jmcunx gemini phlog for 2024

• 2024-12-01: Nethack TNNT ended yesterday, I ended up with 42 achievements and the clan I was in had a respectable showing. Last year we had the most unique deaths, this year we missed most unique deaths by 5.

• 2024-11-28: Well it is Thanksgiving here in the US, I am about to leave to celebrate with my relatives at their house. Where I live, it is about freezing and misting outside, which by past standards is considered not too bad. In the distant past, this weather would be considered nice. I remember many days when I was young where this holiday's temperature would be around 0F (-17C) with snow on the ground. Yet still, many people in this country still deny climate change. I hope we as a World get real about mitigating this issue very soon, otherwise the youth of the Earth will suffer worse than many past generations have.

• 2024-11-26: I have been on Bluesky for a couple of weeks. It is not a bad platform and people there seems somewhat smarter on average then what I have seen on Twitter. But I am starting getting "invites" to some groups that are a bit "over the top" for me. Those groups are really OK, but I am not interested in the content. Also, I have not seen any real bad abusive posts. FWIW, I do not spend a great deal if time in Bluesky, so I am still figuring the ins and outs. I tend to peruse Gemini and Gopher sites than what I find on the WEB. The good new is, many people have disabled their Twitter ID and moved to Bluesky, including a few friends of mine :)

• 2024-11-10: A couple of days ago I deleted my Twitter ID. I did that because of Musk's support of a fascist presidential candidate. I am hoping more people do that in order to hurt Musk where it will really hurt him, in his pocketbook. I have been on sdf mastodon for a while and I just created a bluesky account to see what that is all about.

• 2024-11-07: Well seems these days, racism and hate always wins in the US. I hope the EU can get together and hold back the "forces of darkness".

• 2024-10-31: TNNT (The November Nethack Tournament) Starts today in my time zone at 8:00PM. I am once again in clan surly dinos again. Seems there are a couple of new clans this year and people are being shuffled around. Will be an interesting year. Visit tnnt.org if you want to participate in this fun activity.

• 2024-10-29: The US Election is next week, I voted for Harris and not a single GOP candidate. People need to understand what Trump will do for the US and the World. If he is elected, US will end up being close to a 1930s type of depression. One of his goals is to personally control Fed Policy. He wants to replace the Fed Board with his lackeys who will do what he says. His main objective is to force the Fed to lower interest rates to 0% overnight. That policy with his tariff proposal will destroy the US economy and make the US Dollar worthless.

• 2024-10-26: Ended up disabling Mersenne Prime search (GIMPS), even using a very low throttle it stressed out the system. Plus it was so slow, the check may take months. So just BOINC for now. But BOINC does provide a clear benefit to society.

• 2024-10-22: After the new Mersenne Prime was found by GIMPS, I decided to see if I could get it to run along side BOINC on the W541. I found setting "Throttle=10" it seems to work OK alongside BOINC. The CPU Temperature so far as been averaging 125F (51C). So far so good!

• 2024-10-16: Found an oddity with file gophermap, if a "link" has a white space character were it does not belong, lynx(1) will fail when you try to access it. I guess this makes sense due to Microsoft's stupidly allowing spaces in file names. So, before saving changes to file gophermap, ensure there are no unwanted trailing or other white space characters.

• 2024-10-14: Completed the move of my WEB Site to Geming and Gopher. Now what to do about the WEB Site ? I no longer maintain it but I use it as a pointer to my Gemini caspule and Gopher Hole.

• 2024-10-08: Upgraded my OpenBSD systems to 7.6, the upgrade was very easy and quick. All working fine.

• 2024-10-07: I decided to mirror most of my gemini site on gopher at SDF. I noticed a lot of people still use gopher, plus it gave me something new to learn and an additional mirror.

• 2024-08-12: Emacs on OpenBSD with RCS does not get along too well. To use RCS with Emacs on OpenBSD you need to install GNU RCS from ports (grcs-5.9.4p4). That alone will not get around the issue. What I had to do is ensure the binaries from GNU RCS is in a Directory that is first in your path. This script will set up the links for you:

• 2024-06-24: All my utilities are now also maintained in gitlab along with here in sdf. I found gitlab easier to use then github, once you figure out how to create a new repo in gitlab. Their free account is an odd retention policy, but it should be fine for me. I am keeping an eye on a new announcement about an OpenBSD GOT repository being build, it sounds intriguing.

