Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 30/08/2023: 90′s Kids Trackball and Sleuthing an Old Phone



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Invega withdrawal and other things

        It has been 24 days that I've been on 4.5 mg of Invega. No noticeable withdrawal effects today.

        Other than the "benign" paranoia that is constantly present in my mind and which I don't think will ever go away, I haven't had any episodes of the panicky paranoia aside from that one day last week. My cognition feels basically the same as it did on the higher dose. I had panicky paranoia episodes on that too.

        My mood seems stable today.

        I have been feeling sad and lonely/socially alienated intermittently. This seems to be an outcome of social anxiety and rejection sensitivity. The other day I made a minor mistake on a public GitHub repository and felt stupid/terrible about it, and my brain probably made a bigger deal out of it than it actually was (catastrophizing).

      • Biggest Fear (breadcrumbs)

        > And my biggest fear is that we're going to just continue with business as usual until we have a collapse of biodiversity and life on this planet. And actually, my biggest, biggest fear is that we're going to do that and we're going to continue living and we're going to live in this dead world. We're going to find some way to engineer ourselves to the point that we can live -- survive, but we're going to survive without all of the beauty and all of the life around us.

      • The hypocrisy of Australia’s Net Zero policy (breadcrumbs)

        An unbroken canopy of ancient eucalypts rides over the ridges of the Atherton Tablelands and disappears into the horizon. Queensland’s wet, tropical ecosystem is like nowhere else on Earth, the sacred remnants of the ancient Gondwanan forest that covered Australia before it separated from Antarctica 100 million years ago. Chalumbin Forest survived the axes of Queensland’s early settlers with its ancient ecosystem virtually intact. Yet a brutal reckoning with modernity could be just months away. “They’re going to put the windmills in there, aren’t they?” said Tommy, my Aboriginal guide, as we looked down at the forest from a secluded bluff. “They want to really rip this whole country up.”

      • 🔤SpellBinding: EJNOYUR Wordo: MEDIC
      • Hot Dogs and Découpé

        Had a great time out last night with my partner and a couple of friends. We went to a little brew pub, its interior done up sort of kitschy island/beach style. Games stacked up in the corner. Had a couple of drinks, a couple of fancy hot dogs. Chatted and played a couple of games of 31. I was out first the first time, almost won the second.

        Received a really nice handmade mug from our friends as my birthday present, which I'll cherish: she made it in her pottery class, and it's a smaller one, maybe roughly teacup sized? A little larger? Meant for smaller drinks. Seems like it'll be perfect for my little Moka pot.

        This morning I woke up and it's downright cool. The kitchen window covered completely in dew; I was just wearing a t-shirt and was shivering when I let the dogs out to pee. It feels like a fall morning. We were supposed to have a hot week, and that's just sort of vanished.

    • Politics and World Events

      • 90's Kids Trackball (Microsoft EasyBall)

        This was a trackball aimed at kids, it's very easy to use and only has one button. The ball itself is a bit squeaky but I'll open it up and have a look if we can grease it up a bit.

        Seller just wanted to get rid of it, only cost me €2. Which is a steal in my book!

        In my last post I wrote about getting my Win95 desktop back up and running to test this trackball on, while I did get it up and running, I ran into a problem with the PCI VGA card (S3 Trio64v+) where lines would appear on-screen when attempting to use resolutions above 640x480 (all I wanted was 800x600). So that one has been moved to the 'fix-it' pile.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Sleuthing an Old Phone

        I've owned and used nine different mobile phones in my life so far. I remember every one of them too; I even maintain a list of them here on my capsule. That list contains some supplementary information as well, specifically when I began using each phone, when I stopped using them, and what carrier I used them with. I was able to find date information well after the fact by using various clues, such as when a photo was taken with the device.

        That supplementary list, however, is incomplete. There is one phone I owned for which I don't have a started-using date--indeed, I have very little evidence that I ever owned it at all. That phone is the second phone I owned: the LG CU515.

        The CU515 was a major upgrade from the Nokia 6030 I started out with. It was my first flip phone; it had a camera; it had expandable storage; it could set custom ringtones and SMS tones. everyone in my family had owned a camera flip phone by then except me, and I was thrilled to join the camera phone club.

      • Programming

        • LLMs for research

          Pretty much everyone has dabbled with LLMs by now, and most have found it nigh-unusable. My own experience of it is like working with a very, very dumb and lazy research assistant who's only saving grace is that they can justify any of their half-assed answers. It's a profoundly frustrating contact.

          But if you need an idiot, it might be the right thing.

          In research, we tend to outsource tasks to strangers. Typically, this is either annotation—we get people to read some text and extract some information—or participation in studies—the tasks are part of an experimental protocol to illuminate something. Strangers are pretty much anyone. We don't expect any special skill or knowledge, except basic linguistic habilities. Want to know if people are talking about covid-19? If the text in your corpus are about a conspiracy or another? Some LLMs can do just fine.

        • CGI scripts: simple vs easy

          This post is a follow-up on the previous announcement of gmid 2.0 dropping CGI script support. I felt that I had to explain more accurately why I decided to drop that feature and what are the options available and what I can try to do before finalizing the release.

        • Go-C interop memory leak

          Wrote a program at $JOB that, for each frame obtained from a camera, tries to scan barcodes. The purpose was to replace a handful of libraries not compatible with Node.js v18[^0]. The Node.js controller program spawns this other program (camera-streamer), passing some static parameters as program arguments, and otherwise communicating through stdin/stdout. It's a simple solution and I'm pretty happy with it[^1].

          We wanted something compiled and relatively fast (though almost anything would be better than JS), and with good C interop because of the libs we used underneath. We chose Go. It's an annoying language, but I can't say it was a bad choice in the end. Message passing in Go is (almost) a gift from Joe Armstrong himself (if it wasn't so dumbbed down), and makes concurrency super easy (though not reliable)!

