Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 22/06/2023: Self-hosting and Belated Happy Birthday to Gemini



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • insomnia

        Sometimes I have trouble getting to sleep at night. Some nights I don’t sleep at all. Tonight was one of them. Apparently insomnia is more prevalent among autistic people but I can’t blame my autism tonight. No, I dosed myself with too much caffeine because Final Fantasy XVI released at midnight last night.

        Catherine and I have both been looking forward to the game, especially once a demo became available a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been a FF fan since I was 12 and after Cat and I got married she got dragged into it.

      • re: Coffee and Tea and the Java and Me

        I'm your exception to this! We have a bag of decaf coffee at home to make for when we want to enjoy coffee at night, or want to add coffee to a cocktail. I wished that decaf coffee was just as available and tasty as regular coffee. It's gotten better, but not quite 100% there. Believe it or not, I have also wished bourbon to taste exactly the same, but remove the alcohol. I enjoy the taste, but often I wish it had no alochol due to the possibility of dependence, impact on sleep, etc.

      • June Post

        I'm done with two weeks of antibiotics. I was very very weak and I think I lost even more weight: I'm probably close to 50 Kg and BMI of 20.

        My appetite is slowly coming back and I feel much better since Monday or so. I was able to carry my flugelhorn (in its heavy wooden case) to my lesson, play it (loudly!), then carry it and myself back home. And I was OK afterwards! No pain, no heartburn while playing, no tiredness on Tuesday.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Empowering the masses to wreak havoc (my view and wish for Large Language Models)

        I've been asking myself lately. Epically after Large Language Models becoming the new hot girl in the town. - Thing are, mostly, owned and propelled by large mega-corps. The situation of the field of AI is even worse. So far only Facebook, Google and Microsoft have the capacity to build new LLMs due to how much data and how expensive it is. I don't see this trend breaking any time soon; we are heading straight towards some version of the cyberpunk dystopia. - How can I throw a wrench into the steam engine driving us towards the grim future?

      • On Hardware

        Today I booted up the laptop to start transferring my TinyCore extensions. However, I was in for a shock - memory errors and a failure to boot! I checked the codes online and reseated the RAM as suggested to no avail, so I booted up with my copy of the Ultimate Boot CD into what was basically FreeDOS and had a look around. It seemed as though I was running out of memory, so I started removing newly added things from the onboot.lst file. I then added norestore to the syslinux.cfg file and rebooted and (eventually) it was working. I removed the norestore and rebooted and it was broken again. I rebuilt an extension that had been causing issues in case it was linked and readded it, but that didn't help the memory problems. In the end, I just deleted the .tor directory from the home directory backup and that seemed to do the trick. It means I can't use Tor anymore, but I have a copy of it tar.gzipped up so I can always put it back if I need it.

        [...]

        I'm writing this entry from the laptop in question, resting on an atlas and then on my lap so I don't have to clear my desk. It's hot today and that combined with the laptop on me has me sweating. I may need more insulation between the laptop and my legs...

      • Self hosting

        I recently started my own pubnix where I now host my blog and everything else. I started learning about OpenBSD and decided to give it a try, and I love it so much I decided to move there permanently.

      • Live Nontindo Direct Reaction

        Or... not live because I'm typing this up several hours later. Oh well!

        There are only a few games that I'm following very closely here, which surely exposes me as a Fake Gamer, which is fine.

      • Pentium II, National day, cabin-life

        Summer has been really kicking off up here in the north the last couple of weeks. During the weekend I visited a friend who is living in his girlfriends parents cabin out in the woods during summer. He has been going big on gardening and is growing his own tomatoes, chilis and various other stuff out there, and we have been helping him out a bit while also enjoying the nice weather that we've been having. I've gotten a bit sunburnt already, and even so I was taking precautions by wearing a cap and sunscreen. We've also been having some nice sauna-sessions, cooling ourselves of from time to time in the nearby lake.

        [...]

        I've also been working on an old PC donated by a friend. He had an old Pentium II MMX system that had been used in their summer vacation cabin that they were now selling, so I got it for nothing. It's a bit newer than the 486-system that I've been playing with during winter and spring, but I installed a CF-reader and a network card in it to be able to experiment a bit.

