● 06.01.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 01/06/2023: Scam Call and Flying High With Gemini

Posted in News Roundup at 1:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• We are now halfway through the year 2023. [No, that's next month...]

Technical

• Recently, OpenBSD package manager received a huge speed boost when updating packages, but it’s currently only working in -current due to an issue.

• [...]

• On -current, there is a single directory to look for packages, but on release for architectures amd64, aarch64, sparc64 and i386, there are two directories: the packages generated for the release, and the packages-stable directory receiving updates during the release lifetime.

• I had an unusual experience yesterday: a call from a scammer claiming to be from my bank.

• Because the caller ID showed the correct name, I was initially taken in.

• They claimed that there had been a suspicious transfer from my bank account via online banking, and that they had blocked it. They then asked about how I use online banking—from what devices—and suggested that one of these must have been hacked.

• [...]

• I asked for the account number of the account with the issue, and they made up a number—it didn’t match anything I recognized. I asked for the address associated with the account—and they had a wrong, out of date, address for me.

• For years I’ve been trying to figure out why, sometimes, my mouse starts pausing for 1/2 a second or so at random intervals.

• I went down many rabbit holes, but it looks like I have an old mouse that must be defective. `journalctl -b -e` (very useful for things like this) reports entries like ‘kernel: usb 3-3.1: reset low-speed USB device number 14 using xhci_hcd’ – several per minute when things get bad. That explains it.

Internet/Gemini

• So here I am on an airplane flying from Istanbul to Los Angeles. I thought it would be fun to take the opportunity to post on Gemini while I’m thousands of feet in the air. Bubble is the most convenient way to do so on my phone, although I could get out my laptop I can’t be bothered.

• The flight came with some form of free WiFi, which is a shock to me because last year they wanted to charge an arm and a leg for it. The terms of service seem to have gotten a lot better, with lower cost packages back down to what I remember them being 10 years ago, and a longer duration of use, I think. (The flight is 12 hours and I have 24 hours of service.)

• Two camps. Two schools of thought.

• The despondent “partakers” in consumer tech

• The devoted…devotees of the WWW

• We are on the cusp (or IN) the New AI era of tech. I’ve said a million times, it (AI) IS the biggest innovation (through numerous iterations) in the tech space since the creation of the Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990.

• The domain name of this capsule has been a topic of discussion.

• I’ve already added an introductory text to the Help page that sheds some light on what’s the deal here, but to further alleviate potential confusion, I’ve decided to switch this Bubble instance over to a subdomain.

• Not posting this on main, too easy to connect the dots.

• Don’t scroll Facebook, you’ll only find bad things.

• Checking up on an old friend, it turns out he (regularly? semi-regularly?) plays board games with a known antagonist/pot-stirrer of Canadian letters, someone who devotes most of his space to being unkind, cruel, belittling; a person who, if it were me playing games with him, would have fellow writers taking me aside to tell me, “winter, dude, what the fuck.”

• There’s never been anything wrong with the web.

• For how could a reflection be wrong?

• The web quite simply has far more moron-ia to reflect.

• Poor thing…. right?

• The most recent excitement in Geminispace is about the domain `geminispace.org`.

• Is it appropriate that it be used for Bubble?

• Might it confuse newcomers into thinking it is somehow an “official” representative of Geminispace?

Announcements

• The new menu button serves to visually indicate the function of the application menu to new users. The button also serves to provide an alternative method of expanding the menu for users who may not be able to (or may not wish to) use the swipe-down gesture.

Programming

• I like GTK+ visually. It’s minimalistic and all applications look organically on one Gnome-based desktop.

• But when I decided to write an application myself for my favorite OS (Elementary), I went into a stupor.

• You can only write in Vala+GTK in HORRIBLE imperative style.

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