Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 22/08/2023: Pokes and Terminal Metronome



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • The passing of Kenneth Evans Jr.

        It wasn't exactly like I didn't know it was coming. He had been going downhill in the last year and COVID didn't do him any favors. He had a number of heart attacks over the decades including a quadruple bypass that he outlived the repair and had to have it done again.

        But, knowing it was happening and having it happen are sometimes two different things. For some of us more than others.

        [...]

        In the end, he made sure we knew that he loved talking to my children and that he was proud of us. He was apologetic for dying in the same year as our mother and was struggling to make sure my brother knew the password to his BitWarden before he passed.

        My dad is the inspiration for my exit planning[4]. He was one of the most well-organized people I knew, even when it came to planning out his death. He had his paperwork gather together, his notes distributed and an archived drive with (almost) everything we needed.

      • A Farewell to Leaderboards

        Some...things...came up today, the result of which was that I ended up making my Duolingo profile private. This has a couple of effects: it stops you from having friends in-app; and, it turns off the leaderboard.

        I was sad for the former, though in my group chat, my Duo friends totally understood the reason: unwanted attention. But turning off rankings and leaderboards? Holy hell. That was amazing. This app is for learning again.

      • Work From Home: Pros and Cons
      • WILDER, an indie magazine about nature (in Portuguese)

        A couple of weeks ago I found this Portuguese[^0] indie magazine about nature called WILDER... and boy it's pretty fucking good!

        They publish around two articles per day, about news or scientific studies. There's a section titled "Que espécie é esta?" ("What species is this?") where readers send observations of their own, and specialists collaborating with the magazine try to determine the species (on a best effort basis) -- it's pretty cool to learn of so many different life forms living around here. And for some weeks now there's been a running series of interviews of those specialists, titled "Embaixadores por Natureza" ("Ambassadors for Nature").

    • Technology and Free Software

      • more pokes

        I was looking for anything that might hint at what went wrong in the commits. I first found a closed issue about windows computers not being able to connect to the bootstrap.

      • poking at the thing

        woke up this morning, booted my computer, and saw veilid-server had been failing to bootstrap. so, ofc I bother someone on the internet with the problem before I actually look into it and get the "did you update it?" response. ofc I had not. I do that. and it still does the thing from before the update, and this is where I started poking. I found that the bootstrap server is bootstrap.veilid.net. appropriate enough. I dig the domain for the A and AAAA records, and ping to make sure they are all pingable.

      • Terminal Metronome

        So today I sat down to practice guitar and I realized that I left both my metronomes at my sister's room. Obviously I wasn't going to get up to go and fetch one, so I picked up a bash spell tome (man SoX) and with a little bash magic, made a basic metronome.

      • Migrating prosody internal storage to SQLite on OpenBSD

        As some may know, I'm an XMPP user, an instant messaging protocol which used to be known as Jabber. My server is running Prosody XMPP server on OpenBSD. Recently, I got more users on my server, and I wanted to improve performance a bit by switching from the internal storage to SQLite.

        Actually, prosody comes with a tool to switch from a storage to another, but I found the documentation lacking and on OpenBSD the migration tool isn't packaged (yet?).

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Hello!



          I'm Day. I stumbled upon Geminispace somehow last week, and thought this would be a good place to get to know everyone :)

          I'm probably going to be treating my profile page? site? as a sandbox for playing with Gemtext, and figuring out how to make fun stuff within the constraints of Gemini, so I might not make too many posts of my own.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Sophie Brun, Raphael Hertzog & Debian sexual conflicts of interest
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Instant Bluewashing at Confluent: Mass Layoffs Alleged at IBM
So the main question is, did IBM just fire 800 people?
 