      • Amiga archaeology, Windows 95-98

        I've spent some time these last few months to accumulate flux-images of floppies I got from various sources. Most of them were acquired from an auction-site regional to me, similar to eBay. They turned out to be mostly Amiga formatted disks, but also contained the odd IBM-formatted disk, and some Atari ST stuff as well. I had an Amiga 500, but never really used it much, since I got it very late. With emulation being what it is, it is trivial to run the old stuff found on these floppies on a modern system though. But, with hundreds of dumped images, this turned out to be a real hassle. Because of this, I recently started looking into different methods to look through these dumps to find interesting files.

      • Sbanken/DNB a.k.a. ApplePay support workaround

        I started thinking about all this due to recent changes in the banking market here in Norway. However, if that is of no interest to you, skip straight to S. "The workaround".

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Happy birthday Gemini

          I know on my end, where I have a web presence, am on Mastodon, a tilde community, and in my own IRL communities, Gemini and this capsule provides me with a different space to express myself and explore. I can keep a separate identity from my main professional work. I don't have to make sure my work here matches my professional goals or even my presence on social media. With minimal tools, without commercial interests, ads or monetization, I have a place I can enter on my own terms, engage with like minded folks, and then slip out the back door, without having to do a ton of setup, negotiate or dance around a corporation, or even spend much time on drudgery.

        • Geektools has shutdown

          I just noticed that whois.geektools.com and geektools.com both return NXDOMAIN now... Checking the internet archive, they had posted a notice on their site back in May stating that they had ended the service:

          geektools.com has shut down. We started this service in 1998 as the first smart whois that would automatically query the correct server(s) to get the data you need. A lot has changed since then and it's time to move on. Most modern command line clients on *nix-like systems will select the appropriate whois server. Check your system's man page ("man whois" for those of you who don't know what a man page is). If you prefer to use a browser interface there are many sites that perform the same function and they're easy to find with your favorite search engine.

        • Reddit

          SDF just recently released a reddit-style webpage for the community which I think is pretty nifty.

          Reddit is interesting in its own way. I was only a casual user of Reddit but it's one of those websites that does something that is really hard to replicate: Be incredibly niche while being incredibly popular. I think only Wikipedia comes close.

        • Don't use Tabs with Preformatted text in Gemtext

          You can't depend on how tabs will be rendered in preformatted text blocks. You probably shouldn't use tabs in your preformatted text blocks. You should convert tabs into spaces and use that in preformatted text blocks in Gemtext.

        • hi! i'm Sunny ☀️

          i only learned about the small web fairly recently. i like the reasons behind it — simplicity, mindful curation, valuing humans over corporations — things that seem to be increasingly rare on the web at large. i've been browsing around it for a couple days now and it's really cool to see people just writing about things that interest them

        • Dialogues in the Japanese Web

          I have noticed a strange thing about the Japanese corner of the Internet: the number of pages presenting themselves as dialogues. Often times when I look up something in Japanese and click a result, I see some character asking another character how something works and the page continues in a dialog format. Alternatively, the explaining character may start with "today I will explain XYZ" to the second character who asks questions.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



Recent Techrights' Posts

Techrights Does Not Compete With LLM Slop, It Exposes the Bastards, Plagiarists and Scammers Who Do That
People like Scam Altman, still facing a lawsuit from his own sister for sexual abuse against her
Slopwatch: Planet Ubuntu Became LLM Slop and Some People Fail to See the Immorality of Plagiarism
it lessens the incentive for people to publish real articles
Microsoft Layoffs Again in Bay Area
Microsoft relies on people's false belief that being "in LinkedIn" will get you a job; well, seems like even working inside LinkedIn really sucks and you lose the job
 
