Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Healing liberation & cultivation

    There are 3 major elements of practice, the healing, the liberation and the cultivation.

    They all work together, at different level and at different time in the development. If you focus too much on one element and forget the others it might back fire and make the path harder.

    Healing works with the past, liberation works with the present, and cultivation works with the future. We heal our past, liberate from the present moment, and cultivate for the future.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Raspberry Pi's Paul Oberosler Makes USB Gadget Mode as Easy as Flicking a Switch

    Raspberry Pi's Paul Oberosler has announced a new package that offers an "easy way" enable Ethernet over USB in USB Gadget Mode on anything from the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ upwards — adding the feature as a simple toggle in Raspberry Pi Imager 2.

    "The idea [of Ethernet over USB] is beautifully simple — plug the Raspberry Pi into a laptop and it appears as a USB network adapter, just like when you enable USB tethering on a smartphone. At least, that’s the theory," Oberosler writes. "In reality, getting this to work has traditionally involved a mix of outdated scripts, manual configuration steps, and platform-specific instructions that only reliably supported one host OS at a time — Windows, macOS, or Linux, but rarely all three."

  • The Danish Approach to Deepfakes: Can Copyright Protect Digital Identity

    The advent of generative artificial intelligence has democratized the creation of synthetic content with unprecedented realism. While this technology opens extraordinary creative opportunities, it also raises real concerns about protecting personal identity. Deepfakes—manipulated audiovisual content that realistically reproduces the faces, voices, and movements of real people—are now one of the most pressing challenges for contemporary legal systems.

    The ability to generate videos or audio in which a person appears to say or do things they never said or did raises profound questions: how can citizens be protected from fraudulent, defamatory, or sexually explicit uses of their digital image? And above all, which legal instrument is best suited to this protection?

    Denmark has proposed an innovative response, choosing to address the issue through an amendment to its copyright law. This choice deserves in-depth analysis, not only for its originality, but also for the implications it could have on the European regulatory debate.

  • [Old] Welcome to the MODcast (again)

    Since updating and reviving my webpage, I noticed that the HTML5 embedded audio player had stop working on my MODcast page[1], where I serve a continuous playlist of 242,430 MOD files (think chiptune music if you do not know what MOD files are).

  • [Old] qutebrowser is pretty dang awesome

    I've used a lot of web browsers. My journey down the "Information Super Highway" actually started before there were paved roads i.e. before the WWW existed. My first use of the internet was mainly using tools like gopher, archie, veronica, ftp, email, and usenet. The first web browsers I can remember using were Cello and Mosaic, but I may have used an older text mode web browser on a BBS prior to that.

    I've been using linux for going on 31 (DANG, that's over half my life) years now, and feel like the GUI web browsers I've spent the most time in are Netscape and Firefox. In the terminal, it's been links, lynx, and w3m. I've happily used Firefox for the last I-don't-know-how-many-years, with the extensions ublock origin, Joplin web clipper, Vimium (for Vim-style keybindings), and Bitwarden.

    The reasons I decided to try something else boil down mainly to needing something keyboard-focused (Vim-like keybindings), minimal GUI (less clunky), and light weight. Firefox with Vimium meets the Vim-like keybindings, but with my tendency to have a lot of tabs open, I was having to run a couple of extra extensions (OneTab and Auto Tab Discard) just to manage the amount of memory Firefox was consuming. As for the something-less-clunky requirement, Firefox even with the menu and bookmark toolbars disabled still uses more screen real estate than I'd like.

  • Programming

    • Random vi Things

      Here we have an ex command to reverse the lines, which in visual mode requires a ":" to get into ex mode.

      This can also be stated as

       ex command
          global /^/ move 0
      

      which is longer to type but may give a better clue to those not very proficient with vi as to what is going on, maybe for educational purposes or to better document an ed script used to do who knows what. The mechanism here is that "global" operates on each line in turn, top to bottom, "^" is a very fast regular expression to match every line, and "move 0" moves the matched line to the fake or virtual line number of "before the first line". So the first line is moved to the top of the file, doing nothing, then the second line is moved before that, then the third is moved before the second line, etc.