Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 20, 2023

A Gemini client^* is needed for the following links.

• Technology and Free Software

  • On-Call Culture and the Human Aspect: Prioritising Well-being in the Realm of Reliability

    Site Reliability Engineering is synonymous with ensuring system reliability, but the human factor is an often-underestimated part of this discipline. Ensuring a healthy on-call culture is as critical as any technical solution. The well-being of the engineers is an important factor.

    Firstly, a healthy on-call rotation is about more than just managing and responding to incidents. It's about the entire ecosystem that supports this practice. This involves reducing pain points, offering mentorship, rapid iteration, and ensuring that engineers have the right tools and processes. One ceavat is, that engineers should be willing to learn. Especially in on-call rotation mixing SREs with other engineers (for example Software Engineers or QA Engineers), it's difficult to motivate everyone to engage. QA Engineers want to test the software, Software Engineers want to implement new features; they don't want to troubleshoot and debug production incidents. It can be depressing for the mentoring SRE.

  • Everything's on fire / No XMPP, no Robbie Robertson

    We're between several wildfires. The smoke is absolutely miserable, burnt embers are dropping all over, and the communities about 10 km away are on evacuation alert. We've loaded up the car, just in case. I've done a lot of work on this house, but it can burn. Everything is temporary.

    Robbie Robertson died last week. Attentive readers of this phlog will remember a misleading phlog title a couple of years back.

  • Booklet printing

    I found how to prepare a PDF into a printable booklet (aka brochure or pamphlet) PDF! (Again!) The booklet pages will be half the size of the print paper -- e.g. with an A4 paper printer the booklet will be A5.

    For whatever reason I find it extremely hard to understand how to operate the printer... If I put the paper this way, how will it come out? Should I flip it to print the other side? Should I rotate? Who knows! It's not the first time I've gone through the whole process of (re)learning these things, but, like a dumbass, I never documented it. All is about to change! Brace yourself!

  • Free Pens

    At my office there was a box of free pens and I helped myself to three of them. I love free pens. I doubt that I will ever have a need to purchase a pen because I have so many that I have acquired through the past several decades.

    Yes, I can obtain pens at work. Our office has a modest supply cabinet including boxes of pens. However, it is the surprise pens that I chance upon outside of work that delight me the most. These are the pens that I see in hotel or bank lobbies, or trade shows, or conferences.

  • A PSP Update

    This is something I had been completely overlooking until a couple days ago. The PSP officially had a good collection of classic PS1 titles that it was capable of emulating, and thanks to community tools it's possible to convert any other PS1 title that wasn't officially supported and play it on the PSP.

    I never had a PS1 growing up, but I did play a couple PS1 games thanks to the PS2's backwards compatibility and a lot of my favorite PC games were also available on PS1. Lately I've been playing a lot of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 which was a childhood favorite. I've also been playing a bit of Re-Volt, an RC car racing game that's harder than I remember, and Spider-Man, whose PC demo I would play over and over.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • How to run gemini clients via SOCKS5 (e.g. TOR)

      After some discussions on the IRC channel, I decided to try how running a gemini client would work with SOCKS5 to be able to connect via TOR (though the same has other uses) and I found that most clients do not support SOCKS5 directly.

    • Re: Emergency Notifications, Mastodon, the Climate Crisis

      One of the links in the post is to lemmy.world about how the Dutch government is starting a Mastodon server. But that lemmy.world link is down right now.

      Fedi’s tech is still pretty flaky and unreliable. Posts go missing all the time. I don’t wanna slag Lemmy because I know they’re working hard. And it’s not just them that have issues, it’s the entire ActivityPub world.

    • How to reply to Lemmy posts from Mastodon

      If you got an account on Mastodon, Homecamp, Akkoma, Misskey, Pixelfed or similar during the big Twitter migration and you wanna reply to a post on Lemmy or kbin, read on!

      If you don’t have any Fedi account at all yet, you’re living the blessed life. Good on you!♥ Bookmark this page and return here once you’ve been on Fedi a few weeks and have gotten comfy and wanna branch out to the threadiverse. Or, if it's the threadiverse itself that's appealing rather than the seedy world of microblogging, just make an account on Lemmy or kbin instead and in that case you don't need this tutorial. You might need a reverse tutorial if you wanna interact with people from Mastodon or Pixelfed or whatever, but I don't know how to make one since I don't know how Lemmy looks from the inside!

      For us in gemspace, there is actually a Fediverse on Gemini thing that’s awesome, it’s called Tootik, but this tutorial doesn’t apply to it yet since it can’t fetch posts by URL as far as I know. I don’t know for sure, but I believe you can still subscribe to Lemmy and kbin groups from Tootik. I’ll edit this section if I find out more.♥

  • Programming

    • Mixed feelings about Rust

      Now, I was not intending for this post to see a wide audience. I have no way of knowing how many people read what I write there, but based on the lack of feedback I'd guess not many. This time, it was picked up by Rust weekly, from whence it hit HackerNews. You know how they say never read the comments? I read the comments, which were overwhelmingly negative of course.

      [...]

      Another of my criticisms was Rust macros. I said flatly that they were a mistake. I stand by that. Zig's use of 'comptime' shows that a fully developed language and compiler level type reflection scheme can completely, and cleanly, replace not only macros but a lot of other metaprogramming pains. Generics are a breeze with good type reflection. You can move even more classes of bugs from runtime to compile time. Heck, the comptime concept enables Zig to have their build system written in Zig.

      Now, around this same time, @thecompiler was getting ready to present a keynote address at RustConf. Certain members of the Rust core team took it upon themselves to turn this into an awful mess, by reaching out to the conference organizers and implying that the core team had decided as a whole that his talk was not a good fit for the keynote. Did I mention that @thecompiler was one of the editors of the C23 standard, and a massive presence in the programming community? He was insulted and it became a scandal.

^* Gemini links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.