The "AI" (Slop) Bubble Already Popped, But It's Not an Overnight Collapse
where Microsoft put its money
No More Steven Astorino at IBM, Chatter About Weekly/Nonstop Layoffs at IBM
What happened? Good luck guessing.
Looking at Corruption in Europe, Going Beyond the EPO
Expect a new series to kick off very soon
Slopwatch: Security SPAM and LLM Slop for SEO and FUD Purposes, Perpetually Tarnishing the Perception of Linux and (Open)SSH Security
A lot of this Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) comes from Microsoft and its LLMs
Links 30/05/2025: Google's LLM Slop Pushers Are Killing Journalism and Shira Perlmutter Fails to Stop Bribed Regime From Legalising Plagiarism (in "AI" Clothing)
Links for the day
Links 30/05/2025: Offline Arts and "Threshold of Patience"
Links for the day
Signing Off Serious Lies With a Statement of Truth is No Joking Matter
It's not hard to see what's happening here
Links 30/05/2025: LLM Slop Already Ingests and Vomits Its Own Garbage, Facebook Exec Admits Copyrights a Concern Too
Links for the day
Mass Layoffs at Microsoft Result in More Whistleblowers From Microsoft
Microsoft's predatory pricing is further
EPO Poll: 68% Dissatisfied With Quality of Slop (Wrongly Framed as "AI") for Patent Classification
Slop does not work, it's just falsely advertised with extra hype (funded by slop pushers that sponsor the major media)
Big Crowds Gather to Learn About Software Freedom From the Man Who Started GNU/Linux in 1983
"It was a great success"
Gemini Links 30/05/2025: Fighting Against the Bad News, and Slop is Dehumanisation Disguised as "Intelligence"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 29, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, May 29, 2025
Links 29/05/2025: Chinese Cracking Against EU Institutions (Prague), More Assaults on Media and Its Funding Sources
Links for the day
EPO Workers Caution That the Officials Are Still Illegally Trying to Replace Staff With Slop (to Lower Quality and Validity of European Patents)
Nobody in Europe voted for any of this
Links 29/05/2025: US Health Deficit and Malware Disguised as Slop Generator
Links for the day
Links 29/05/2025: Turtle Roadkill, Modern 'Tech' as a Sting
Links for the day
Thanks for All the Fish, Linux Format
people who once wrote for it (or for other magazines) comment on the importance of this news
People's Understanding of the History of GNU/Linux is Changing
RMS is not a radical, he's just clever enough to see and foresee what's going on
Microsofters Were Scheming to Take Over This Entire Web Site (in Their Own Words!)
Money gets spent censoring/deplatforming people who speak about real issues; no money gets spent actually tackling those underlying issues
Bicycles for the Minds and the Story Harrison Bergeron
"The goal of having people in charge of the tools they use and that the tools should amplify ability" has long been abandoned
Links 29/05/2025: YouTube Problem and Giant Privacy Hole in Microsoft OneDrive
Links for the day
[Video] Cory Doctorow Explains DMCA: DRM in the Browser (or Webapp) Will "Make It a Felony to Protect Your Privacy While You Use It."
Pycon US Keynote Speaker Cory Doctorow
United States Courts With Sworn Testimonies Are on Our Side, We'll Present the Same Here
Chronicling what happened is a moral imperative
Serial Sloppers Ruin and Lessen the Incentive to Cover "Linux"
The Serial Sloppers (SSs) ought to be named and shamed, but almost nobody does this
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, May 28, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Links 28/05/2025: 'Emulation Layers' (Measurements and Linguistics), Libraries, and Discomfort
Links for the day
Links 28/05/2025: More Arrests for Bitcoin-Connected Torture and Prosecutions for Dieselgate-Linked Executives
Links for the day
Even Microsoft (MSN) Covers Richard Stallman's Public Talk in Milan 2 Days Ago
He spoke in Spanish earlier this month (Alicante)
Gemini Links 28/05/2025: Techo-authoritarianism With Slop Plagiarism and "No Online June" (Going Offline)
Links for the day
Links 28/05/2025: GitHub MCP Exploited and MathWorks Discovers Huge Windows TCO
Links for the day
Very High Attendance Level at Richard Stallman's Talk Shows People Can Relate to His Message
Smear campaigns have their limits
Gemini Links 28/05/2025: Celsius-Fahrenheit, Endless Scrolling/Infinite Scrolling, and Trapping LLM Slop Bots
Links for the day
Prison gate backdrop to baptism by Fr Sean O'Connell, St Paul's, Coburg
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
More Photos From This Week's Milan Talk by Richard Stallman
The posts are in Italian, not English
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, May 27, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, May 27, 2025