Gemini Links 24/02/2024: OpenBSD Advocacy and Nonfree Firmware Debated
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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cats
I fonud a cat under a car many years ago (maybe 2014), as I went for a walk to try the GPS of my new tablet. I took a picture of it, memorized where it was, and I went home to show it. I didn't know if we could adopt her, as we already had 2 cats... But finally we did :)
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🔤SpellBinding — ABDRYTS Wordo: WATTS
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To Hold Hands
Recently my parents visited a relative at an assisted living facility. She was in relatively good health despite her advanced age; they had seen her only two days prior and had carried out a full conversation with her. On this visit they noticed that she had begun to mumble, to the point that they found it difficult to understand her. The next day, the staff at the facility called to inform them that she was now incoherent, sleeping all day, and eating almost nothing. They recommended entering her into hospice care. My parents decided to visit again to see her condition in person, and they asked me and my wife if we would like to join them.
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Politics and World Events
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Tories finally move to ban new leasehold houses
The Conservative government's proposed ban on new leasehold houses is too riddled with exceptions to honour the commitments they made to voters.
Today the Housing Secretary Michael Gove tabled new amendments to his Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill, currently making its way through the UK parliament.
These amendments include a proposed ban on new leasehold houses, which was one of the few manifesto commitments the Conservative Party made about leasehold during the 2019 general election. However, the proposed ban has serious exclusions.
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Technology and Free Software
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Some OpenBSD features that aren't widely known
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Some OpenBSD features that aren't widely known
In this blog post, you will learn about some OpenBSD features that can be useful, but not widespread.
They often have a niche usage, but it's important to know they exist to prevent you from reinventing the wheel :)
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Nonfree Firmware And Principle (publ. 2023-02-23)
He took a few paragraphs, as an aside, to criticize the FSF for their position on nonfree-firmware. I feel that I need to address some of these points. I'm not an FSF representative — just a member — but I believe Wingo's reflections misrepresent their position and confuse the issues further.
First of all, we need to recognize the FSF's fundamental goal, which is for users to have control over their own computing. According to RMS (sorry, I don't have any references handy) the priority is individual user freedom, rather than companies or governments, though ideally he would like them to have software freedom also.
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Dusting off a green trackball
Once again a new package arrived with one of my favorite bits of computing history: it's another trackball!
This time, the trackball dates back from 1994, made by A4 Tech and has a very distinct button placement. Oh, and the ball is GREEN!
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Time Bomb
The first week of last December a developer made a simple mistake. They inadvertently committed their .nmprc to the git repository they were working on. This commit triggered the Continuous Integration process, which built the image, and the Continuous Delivery process which deployed the image to the development cluster.
The image crashed repeatedly without ever successfully starting. The developer spun the number of pods down to 0 to stop the pod from crashing and investigated. They saw their mistake, deleted the .npmrc file, and even rewrote the git history so that the file was no longer in the history, and avoid the problem from returning. Their commit triggered another run of CI and CD to deploy the new image, and their image spun up. They tested and moved on with life.
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Unix File Creation Time
Does not exist. Well, maybe it does; this really depends on the filesystem. Some filesystems support a file creation time, and others do not. But what about the "ctim" field as mentioned in stat(2)? Is that not short for "creation time"? Nope.
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Internet/Gemini
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The Yesterweb postmortem is a mess
I've had this quasi-rant stored in my files for a while, but I'm posting it in public because I don't give a fuck anymore.
Anyone who has been in "small web" spaces has probably heard of the Yesterweb. It seemed like everyone was in their webring (some people still have the defunct widget up, even), and supposedly they were very active in proseltyzing on social media because there's a cutesy infographic page on their website. (I wouldn't know, as I don't use social media.)
I thought the Yesterweb was really annoying, and I didn't agree with what they were on about. Ultimately, though, I thought they were just a harmless clique that I happened to find obnoxious, so I didn't really care.
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daily gratitude
it's early in the morning but thank goodness websites like this still exist... social media has been so toxic lately... it's so nice to unwind here after consuming nothing but brain rot for hours on end. i desperately need to get better at coding so i can just live on the small web forever...
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.