearly 200,000 documented moth and butterfly species. The bone collector caterpillar belongs to the Hyposmocoma genus, also called Hawaiian fancy case caterpillars, endemic to the islands.

• Technology and Free Software

  • WhatsApp Issues Major Update to Stop People Downloading Chats & Photos

    WhatsApp has announced a major new update designed to prevent other users from exporting chats or downloading images and media without permission.

    The Advanced Chat Privacy setting, which is available for both individual chats and groups, will block people from exporting the chat or auto-downloading shared media.

    The Meta-owned platform, which is the world’s most popular messaging app, said the new feature aims to give its roughly 3 billion users “greater confidence that no one can take what people said outside the chat”.

  • Freeing a VPS from systemd with Devuan

    The problem with many VPS providers is that they lack the possibility to use custom ISOs. Most of the time, the distributions that users can choose from are Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and sometimes a few others. Unfortunately, all of these distros use systemd as their init system and service manager - but also as their logger, bootloader, dns resolver, etc. (which is one of the many reasons I don’t like systemd).

    I have been avoiding systemd for the last two or three years now, and using it is not an option to me. However, for personal reasons, I recently had to use a VPS from a specific hosting provider which didn’t support any systemd-free distribution. Therefore, I had to install Debian on it.

    Honestly, Debian is a really great distribution, and it was one of the few non-commercial distributions available with this VPS. The one and almost only problem I have with it is the fact that it depends on systemd.

  • Space

    • A Claimed Hint of Alien Life Whips Up Spirited Debate

      You may have already seen the headlines: Signs of life have reportedly been discovered on an alien world.

      A team of astronomers led by Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge used the James Webb Space Telescope to search for interesting molecules in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system called K2 18b. The team now says they’ve found molecules that, on Earth, are associated with life, in an abundance that is hard to explain otherwise.