Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 04/08/2023: Gemini Client Preferences and FreeBSD Minimum Desktop Guide



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Heaviest Of Them All

        Alas, the fate was sealed And 'twas decided that he ought to live in peril And to roam in vain For an eternity unknown Until his undoing cometh.

        And to be forgotten both above and under the earth. Thus was decided for him And thus it shall be ...

      • Head in Pisces

        Her cracked lips are leaking. Both eyes still work, but cannot grasp the damage. The skeletal fingers tip-toe from her shoulder up the neck, looking for the point of impact. There it is, a screwdriver through the throat, barely missed the trachea. The hand grabs the handle.

        "What the fuck are you doing?!" The shattered blade exclaims through a flooded speaker in its hilt. She spits into her other hand. Oily blue mixed with blood reflecting the hot orange light of antique lightbulbs in the ceiling. "Don't fucking pull it out, stop!"

      • The Moments We Feel Alive

        When I was a kid, I’d sometimes have the clarity to realize how truly meaningful or special a moment was.

        Once, a friend from a previous town had come to visit for the summer. We spent the days in the woods, exploring or building forts, and the nights inside playing PlayStation. I knew the summer would be over in the blink of an eye, my friend would return to his town and I might never see him again. But I had a trick.

        It’s going to sound odd, but I would squeeze my tear ducts with my thumb and pointer finger and massage them. Yes it’s strange, but this would give me a moment of clarity, a moment where I felt truly in the moment, instead of being swept away by time. I would feel my mind clear, the weight of life lifted from my head. I’d do this often, trying to remember moments like that summer.

      • As the evening comes to a close

        But for a few unavoidable exceptions, if something doesn't load in elinks, I consider it not worth my time. There are plenty of good reads in Gemini, and simple personal websites some of those authors create. Ain't got time to watch a page load, jump around so that I wind up clicking on the wrong links, suddenly displays an overlay or popup requiring a click to make it go away, etc.

      • Taking time off

        So I kind of have August off? And it's flipping wild, tbh, because I don't think I've ever intentionally taken more than a couple of days off at a time in my life.

      • Do I know how to be happy?

        I think one of the cruelest things anyone has ever said to me was a decade ago when I was dating someone who had spent a lot of time telling me I needed to open up, needed to learn to rely on them, &c. and then when I was talking about how hard shit was in grad school they got quiet and said

      • 🔤SpellBinding: ADEFITX Wordo: CONEY
      • Midnight Poll I

        It's not that I stopped having dreams. But I stopped remembering them. Perhaps they weren't so special anymore.

        Maybe it's because I became busier with life, and at the end of the day I was too tired to keep thinking, let alone remember.

      • I wish there were more garbage in this world

        Oh my gosh, how I loved "Garbage 2.0"!

        Kinda makes me wonder if we might have some favorite bands/albums in common, given you're almost exactly a generation younger than me, but I was a huge fan of much 1990s music.

        This is, I never had anyone my own age to communicate with about it, because most people my age are often insanely stuck up about the music of "our" times/day.

        I rarely whip out the CDs anymore, so I've forgotten a lot of band, album, and song names. And it's not *just* because I'm lazy, having been coddled by Alexa so quickly playing what I want/need with little to no fuss. But it's that we're generally too busy doing things requiring focus to have great songs trying to kidnap that focus. I'm not nearly as capable of doing things to music as I thought I used to be.

    • Politics and World Events

      • Re: Cost of the Right Thing

        France I recall being pretty car centric but there were plenty of walkable areas, and often good public transportation options. "The United States is a unique outlier" when it comes to car-slaughter, and public transportation generally ranges from "lol" to "no". Or, let's play granny frogger on that six-lane stroad! How bad varies by location; a tourist from Florida was quite happy that those sitting in cars were not actively trying to murder him on his bicycle; we were chatting at some intersection in Seattle, maybe it was the Elliot and Western mess, in the usual car exhaust with all the usual noise pollution.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Fingering vending machines

        This section was absent in the original RFC (RFC742, from dec. 1977), which was an incredibly succinct document. It was, however, present in both RFC1194 and RFC1196 (both from late 1990), with a slight variation on the final sentence:

        Vending machines should NEVER NEVER EVER eat requests. Or money.

      • FreeBSD minimum desktop guide

        I'm not going to cover the installation process, but it is worth noting you might want to add your user to groups 'wheel operator video'.

        The few services I use by default are local_unbound, powerd and ntpd. local_unbound caches dns requests and needs no configuration, powerd adjusts cpu frequency as is needed and enables hibernation and suspending, ntpd makes your clock synced.

