● 07.16.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 16/07/2023: Old PCs and Another Cool Capsule Of The Week

Posted in News Roundup at 8:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• When I left Uni, back in the mists of time, I moved into a house opposite a pub—the Bent Brief in Portswood. On the outside it looked much like any other student pub. Run-down but with a slight psychedelic chic. Unlike most student dives, the Brief was run by adults who lived there. Andy and Moreen. I quickly fell in love with the place, and it became my regular haunt. By the time I moved opposite, I’d been frequenting, off and on, for three years. I’d spend another glorious couple with it acting as my social hub.

• I didn’t realise it then, but the Brief was special. Eclectic. Patrons ranged from poets to professors. We had accountants and a militant lesbian Americas Cup yacht racer. A millionaire, and the permanently unemployed. Students and Professionals. No one was arsed about what you did for a job, you were just a person down the pub. Don’t be a dick. We’ve chosen this place as our public house, and we won’t take kindly to someone wandering in, shouting their gob off.

Politics and World Events

• The original post of mine was not about gay rights, or racism. It was about consent and the right of the State to compel you to do things against your will.

• Consent is viewed as a basic principle in a free societly. Lately it has been brought to the forefront as the younger generation is trying to avoid harmful sexual interactions. But in any setting, if your consent is lacking, it is an abusive situation. Someone is forcing you to do what you do not want.

• It may seem terrible that the Supreme Court failed to compel a bigoted web designer to build a web site for a gay couple. What if the situation was flipped?

• All of which is my roundabout way of saying that I’ve decided to finally let on where we live: we’re in Switzerland, in the French-speaking region, along Lac Léman.

• I’m an immigrant: born English, but here for fifteen years and now also Swiss.

• The reason I say this is simple: there are plenty of fun posts I can think of that need that background to make sense.

• Besides money and food, what are some of the tangible goods People cannot live without? I’m trying to noodle avenues We can pursue in order to help move the Revolution forward. Please consider responding and boosting. Thanks.

Science

• I have an increasing belief that the medical profession in its inner workings faces pretty much the same challenges as society in general in the 2020′s. However, this may be underrecognized because people think that doctors are so smart that they don’t succumb to the problems of the information age… If only it was that easy to deal with the challenges of the Information Age…

• One of the key challenges for healthcare professionals is keeping up with the latest relevant scientific findings for their practice. (I mean primarily doctors based on my own role, but of course this extends to many adjacent professions, like nurse practitioners, physician assistants, etc.) Traditional ways of keeping up, like reading a big text book like Harrisons every few years, will quickly leave you behind, especially with rapid developments like a viral pandemic. Subscribing to a journal is also only a limited bandaid, as each journal publishes different articles and you will necessarily miss out.

• Diet is a concern for members of late-stage civilizations according to Oswald Spengler; that society has moved to a reflective stage. Not so for young cultures red in tooth and claw! Also young cultures are generally doing the growth thing, and have not yet reached “oops, look at what a mess we’ve made.” And most everyone is a parasite, beyond those living directly off solar and various other metabolic paths.

• Distance from the equator is a factor; more distant generally means that more meat in the diet. More distant also means a less supportive environment; elderly in the Arctic Circle were generally pushed out to die when they could no longer contribute, while in India one might go on walkabout and could still be fed enough to survive, usually. There can also be cultural norms here, provided the environment supports the excess.

Technology and Free Software

• I said yesterday I was going to try installing NetBSD on an RPi4, and I did try but I failed miserably. Oops. Well, I said I /consider/ myself a NetBSD user, but I didn’t say I was a competent one. On a whim I thought I’d try OpenBSD; on RPi4 I run FreeBSD normally (it’s VERY easy to install) but Firefox is very slow and heavy and crashy. On OpenBSD Firefox runs quite well, and fvwm is so nice and old school.

• We have reached the final day of the Old Computer Challenge.

• Below follows a wrap up of my experiences.

• OpenBSD 7.3 on a twenty year old IBM ThinkPad R31

• NOTE: The occ lab will be offline and unavailable on Sunday, July 16th,

• which is the last day of the Old Computer Challenge.

• Participation will conclude on Saturday, July 15th.

• IRC: Tekk visited their friend’s game store and bought old video games.

• Reminded me of buying pirated software in the mall in the

• Philippines. I still have them around here. I thought it was

• so crazy that they could sell pirated software like that, complete

• with printed labels and serial numbers. Nobody bought the boxed

• software since it was so expensive. They gathered dust on the

• shelf.

• NOTE: Not much old computing today at all. Much meatspace goings on

• today. I write m0ar l8r.

• As I am starting the last day of the 2023 Old Computer Challenge, I wanted to jot down a few finishing notes. Of course written on my iBook G3.

• I’d call the week a success in that I was able to do about 80% of the things I usually do. This includes much of my programming and scripting activities, staying up to date on gopherholes/gemlogs/blogs, reading my email, running a VPN client, connecting to servers and doing some basic surfing. For much of my day-to-day tasks, there was little to no difference in using this computer.

• Keep in mind that this was done on a machine that is 23 years old and has 200 times less RAM than my work laptop. This is hardware that has long been considered useless and obsolete, yet it runs on a modern OS – OpenBSD 7.3 – and runs like a champ. That, in itself, is nothing short of incredible.

Internet/Gemini

• In my Gemini experience, what you’re calling polite / actively considerate on Gemini seems disinterest in engagement. Sure, there’ll be the occasional post about “community”. But for the most part the environment seems much closer to isolationism than united nations.

• I will need to extend my Mastodon scripts if I was to continue this challenge further as I haven’t spent as much time on the Fediverse this week as normal, just because it’s difficult to do so. I feel that I’m not keeping up with things though.

• Alexandra’s Cafe is a personal capsule that’s so well-crafted and textually-themed that the capsule itself feels like art. There isn’t a whole directory structure to explore; instead, everything is linked to from the home page, which reminds me of a text adventure set in a coffee shop.

• It begins with a welcome and introduction from the barista (Alexandra). They then ask you for your order, and you are presented with a long list of different drinks which each link to a different article. Each page features properly-captioned ASCII art, and every article ends with a link back to the homepage which asks you whether you’d like to order another drink. After a while, you really start to get the impression of being in a cafe and listening to people’s stories (at least I did).

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