• 2024-06-14: For the past month, on my Laptop, I enabled my old "Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search" setup. But after a few weeks I disabled it, no matter what I set the Throttle to, it ran too hot. So I re-enabled BOINC for the "World Community Grid" and "Rosetta". Time will tell if I keep this active on the W541 with Slackware. The Average Temperature is about 20F (12C) higher, I do not know if I can live with that. I miss the desktop days, but laptops are far more convenient these days :)

• 2024-06-14: Converting from RCS to git was rather easy, but trying to get the git repository loaded into gitlab was way too hard. Seems no matter what, they want you to use https instead of ssh for pushing/cloning, so I could not get that to work after 2 days of trying. https is a deal breaker for me, so for now I will stick with RCS and anonymous ftp. Plus the documentation seem to be tailored to Microsoft Windows or MACs, making things even harder. The only easy option is go go back to github, but due to Microsoft 2FA and the need for a Cell Phone, that is a no go for me.

• 2024-06-12: I finally found a way to convert my source from RCS to git and keep all the history. It was on stack, pretty much you convert it from RCS to CVS, that is trivial. Then via "git cvsimport", it will load the objects to git with history. The missing piece was utility cvsps(1). I am slowly moving to back to git again. That is a tough decision, but friends kept pushing me to do go to git. Plus, RCS on OpenBSD has issues with Emacs. So I guess I relented. Years ago I converted to git/github, but because I lost my history and github 2FA, I decided to abandon git and stick with RCS. This conversion activity may depend upon github, Microsoft 2FA requirement upset me and I left github. I calmed down a bit since and will read about this 2FA more, or see if I can find a good alternative. If so, I may finally be 100% on git for source.

• 2024-06-07: On OpenBSD I found a work-around for the Emacs Issue. Instead of installing "emacs-29.3-gtk3", install "emacs-29.3-gtk2" instead. That allows Emacs to work fine on OpenBSD. The gk3 version freezes when you use Menus on the menu-bar via your mouse in X. Depending on what you have installed, there is a good chance gtk2 has been installed as a dependency for some other package.

• 2024-05-24: My lisp tags setup NetBSD pkgsrc emacs29-29.3 and emacs 29 from ports on OpenBSD breaks the menus. Emacs will freeze Xorg when I try and use any of the drop down menus. On NetBSD I reverted back to Emacs 28, all works good. That is not an option on OpenBSD. I will check to see why that is the case in an emacs forum, but I suspect it is something in "~/.emacs".

• 2024-04-03: This has been a "fun" week. It was discovered that a backdoor was put in library liblzma starting version 5.6.x. This backdoor added a hole to sshd with many distros using systemd. I know the BSDs and Slackware was not affected. Do a WEB search and you will find more information then you will need. As of now, I believe all affected distros have been patched.

• 2024-03-28: Updated the T420 to NetBSD 10.0 from RC6. All went well and no major issues. But if I run a heavy Hash Analysis Program I created, after ~1 hour, X will get corrupted. I may create a PR for that, but for now I am running that on my Slackware System since it executes 10x faster then on BSD.

• 2024-02-24: I had more time, seems ksh(1) and csh(1) is pledged on OpenBSD, so since I really like pledge(1)/unveil(1), I stopped using tcsh(1) on OpenBSD :( For a fun activity on OpenBSD, you can issue this command to see what ports have been pledged: "find /usr/ports/ -name pledge\*". Of course you need to install ports, see the FAQ for that.

• 2024-02-22: I finally examined OpenBSD's ksh using objdump(1). Seems ksh(1) and csh(1) is not pledged or unveiled, which makes sense based upon how it is used. Because of that, I am decided to use tcsh(1) on OpenBSD. I was using csh(1) only because I prefer its interactive use compared to "sh type" shells. I have always used tcsh(1) on Slackware and still do. I was exposed to it when I used Coherent 386 on a 386sx.

• 2024-02-06: For the last few years, I have been playing with using the original csh(1). I am a tcsh(1) user so all that is really missing is cursor movement to edit commands. Right now, I decided to use the original csh(1) for an undetermined period of time to exercise my memory. Over the years I have become very dependent on using tab completion for some commands. I was exposed to csh(1) decades ago on SunOS, at the time I did not like it too much. But now I see an elegance I missed back then.

• 2024-02-05: I played with git again with a couple of new utilities. But when you sign commits with gpg, OpenBSD and NetBSD has issues. This is due to pinentry, gpg2 needs that for a GUI prompt. Why the the gpg people "broke" gpg2 forcing a GUI on us is beyond me. So, that reinforces my use of RCS and ftp distribution of my things. gpg (not 2) is no longer available on Open/Net and I kind of expect support to stop for it. But, Slackware still ships it :)

• 2024-02-05: First time in a while I have seen the Lake fully frozen. It has been two years. But the last couple of days some small sections melted. Years ago, by mid December the lakes would be frozen enough to skate on and in some cases to drive on. Now, I am too afraid to venture out on the lakes in my area.

• 2024-01-01: Happy New Year!

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