        Once it's installed, I get the handbook from the post-installation menu. One benefit is that this will also set up pkg and save you 10 seconds, when you install packages for the first time.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Joining a google group (?) from a non-google email

          I recently had the displeasure of needing to join a (non-usenet) google group. Google doesn't make this easy to find anymore, but they do allow you to subscribe from a non-google account.

        • My Gemini Client Preferences

          The ideal would be to have an actual SOCKS5 interface built-in to the client, like the Firefox Web browser has. I haven't yet come across a gemini client that has SOCKS5 support. So, I've had to use torsocks. The tricky part is torsocks doesn't work well with all clients. In particular, Lagrange has this problem where, if I try to run it on top of torsocks, the feed reader occasionally crashes and causes the whole application to freeze up. At one point, I actually patched Lagrange to disable the feed runner from running, but I found it was easier just to delete all my feeds from the Lagrange feed reader, and load the feeds up using my gmisub aggregator instance. But if the client had proper SOCKS5 support, I wouldn't have to deal with torsocks at all.

        • It's feeling like one of those quoting kinds of days

          I'm glad I don't. I'm merely an occasionally humble user of it for giving me a fast path to efficiently putting easily nicely rendered text in others-accessible places where the quality of others in somewhat the same space seemingly defies Sturgeon's Law on a regular basis.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Ethics in Perspective, Free Software and Morality
top clients of Jeffrey Epstein are one happy family
The Register MS Made Millions of Pounds by Participating in the Slop Hype Campaign (It's Still Doing It), Now It Admits That It's Just a Bubble
the slop frenzy played a role in the Microsoft meltdown
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXX - Pyramid Schemes (Planned Plunder) and Canceled/Botched Surgeries Aren't "Funny", They Cause Serious Harm and Distress
We were right about Microsoft
 
