Gemini Links 14/02/2024: Gemini PDA and Installing LibreOffice on FreeBSD 14.0
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Notes from an overheard conversation from a car attempting a right turn
“Oh! Now what?”
“Sir, see the lit sign up there? You cannot turn right.”
“But did you not see the car right in front of me turning right?”
“Sir, if a person jumped off a bridge, would you follow?”
“Yes.”
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Frames Of Reference- Chapter 8
I walk outside holding a lukewarm ceramic mug of unnecessary coffee. I spent most of the morning on my laptop, perusing various articles for mentions of any company by the name “Agarico”. There were none. I worried that maybe I’d misheard Bradford, that it was something else, but the memory of the word rings true. Some phantom organization with no records. Either that, or he's lying. More lies, more deception. The last thing I need right now is a further illusory layer. I don’t like words that have no traceable etymology.
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And So, It Begins...
So I left experimenting too late, meaning my experiment now has to become a game. Not a problem! I was just hoping to have more of a solid idea of what was needed before I got started is all.
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Weather
The first third of February was quite warm here. It means nothing as we can get some serious snow as late as in April. We will see.
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One month in
We are now 1 month into 2024. It hasn't really been a stellar year for Japan so far. On new year's day Ishikawa Prefecture had that awful earthquake that they are still trying to recover from. The very next day was that terrible accident at Haneda Airport, and just this last weekend we had a decent sized earthquake that rattled buildings all around Tokyo, Chiba and Yokohama. I have a really bad feeling that this summer is going to be another miserable one.
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They Might As Well Be Dead
It's been about 10 days since it started raining here. One night there was even a thunder-storm with lots of noisy thunders. Umbrellas are not always the best solution against getting wet; some coats and jackets provide you with a better protection.
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Technology and Free Software
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Usual situation
During years I noticed a strange phenomena: if I have became used to something then it suddenly changes or ceases to exist. The obvious examples are the Psion PDA (they decided to quit teh PDA market just after I bought the Series 5), the PowerPC at the Apple (well, they released the OS Tiger just after I finally familiarised withthe Jaguar and they announced their switch to the Intel just a feew weeks after I finally decided to get the iMac), then Palm (I so much wanted the WebPad!), the Linux version of the Intel Compute stick or the nVidia Shield tablets (I'm sorry but I had two).
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Gopher client
If the UMN Gopher client is the one you get on Linux/*BSD, then that's the one I use.
I sometimes come across a Gopher hole where I cannot scroll past the first page, in which case I use Lynx.
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On the SGI now
The frequency of use of my once the main desktop (the SGI O2, 2005-2019) was terrible in the 2023 and it wasn't better in this January. This is not good because this machine this easier to use than almost anything, prevents distraction caused by social networks, an e-mail and even by the most of WWW pages (nothing of that stuff works here these days).
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Gemini PDA sans camera
In the middle of the last year I have noticed that my Gamini PDA is not detecting it main camera. It wasn't a big issue as I use the Gemini rarely (it's Android 7 cannot be upgraded and many apps cannot be installed on this device at all) and the camera was quite bad.
Yesterday I tried to check connection of the camera but nothing helped. It was just and add-on (even if expensive one) so I had the "old" back cover without the camera hole. Thus I have removed the camera and have installed that old cover.
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Installing LibreOffice on FreeBSD 14.0
I recently upgraded my FreeBSD to version 14.0. Then I found that LibreOffice is no longer installed, so I installed it. The process included 618 steps of installing, deleting and upgrading packages. After the installation, the desktop environment XFCE stopped working. After reboot the command 'stratx' failed and returned me to the GUI-less shell. The reason was that the file ". /usr/local/etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc" did not exist.
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Internet/Gemini
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Starting Gemlog Entries Faster Part 2 (publ. 2024-02-14)
One thing I am little nervous about is the use of find-file, as it does not necessarily do what I would want — throw a fatal error — under some exceptional cases. E.g., I found that if the file doesn't exist, then find-file will go ahead and create a non-writable empty buffer. But there are several convenient things about find-file, namely that (1) it opens the file in a buffer, or switches to that buffer, and (2) it can process Tramp compatible file names, so that the files can be files we are working with remotely through Tramp and SSH.
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Programming
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Don't want the first line of a git commit COMMIT_EDITMSG buffer in emacs to wrap?
Again, the trick is to use the Emacs variable fill-nobreak-predicate, but it's a bit trickier than my earlier example.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.