The word spreads

HE news about GNU/Linux generally gets better over time. If one looks deep enough, there’s already more of it than before. More and more people use the platform, and some bloggers adapt and react accordingly.

Heck, many bloggers are themselves moving to GNU/Linux.

I reckon that by next year GNU/Linux will be seen as a non-niche.

We’re drowning in seas of words

‘ve been typing and keeping personal stories since around 2002. It started when I sat at my office in Manchester Computing with plenty of time to pass, not much to do. Some of those stories predate that habit by a year or two. I thought to myself, one day I can turn those notes into publications, even though books were still more common at the time.

The world has changed somewhat since then. Quantity of text does not matter because of serial sloppers who do not value quality and who conflate plagiarism with “intelligence”.

People’s stories that are authentic still have real value; a high quantity of computer-generated garbage ‘stories’ will be culled and put in the digital ashtray sooner or later.

Application already in progress

t’s only 7:20AM and all the birds have already come and have been fed. Same for the fish. We’re leaving the house for today and we want to relax as best we can.

I’ve had a hyper-productive week, both online and offline. I think my health has improved since I began sleeping extra hours (January 2025), I certainly can focus a lot better that way.

Next month will definitely be uneventful, so further and improved focus on articles will be assured (as it seems at the moment anyway).

I now publish close to 1,000 articles/pages per month, or 1,300 if meta pages (like Daily Links) are counted and over 1,500 if news clippings get counted. Together with Rianne, it’s a total of over 2,000 per month. About 24,000 per year.

I’m just glad we managed to lower our budget requirements while keeping happy, productive, and still in love (in the fifteenth year of our marriage).

We are still hoping the Court of Appeal will agree to hear our pleadings next year. There are technical – not only legal – matters at stake.

IRC was created 38+ years ago

t would be absolutely impossible for me to know when I began using IRC unless I somehow, miraculously, manage to have found the receipt for my modem purchase. My mom bought it for me. She probably won’t remember it anymore (I spoke to her in length yesterday, I still love her even if she has scarce understanding of what I do, she says I am “activist who focuses on battling corruption”).

I am pretty certain that it was a 14,400 bps (14.4K) Dynamode modem and I think my mother discarded the PC that I personally (manually) installed this on. I think I was 13 or 14 at the time (after I had begun programming). I will never forget how awful I felt when I tried to install a hard drive (I think it was a year later) and caused it to blow up/burn (rancid smoke) due to stupidity/sloppiness. It wasn’t new, it was just about 50 megabytes in size (compared to my 170 megabytes main drive), and I paid not much for it (a friend sold it to me at school). I didn’t ask for a refund, I think I paid only about 10 pounds, maybe 20+ pounds in today’s money.

I think this was the first time I installed hard drive using my bare fists and a screwdriver. We didn’t “google it” (this predates Google and you’d need a modem to read the Web) and there was no YouTube. Cable television had no show in the programme that said, “watch how to install a hard drive or modem.”

The modem installation was a lot easier (fewer bits to plug in) and they say you only ever learn from errors. At age 19 I fixed my own laptop; it cost me 1-2 pounds (components from RS Components) instead of over 200 pounds at the repair shop.

IRC was one of the first things I used once connected at home and about 32 years later I administer IRC at a fairly large network.

I still love IRC. It’s not perfect. As a grownup, last year and this year I got to explain to High Court judges what IRC is and how it works.

Thanks, mom, for buying me that modem. I’ve been on the Net since then! And that no longer hijacks the phone line at home.

Cursing all day long like a drunkard

he irrelevant loser who sends my wife and I veiled threats via social control media (all he ever does to people is threaten them; he does so even to his own spouse) is talking to himself again. Nobody bothers reading what he says, yet he insists that he has reputation. When it comes to technology, 2-3 days were not enough for him to fix a laptop and he simply gave up. This means that his lack of reputation in tech is also self-evident. He has no publications in that area because he is a pretending-at-best socialite and a thug, a bully.

Dealing with bullies is a common problem. There are ways to deal with it.

Having become known for restricted boot infamy, he is not popular. As a purveyor of restricted boot (who landed restricted boot in Linux), he’s known for sucking up to monopolies. He acts like them, too.

Bots are chewing up way too much ‘traffic’, hoping to ‘monetise’ it at someone else’s expense

t has gotten gloomy again, so the hopes of going to the park are deflated again and this likely means lots of original articles, instead. Tomorrow we’ll exchange cards and celebrate with Jim Beam 14 years of happiness and teamwork. I said more about that in another site [1, 2], envisioning we’ll be too busy to write about the anniversary tomorrow.

Today I checked the progress in the blog in terms of visitorship, as it was not regularly updated in the past two decades because in 2006 I focused on non-personal sites.

It’s sad to see how much junk traffic comes from totally useless bots (not even search engines’ spiders). So much has changed, not just because of LLM slop. It seems like many people choose walled gardens such as social control media and many young people never heard of RSS feeds.

This predates the slop frenzy and it’ll make the population poorly informed, exposed to state-connected propaganda, and unfit to handle social life.

Techrights still growing

recently remembered that next month it is Wikileaks’ 20-year anniversary – one month before Techrights’.

Techrights is not a site anymore. Techrights is many things, including a community. The community is probably as old as its IRC presence, i.e. it goes back to 2008.

The Cyber Show (cybershow.uk) has been very active in techrights.org IRC (irc.techrights.org) lately and we forge alliances with groups whose missions overlap ours.