Links 14/11/2026: Wuhan Corruption and "Aid Isn’t Reaching Ebola’s Epicenter"
Links for the day
Rahul Kumar Has Turned tecadmin.net Into a Slopfarm That Promotes Slop and Microsoft (as Usual)
Slop promoting slop - a death knell of once-active "Linux" sites
Large-Scale Layoffs - Not Just PIPs - at Red Hat and IBM This Month
Mainstream media has quit covering mass layoffs
Links 14/11/2026: "The Claude Delusion" and "The Microsoft Outage is a Warning for the World"
Links for the day
Richard Stallman (RMS) at Universidad Central del Ecuador (Guayaquil), Cuenca, Campus Sur Universidad Politecnica Salesiana (Quito), and Ohio State University
Long live the message and mission of RMS
They Paid Workers in 'Shares' (That Lost Almost Half Their Value in One Month)
Welcome back 1999 or 2007
Links 14/11/2026: "OpenAI Is Sustaining Enormous Losses" and Slop "Loses the Popular Vote"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, November 13, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, November 13, 2026
Gemini Links 14/11/2026: Code of Conduct, Back to Gemini, and Gemlog to Inbox
Links for the day
Slop Promotion, Including Paid-for Slop Promotion for So-called 'Linux' Foundation (Its Clients Are Slop Companies)
We've noticed a lot of this lately in "It's FOSS" and to a lesser degree in "FOSS Force"
Gemini Links 13/11/2026: Productivity Metrics and Antenna Outage
Links for the day
The Real Issue With The Register MS is Not the Politics of Some Staff's "Tweets", It's That The Register MS Publishes Fake Articles for Sponsors (50,000 Pounds Minimum)
AWS and Google each pay millions for fake articles which beget journalistic bias too (they literally pay the salaries of the 'reporters')
Microsoft Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): We Need Accountability Because Many People Die and It's Because of Microsoft Diehards or People Bribed by Microsoft to Deploy Microsoft Where Lives Are at Risk
They're trying to save face right now
What the Media Misses: It's Not an NVIDIA Issue, Super Micro Computer Inc Also Fell From $45 to $26 in the Period NVIDIA Lost 33% of Its Faked 'Value', NVIDIA is Collapsing Like Intel
History goes in circles
It's Not About China or Sex, It's About Corruption at NVIDIA and a Pyramid Scheme Perpetrated Under the Guise of "Hey Hi Revolution" (That Wasn't, It's Manufactured and Hyped by Bribes, Subsidised by Multi-Trillion-Dollar Loans, People's Pension Funds and More)
What's at stake here is a lot bigger than the "Ponzi hub" of Jensen Huang
No, You're Not a "Most Valuable Company" When Everything is Down for Half a Day in the Entire Planet
Still down, still no explanation (maybe they too aren't sure)
Waste of Money: Giving More Money to Toothless Regulators That Don't Even Examine Evidence
Shame in SRA
"Techrights Statement on Phoronix" Still Valid Five Years Later
Our position as stated in early 2022 has not changed
Vista 11's 'Growth' Has Stalled, It's Measured at Only 17.9% in the US This Year
That helps put in perspective Microsoft's attempt to discard almost 30% of its remaining workforce
"NVIDIA is Enron" (Subsidising the Pyramid Scheme That It Profited From), Microsoft is Next to be Down for the Count
Microsoft increasingly looks like the "next NVIDIA"
Richard Stallman Travels to South America to Give Talks About Free Software in Spanish, FSF Raises Money
The FSF is raising money (goal is $400,000) and the FSF has just mentioned the upcoming talks by the FSF's founder
United States Adding ~300 Billion in Government Debt Per Month, Wall Street Shaves Off Trillions in 'Value' in Less Than One Week
cushioning "assets" by helping them fake "value"
Microsoft: Pay Us for the Stuff That's Offline and We Cannot Fix
Learn to take control of the technology that you rely on
Links 13/11/2026: "Copyright-Strike-for-Hire" and "Stevie Wonder Photo Lawsuit"
Links for the day
The Slop Bubble (or Pyramid Scheme) Relied on Trust and Patience (Being Patient as Losses Grow and Debt Explodes, Trusting the Roadmap of Cheaters and Frauds)
Remember that it all began with trust
Anthropic's IPO Depends on $895.4 Billion in Debt (Money It Doesn't Have, It Loses Over 100 Billion Dollars Per Reporting Period), NVIDIA Has Just Lost Almost 2 Trillion Dollars In Value and Its Debt Trebled in Three Months
This coming week will be very, very entertaining for slop critics/sceptics to watch
At Microsoft, "Buyouts" or "Global Voluntary Separation Agreement" (GVSA) Not Much Different From Layoffs (Severance Shockingly Low)
From what we are able to gather, many people are leaving Microsoft 'voluntarily'
Is Microsoft the Next Fake-Valued Corporation to Lose 35% in "Market Value"? Is Slop Bringing Microsoft Down?
Will NDAs prevent people talking or journalists finding out the true cause?
Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) the Latest of Many to Quit Linux Development Over Linus Torvalds' Obsession With Slop (Linus Wants to Work With Bots, Not Humans Who Understand Whatever Code They Write)
Linus caught the 'brain virus'
Silent Layoffs at IBM (and Red Hat) Continue in November 2026
IBM's CEO is "a Palliative Care Doctor Who Slides [IBM] Gently Into the Night"
Microsoft Asks 60,000 Workers to Leave, Some Leave, Services Go Down
Microsoft laid off about 40,000-50,000 people in past years
Gemini Links 13/11/2026: Roku Exits the Smart Home Market and Poor Reporting/Journalism Regarding Slop Plagiarism
Links for the day
Links 13/11/2026: "Apple Support Community Forums to Permanently Close" and "The Slop Market is Getting Nervous"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, November 12, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, November 12, 2026
Gemini Links 12/11/2026: A Firing of a Boss and Geminispace Growing Fast
Links for the day
Bill Epsteingate-Funded BBC "Totally Ignoring the $1.7 Trillion Wiped off NVIDIA Stocks"
Imagine how many pension funds are tied to this NVIDIA pyramid scheme
A Few Hours Before NVIDIA CEO Canned (and NVIDIA Shares Plunged) the NVIDIA-Funded The Register MS Published Paid Spam With "AI" 18 Times in It
Anything to inflate the bubble
Links 11/11/2026: NVIDIA Decapitated, "The Company That Published Fake Journalists in Sports Illustrated is Collapsing Dramatically"
Links for the day
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXIX - We Didn't Start the Fire
It started in 2012
Photo Ops Are Liabilities
NVIDIA is not a "family business" and its CEO isn't some modest genius
NVIDIA’s Total Debt Trebled in Three Months!
Not the hallmark of a rich company unless its accounting is fraudulent
NVIDIA Turns Out to be Serial Cheater, Stock Plunges 33% in 5 Weeks
The "slop bros" have long relied on patience and blind faith
Adopting LLM Slop is Still Suicide
Suicide (in the literal sense) is also linked to adoption of chatbots
On Laundering Licences and Code
A "Second SCO" waiting to happen
The Cyber Show on Slop and the Ministry Of Truth in "Nineteen Eighty Four"
"cultural erasure" by slop
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXVIII - Keeping Both Eyes on the Ball
One upside of these disputes is that they raise at least two very important issues concerning the law
Gemini Links 12/11/2026: Encryption is Easy, Human Emacs, and Legislation in Italy
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, November 11, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, November 11, 2026