Slop Is Plagiarism, Not (Vibe) Coding, and It's Not Automated, It Doesn't Save Money
Reject misnomers, explain what's actually happening
UPC is Still Illegal and Unconstitutional (Kangaroo Court for Patents, Manned by Corporate Staff), Federal Court of Justice of Germany Receives Belated Complaint About It
What is happening to Europe???
EPO Demonstration Happening Right Now, Later This Week Things Will Only Escalate Further
The SUEPO The Hague Committee wrote to staff this morning
Links 18/03/2026: Commodore's Hedley Davis Dies, Apple Not Good Enough, Cheeto "Floats Treason Charges for Iran War Coverage"
Links for the day
A Step Close to Shutting Down the European Patent Office (EPO)
Not going to work all month long
EPO Staff Demonstration Today
The demonstration will be live-streamed for those thousands of colleagues who don't live in Munich
Gemini Links 18/03/2026: Brazilian SYN Attacks and BGP
Links for the day
LibreLocal Also Coming to Jordan, Kenya, Mexico, New Zealand, and Spain
It helps raise awareness of Software Freedom
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 17, 2026
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 14 Out of 200: Men Who Strangle Women (and Worse) Trying to Force Us to Write Public Apologies to These Men
For those who never before saw a SLAPP, they basically make many demands
"Vibe-forking" and Why It'll Ultimately Fail (Hype on Top of Hype)
Code made with LLMs sucks; converting solid, human-tested code into slop only complicates matters and increases risk
Updates About Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation
After all those years (a decade) and in spite of phony scandals many people out there still respect him
LLM Slop With "Linux" in the Domain Names
This is becoming a pain and a problem also in the arts and in software engineering
The EFF Has a Bug, Fixing This Bug is Likely Not Possible Anymore
"the EFF's continued existence impairs the arrival of a replacement organization, one which will actually champion digital rights."
Links 17/03/2026: Microsoft Windows Broken by Samsung, Afghanistan-Pakistan War Escalation
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/03/2026: Newcomers and False-Positive 'Slop'
Links for the day
Héctor Orón Martínez & Debian shadow candidate pressure on Sruthi Chandran
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 17/03/2026: American Fentanylware (TikTok) Investors Implicated in Kickbacks, "Big Oil Knew It Was Wrecking Louisiana’s Coast"
Links for the day
For Third Time in a Week The Register MS Runs Google SPAM That Paints Google as an Ally of Women (Which is False, They're Womanisers)
What does that make The Register MS to women?
British Justice Minister Sarah Sackman Blasts Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
The "legal industry" is due for "some reckoning"
GAFAM Deprecating Old Videos ("Content") by Removing the Support for Their Format for No Good Reason
"Security" is not a valid excuse
Credit/Debit Cards Have Long Been Called Plastics, Over Time They're Becoming More Like Pure Plastics
They cost less than a dollar to manufacture
The European Patent Office (EPO) Holds a Public Demonstration Tomorrow and It'll be Live-streamed
The EPO's workforce was meant to be capable of speaking many languages and have extensive experience in the sciences
People Who Attacked Techrights Also Attacked My Mother
Picking on old ladies because you don't like Free software advocates is never OK
Little Community Element Left in CentOS
CentOS, unlike Fedora, was meant to be long supported and solid
Social Control Media is Cancel Culture (Companies Like Facebook Also Punish/Ban Accounts for Mentioning "Linux" and Lobby for Anti-Linux Legislation)
The masters of Social Control Media decide what ideas can and cannot be expressed
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 16, 2026
IRC logs for Monday, March 16, 2026
Someone at Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is Censoring the Birthday Greetings to Richard Stallman
Some people remember
The European Patent Office (EPO) Illegally Transitioning Into 'Gig' 'Economy' Equivalent (a Shop for Patent Monopolies in Europe)
for scabs aka SEALs
At Least Six EPO Strikes Next Month (Yes, Six!)
The pressure intensifies over time
Several MPs Blast Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) for Inaction and Ineffective Action This Week
"Four MPs have written to the SRA"
Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 14 Out of 200: The Abusive Cases of the Serial Strangler From Microsoft and His Litigation Buddy Garrett Did Cause "Serious Harm"
claims were de facto abandoned at the trial
Today's Discussions About How IBM Pushes Workers Out
The corporate media keeps trying - baselessly and in vain - to paint everything that happens with the "hey hi" brush
Linux Teck (linuxteck.com) and Ubuntu PIT (ubuntupit.com) Are Botspam
now they just keep experimenting by trashing their sites and reputation
Links 16/03/2026: Moscow Experiencing Cellphone Internet Outages, "Salman Rushdie Is Tired of Talking About Free Speech"
Links for the day
Links 16/03/2026: Arctic Security and 'Mr. Nobody Against Putin'
Links for the day
Gemini Links 16/03/2026: KN95 Skins and CSS Surprises
Links for the day
Debian is Dying for Some of the Same Reasons IBM's Fedora is Rapidly Dying
Prioritising CoC censorship, not communities
The Register MS is Again Femmewashing GAFAM (Which Makes Widows) in Exchange for Money
This is a moral issue because they betray or harm women and prop up authoritarian regimes
Gemini Links 16/03/2026: AB 1043, Lagrange Android Beta 47, and Poetry
Links for the day
"Slop-forking" or "Vibe-forking" as the New 'Noble' Plagiarism
New Cloudflare Slop Project?
EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part VII - Cult Mentality, Mobbing, Nepotism
Does the EPO actually believe in the law?
2026 Microsoft Layoff Rumours
Surely if we had properly-functioning media, then someone would investigate this rather than rely on official statements from Microsoft and WARN notices
EPO Strike This Week
contact your national representatives about it
Gemini Links 15/03/2026: "Create Opportunities for Good Things to Happen", DOSbook, and Bitcoin Criticism
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 15, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, March 15, 2026
Pirate Praveen Arimbrathodiyil & Debian denouncing volunteers, hiding romances
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock