Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 14/09/2023: Learning LaTeX and Using Slackware



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • teaching kids

        after 2 months of resting from 4 years of studying in college, i got a job. now i am a teacher of computer science. in the school where i studied. everyone here were inviting me for about half a year, including some highschoolers i knew.

        the first week i questioned my experience (still do, im not a teacher, i just write english words in nvim and they get colored differently). but the kids are kind to me. i talk about different topics with them. yesterday a lot of girls tried to make me watch their favorite anime series. also i got a... love letter? there are a lot of hearts. perhaps they are trying to brown-nose, knowing that I am not such a mean or experienced person. but i will not give good grades just because of pretty eyes.

      • Expanding the concept of Rules for Life

        Our initial reaction to any rule is to reject it, since we have free will, even if it is good for us. We tend to think that rules restrict and oppress us when, in fact, the opposite is true. Without rules, we quickly become slaves to our passions; without rules that give us clear guidance on what to do or not, we end up declining more and more. Therefore, rules are not restrictive but liberating.

        If we take all possible models of life from Greek literature, we will see that there is a limit that cannot be exceeded.

      • Fall Scenery (publ. 2023-09-14)

        These are some photos I took along the Tanana River (Fairbanks, AK, USA) last Friday (Sept 8). After visiting my parents a few days ago, who have a much slower Internet connection, I decided to start uploading lower resolution photos along with the original 4MB files.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • termemu

        xterm, because it comes with OpenBSD. xterm is bloated, but finding (or writing) something more suitable would be a pain. Rarely urxvt if a silly game needs it; urxvt buffers better; you can see a flicker in xterm if the code is bad and sprays escape sequences, a lot. Otherwise not urxvt as there are a few annoyances I'd have to figure out how to fix, and there's no tuits there, especially given that xterm is mostly good enough.

      • My email setup

        On the server side, it’s pretty vanilla. Postfix, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, WKD.

        On the client side, I use mbsync and notmuch and I have a ton of automatic filters via nmsync.

        Everything that those filters label with feed I read in a feedreader instead of an email app thanks to nmatom. I can check in on those newsletters once per day. No stress. And they’re not getting tangled up in my personal business, they don’t trigger notifications, they don’t require responses, they show up when I have time to read ‘em etc. Pretty great.

        I also have the opposite, thanks to rss2email; I have one RSS feed (janitorial type news from inside my building) that are so urgent that I get them in my email client.

      • Learning, Loving, LaTeX

        I first used LaTeX last year for a final assignment for one of my computer science classes. It involved needing to put a long series of images (more than 30) in a specific order, in a document and after struggling immensely with the first five, I decided to reassess my approach. LibreOffice is both an excellent and poor example of free software. It serves as a great one to one competitor to the Microsoft Office suite, albeit not as polished or feature rich, but enabling you to at the very least view files from the rest of society. That being said it also comes with all the same upsides and downsides as Word and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Google Docs. Graphical word processors are great for less-than tech savvy people, because it gives you the "What you see is what you get" experience, which works great for easy-to-format text. Now try to insert an image and watch your document rip itself to shreds. This is the position I was in, trying to put four images on a page, with them all being equally sized and occupying the four quadrants of the page, unable to get it working for the life of me in either LibreOffice or Google Docs. Then I remembered hearing about LaTeX and how easy it made formatting documents. I had never tried it and so I watched a few video guides on how to use it. It seemed simple enough and so I gave it a shot and just about instantly fell in love. I was able to do the whole assignment in vim (and GIMP for creating the images) and properly insert the images the way I wanted in a matter of minutes!

      • Using slackware

        I recently started to use slackware for my desktop, I tried it a few time in the past and didn't take the time to create a setup.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • AuraGem Music Relaunch

          I am announcing the relaunch of AuraGem Music. AuraGem Music was a project I originally announced on 2022-07-15 that allowed people to upload their private collections of music with Titan and stream their private collection with Gemini. Unfortunately, the service was slow at that time, for various reasons, but this situation has been improved; although, it's still not perfect since the AuraGem server is still on a home network, but for 320 kbps mp3 files, it should still be fine.

          Streaming on AuraGem Music should support any Gemini browsers that allow for streaming (by not timing out on long streams). Uploading music will require a client that supports Titan. Lagrange is an example of a client that supports both Titan and Gemini.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Linus Torvalds Blasts Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) for Attempting to 'Protect' Linux
Like it 'protects' women
New Record for GNU/Linux in Australia (at Microsoft's Expense)
Windows is at an all-time low, GNU/Linux... all-time high
Fighting Over Whose Pockets Are Deeper (or Who Borrows More Money)
When processes favour those who are more wealthy (or more willing to go into infinite debt or steal money of other people) those processes match the attributes of lawfare rather than law
Starting a Book With a Flawed Premise or Weak Hypothesis
To me, Schneier is a sort of "RMS of sec"
Microsoft's Mass Layoffs (30,000+ in 2025) Not About "AI", Just Business Failure
"AI" is replacing... the old excuses for mass layoffs
EPO People Power - Part XVI - Berenguer Does Not Speak German, So What Did He Tell German Police That Busted Him?
based in Germany and does not speak the language
Challenges for EPO Insiders to Try to Tackle in 2026
Nothing will get solved as long as the circus that runs this show tries to keep the circus going
 
Links 28/12/2025: Fascination, Holidays, and Mormonism
Links for the day
Microsoft's Weapon Against the Reality of XBox (the Console) Dying Seems to be LLM Slop
XBox is dead/dying
Raffles for the Immaterial: Unauthorised Bingo for Red Hat "Vouchers"
This is IBM and some slop images
Andy Farnell on Standing Up Against Technological Oppression
some portions from it
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, December 27, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, December 27, 2025
Once Again, GAFAM Deletes All Your Data, Only Corrects This After Millions of People Lead an Uproar Online ("Richard Stallman Warned Us About This")
No lessons learned, eh?
You Know Your Critics Are Jealous and Have Inferiority Complex When...
One day we'll write about all this in great depth
"But Corruption is Everywhere"
"We'll always have Polio..."
Days Without Slop About "Linux"
It's time to move on
Links 27/12/2025: Canada Post Strike Called Off, Debate About Europeans "Working Over Christmas"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/12/2025: Household Appliances and Flight Fright
Links for the day
Links 27/12/2025: US Cracking Down on Whistleblowers, Expanding Bombardment Campaigns Worldwide
Links for the day
Resuming EPO Coverage Today, Can António Campinos 'Survive' Cocainegate?
We said we'd continue in the weekend
Links 27/12/2025: More Attacks on Media (Meduza Co-founder Sentenced to Prison in Absentia), "What Owning Music Means To Me"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/12/2025: geminiprotocol.net Downtime and Capsular Gemlog Manager
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, December 26, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, December 26, 2025
Tossing Embarrassing News Under the Christmastime Bus
This isn't just some coincidence; those are conscious choices
Victim-Blaming in Debian
Verhelst previously did blame-shifting when Debian suicide clusters happened
IBM Cuts in Japan, Red Hat is Attached to a Sinking Ship
IBM, which controls Red Hat, is a rapidly shrinking company
Manchester United Dumped Microsoft Because Qualcomm Sort of Did
The Windows PCs were an utter failure
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Supported by Unconventional Digital Bartering Communities
But no strings attached
Geminispace: 5,000 Capsules in 2026
There are 4.8k now
Gemini Links 26/12/2025: Careful What You Eat and "My Secret Santa"
Links for the day
The Indigenous Community Versus Corporate AstroTurt and 'Cancel Culture'
Good people will recognise exactly what's happening here and respond to it tactfully
Richard Stallman: Epstein is a Serial Rapist. Bill Epsteingate: Epstein is a Friend.
Supporting the FSF (or Richard Stallman) is supporting those who asserted Epstein had serially raped women
The Paradox of GAFAM: Saying You Protect Women, Appointing Abusers of Women to Run the Company
older articles
Censored by FreeBSD Core Team Secretary, Reinstated After Talking About it in Public
FreeBSD misfiring a CoC?
Links 26/12/2025: Chatbot Toys Terrorising Children, US Undeclared "War on Terror" Unilaterally Extends to Nigeria During Holidays
Links for the day
Links 26/12/2025: French Postal Services Under Russian Attack, U.S. Cheetos Accuse People Who Obstruct Information Warfare by Russia of "Censorship"
Links for the day
Debian's Daniel Kahn Gillmor is Wrong, Signal is No "Gold Standard" (It's Also Promoted by Proponents of Back Doors)
I'm not too sure why Debian or the ACLU would wish to associate with this
Next Year Will be the Year of Quantum, Just Like 2020, 2015, 2010, 2005 and So On
"Quantum" is the future
The Silent Power of Coercion Over Speech
The important thing is optics
Kazakhstan Doesn't Need GAFAM Datacentres (Spy Hubs)
Suffice to say, as far as we can gather nothing came out from the empty (false) promises of GAFAM's "data centers in Kazakhstan"
So Simple That You Can Touch and Feel It
In light of recent experiences
Christmas Music Project: Back to When Music Was Music
now Canonical (or Ubuntu) says we should make available tens of gigabytes of disk space
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Under Attack by Cross-Network Spam Floods
So far we've been spared (our network has not been targeted at all) [...] Let's hope the spam won't discourage the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who still use IRC
An "AI-Infused" Windows
Microsoft Windows isn't becoming a worthless pile of garbage by accident
Microsoft Laid Off Over 30,000 People This Year, Coders Are "Too Expensive"
Go get some popcorn. Microsoft "slopware" is about to get real!
Critics Have Long Said Microsoft Produces "Slopware", Microsoft Wants to Prove Them Right
Slop instead of code is a step in the right direction?
The Top 8 Innovations of IBM in 2025
What innovations will come out from IBM in 2026?
And as the Year Turns...
The significance of new years isn't based on geology or astronomy or anything like that
Appliances Versus Computers
Replacing a computer inside an object of some kind or inside an appliance (which nowadays includes "modern" cars) isn't simple and isn't cheap
A Dark Side of Europe
They try hard to silence people who speak about these issues
Why People Love Techrights (and Also Loved "Boycott Novell")
I will continue to publish for many decades to come
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 25, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, December 25, 2025
Browsing Techrights With a GUI and 10 Megabytes of RAM Per Tab
Some people say it's not possible in 2025, maybe in part because they depend on very bloated software
A Tribute to Richard Stallman
It's about knowledge and sharing
Links 26/12/2025: Impermanence, Salt and Thermometer, Freetube
Links for the day