        • gmid and CGI

          So the next version of gmid will drop CGI support. This caused a complaint on the #gemini IRC channel. The problem is that CGI support is pretty trivial to add, something like...


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Richard Stallman is Usually Right Because He Thinks "Outside the Box"
he is able to observe society (mores and norms) as somewhat of an outsider
The Week to Come
Planning ahead
LLM Slop Has Only Been a Boon for Misinformation Online
The very same companies that were supposed to maintain quality (again, not limited to Google with PageRank) are now actively participating in generating and spreading slop
When They Tell You It's Free, Does That Mean No Charges (If So, Who's Paying and Why)?
there's "no free lunch"
 
Nonfree Software in My Bank, by Richard Stallman
Updated 8 hours ago
Links 28/07/2025: Science, Health, and Conflicts
Links for the day
Gemini Links 28/07/2025: Healthy Self-Image With Autism and a "New Life"
Links for the day
Links 28/07/2025: COVID-19 Sped up Brain Aging, "Circumvention is More Popular Than Compliance"
Links for the day
LWN Has Been Down for a Long Time, Another Casualty of LLM Bots?
Time will tell. How much time though?
Slopfarms Versus 'Linux' (and Against People Who Write Real Articles About GNU/Linux)
LLM slop in slopfarms by Brian Fagioli and Redazione RHC
Gemini Links 28/07/2025: Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray and Running pkgsrc in a FreeBSD Jail
Links for the day
Microsoft Turns News Sites Into Spamfarms
Is the site The Register MS the next IDG?
The Register MS/The Register US
On Saturday I contacted them for a comment (before issuing criticism)
Hacking revelations at Vatican Jubilee of Digital Missionaries
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, July 27, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, July 27, 2025
We're Going to Focus Less on the Molotov Cocktail-Throwing Microsofters and More on Patents
We can get back to focusing on what we wanted to focus on all along
Just Trying to Keep Web Sites Honest (Journalistic Integrity)
the latest articles in LinuxIac are real
Links 27/07/2025: Political Affairs, Data Breaches, Attacks on Freedom of the Press
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/07/2025: Hot in Japan and Terminal Escape Codes
Links for the day
Links 27/07/2025: More Microsoft Layoffs Coming, Science and Hardware News
Links for the day
Links 27/07/2025: FSF Hackathon and "Hulk Hogan Was a Very Bad Man"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/07/2025: DAW Mixer Chains and Simple Software
Links for the day
The Register MS is Inventing or Giving Air Time to New Conspiracy Theories so as to Distort the Narrative As High-Profile Agencies Fall Prey to Microsoft Holes
But the problem is holes, i.e. Microsoft making bad products; the problem is Microsoft
Most Editors at The Register Are American, Including the Editor in Chief, a Decade-Long Microsoft Stenographer (Writing Prose to Sell Microsoft)
It's not easy to tell where the site is based (we tried) because it's hiding behind ClownFlare and CrimeFlare hasn't been well lately
Pushers of systemd Rewrite History (Richard Stallman Said UNIX "Was Portable and Seemed Fairly Clean")
Unlike systemd
"New Techrights" Soon Turns 2 (A Few Days Before the FSF Turns 40)
We have a lot more to say about LLM bots
When Silence Says So Much
Garrett, a 'secure' boot pusher, will need to defend himself in the UK High Court
The Register in Trouble
There is not much that can be done at this point
Trajectory of The Register: From News Site/s Into "B2B"... and Into Microsoft Salespeople
Something isn't right at The Register
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 26, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, July 26, 2025
Misinformation in Social Control Media
Social control media passes around all sorts of tropes
Slopwatch: Fake Linux 'Articles' and Slopfarms With "Linux" in Their Names/Domains
throwing bots at "Linux" to make some fake articles
Links 26/07/2025: Amazon Shutdown in China, Russian Economy Slows
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/07/2025: History of Time (1988) and Gemini Games
Links for the day
Links 26/07/2025: 50 Percent Tariffs in Amazon, Dying Intel Offloads Network and Edge Group (NEX)
Links for the day
Doing My Share to Tackle Online Slop and SPAM
Trying my best to 'fix' the Web
Blaming Programming Languages for Users' and Developers' Bad Practices
That's like blaming cars for drivers who crash into things
Slopwatch: Fakes, FUD, Duplicates, and Charlatans Galore
The Web as we once know it is collapsing. Some opportunists try to replace it with low-quality slop.
The Register UK Seems to Have Become American and Management is Changing (Microsofter as Editor in Chief)
The Register 'UK' is now controlled by the Directions on Microsoft guy
Many People Still Read Techrights Because It Says the Truth, Produces Evidence, and Does Not Self-Censor
Unlike so many other sites
The Register is Desperate for Money, According to The Register
I decided to check how they're doing as a business
Microsoft Finally Finds a Use Case for Slop?
Create low-quality chaff to shift the media's attention?
Microsoft Windows Lost 400 Million Users in a Few Years, Why Does The Register Double Down on Windows With New US Editor?
days ago they hired a new US editor
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, July 25, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, July 25, 2025
For Libel Reform One Must First Bring (or Raise) Awareness to the Issues and Their Magnitude
I myself know, from personal experience
Links 26/07/2025: Rationed Meals in the US and TikTok Repels Investments (Too Toxic)
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/07/2025: "Bloody Google" and New People in Geminispace
Links for the day
Response to Solderpunk (Father of Gemini Protocol) About the Gemini Community
Solderpunk responds to non-sequitur
HTML and the Web Used to be Something a Child Could Learn, "Modern" Web is a Puzzle of Frameworks, Bloat, and Worse
When the Web was more like Gemini Protocol