● 08.28.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 28/08/2023: Manipulating PDFs and Synapse Room Cleaner

Posted in News Roundup at 4:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• We’ve been playing Yahtzee with the in-laws for well over three years, now: a pandemic activity that became just a standard weekly thing. Two more games today (two Ls for me), but a neat little surprise as well. During the pandemic, meetings for free accounts didn’t have limits; then a limit of 40 minutes was added, forcing us to split things up and do two calls.

• Now, today, another surprise: free accounts now have to wait ten minutes between meetings.

• So we got around it by jumping between accounts and doing it that way, but whew, what a pain in the butt. And I get it, they want to convert some of the endless free accounts people are using, but it’s a no from me. So I’m going to look at other options. Needs to be easy enough to be launched from a tablet by a cou

Politics and World Events

• So the lion and the dolphin had come to opposite views (across the channel, for one); the French had the placid sediments of Paris (where else?) and the aqueous dominated. The British had been at the highlands (these sometimes more unicorn than lion) and Italian volcanoes, probably for a change of weather. This account simplifies or distorts; Neptunism actually originated in Germany. And some Neptunists did end up in Edinburgh. Moreover, it was an Italian studying volcanoes in Italy who booted Plutonism—but see how easy it is to cast this as English versus the French? There was a notable political contrast at the time; certain ideas in France had proven too radical (the reign of terror, the calendar system, etc) so a more conservative approach was supported in England, which bled into the sciences. This was Burkean conservatism, not the modern things that happen to have the same name. Radical change also found support in Catastrophism, assisted by various stories of floods, or to solve the Neptunist problem of where did the magic water go? What happened to that process? Not all flood myths are negative, by the way. Consider Egypt and the Nile.

• CW: Bad vibes about the future in here. Go ahead and skip this one if you’re looking for hopefulness.

• I don’t understand why smart people keep fooling themselves about what the state is, and what it’s capable of.

• The state is a tool for imposing minority rule on a majority. Full stop. Well-meaning people have been deluding themselves about using the state to achieve benevolent ends since the 18th century. It will never happen. It can never happen. That’s just not what states are for.

Technology and Free Software

• I often need to work with PDF, sometimes I need to extract a single page, or add a page, too often I need to rotate pages.

• Fortunately, there is a pretty awesome tool to do all of these tasks, it’s called PDFtk.

• I regularly see people reporting high memory usage on OpenBSD when looking at some monitoring program output.

• Those programs may be not reporting what you think. The memory usage can be accounted in different ways.

• Most of the time, the file system cache stored in-memory is added to memory usage, which lead to think about a high memory consumption.

• After running my Matrix Synapse server for several years, joining and leaving several large rooms, and playing around with bridges, my server accumulated quite a few orphaned, empty, and broken rooms. Software developer wisdom says: “Why spend 10 minutes doing something if you can automate in 10 hours?”. Thus, I built a small web-based tool that lets you get and/or delete rooms from your Synapse server.

Internet/Gemini

• Slondr just about summed up exactly how I feel about Gemini and how it should move forward.

• In short, this is working. Warts and all, it’s working. Maybe there are some things to fix. Maybe we’ll eventually fix them, and maybe we’ll just continue. But I can’t help but feel like Gemini is a roaring success by the only measure that really counts – there actually is a community here that is growing, vibrant and (mostly) healthy.

• There’s been more smoke again for the last few days, but rain is in the forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday.

• The 12mm of rain we had last Tuesday was the most we’d had all year. Some parts of the Bush Creek fire got over 20mm, so that was good. On the other hand, a typical summer used to bring 3 or 4 really hard rainfalls, which doesn’t seem to be happening any more.

• Solderpunk mentioned in his latest phlog post that he has started worrying about summer in advance.

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