EASTER BROWSING

I never travel around Easter - too much traffic on the roads. Now 
there's no traffic, but we're not allowed to go anywhere without a 
good reason, so its the same anyway. I'm getting a bit bored about 
hearing so much about the novelty/horror of "life under lockdown" 
when day-to-day there's bugger all difference to my own routine. It 
turns out that if everyone lives like me they all go nuts and start 
doing silly things in front of their web cams, go figure.

Now I've gone to write one of these posts twice over the long 
weekend, but keep considering how long they always take and 
deciding that I'd better get something else done first. Certainly 
fixing the down pipes on the shed during the sunny daylight, and 
typing nonsense into my old PC in the evening, is the better order 
of daily tasks, but it does mean that I can't quite remember what I 
wanted to discuss in the first place.

Well I left a heading and some links the last time, so I guess 
better start with those. With a couple of extra days I've been 
catching up on many of my half-forgotten bookmarks left for 
following up when I've exhausted the content of my usual URLs. 
Those in the audience with a vague mechanical interest may be 
familliar with the excellent TV series "The Secret Life of 
Machines". If you're interested in how everyday things work, and 
the history of their development, then I really couldn't recommend 
it more. The practical demonstrations and detail of the show, 
combined with a relaxed quirkyness completely of its own, make it 
quite unique. The host, Tim Hunkin, has a facinating website 
detailing a near endless variety of electromechanical marvels to 
his name, most in the form of unconventional one-off arcade 
machines. Checking today I saw that the co-host of the show, Rex 
Garrod, recently died. The story there was quite interesting:
http://www.timhunkin.com/a229_rex.htm

Browsing around some more, I found some things to look at when I'm 
allowed to go back to roaming endlessly through the state's back 
roads again. It turns out that somewhat nearby there's an old 
experimental wind generator that was errected in the late 80s and 
possibly still working today. The closest that it has to a website 
seem to be this, there are some interesting things there but I 
doubt that it's really of general interest. Still, so long as I 
have the link:
https://www.suburbia.com.au/~mickgg/breamlea/

Also there's a tank museum as the Puckapunyal army base! Must check 
that out some time. You might as well see that link too:
http://australianarmytankmuseum.com.au/

On Gopher I'm one post away from reaching the start of Cat's FAX 
SEX phlog, which I've been intermittently reading in reverse since 
before I started my own. Certainly the style isn't much like how my 
Gopher presence has turned out, and he's clearly not much akin to 
me either, but quite a facinating insight nonetheless. Reading 
these Phlogs is quite enlightening really, seeing as I haven't 
really looked at the personal lives and thoughts of others very 
much before. That said, I'm not sure that I won't get bored with it 
at some point. My morning internet has long consisted of Email, 
Usenet, then _something_. That _something_ has previously drifed 
between various websites and somehow never really stuck (though in 
a few cases that was due to the websites, or the communities behind 
them, dying). Still what do you care? Either way I probably won't 
be able to resist the temptation to shout my own thoughts out in 
the chorus echoing within the internet void.
gopher://baud.baby/1/phlog

Beyond the web and Gopher, I still quite enjoy having a browse 
around the anonymous FTP sites that are still running, or nobody 
remembered to turn off. I have quite a fondness for FTP. While 
Gopher's advantages are mainly in not providing the features that 
are abused on the web, FTP has its own genuine features for file 
handling. Unlike the web, and certainly Gopher, batch download 
operations are supported by many clients and work very reliably. 
Being able to select a group of files, and even directories that 
are downloaded recursively, make easy many download tasks that are 
prohibitively tedious on the web. You're also pretty sure to have 
the file size listed, as well as modification time. Plus beyond the 
graphical clients, there's a certain fun in logging in with an 
old-fashioned command line FTP client and observing the quirks of 
different server software while roaming around with a curious 
sequence of "cd", "dir", and "get" commands. Today I just logged 
into ftp.scene.org to grab some of the tracker modules from the 
Revision 2020 tracked music compo. Some other sites that might be 
fun for a browse:
ftp.modland.com - Lots and lots of tracker modules
ftp.ibiblio.org - All things open-source
distro.ibiblio.org - Linux distros
ftp.funet.fi - An old favourite for software etc., and hosts many 
mirrors of other sites that haven't survived.
ftp.zimmers.net - Commodore stuff
ftp.cbm8bit.com - Commodore 8bit Stuff
ftp.exotica.org.uk - Amiga and other vintage computing stuff
                     - Browsable mirror of High Voltage SID 
Collection at: 
/pub/exotica/media/audio/High_Voltage_Sid_Collection/C64Music
major.butt.care - Lots of mirrors, including of the great Garbo and 
SimTel FTP sites that finally died during the last decade.
ftp.photonlexicon.com - Laser projector stuff of all description. 
Includes some pictures and videos.
ftp.riken.go.jp
ftp.gwdg.de
ftp.lyx.org
ftp.bom.gov.au - Seeing as its the basis of my improved Australian 
Gopher weather forecast plans.

Plus of course you can upload, so it gets no end of practical use 
on my LAN, while SFTP/FTPS are there for uploading over the big 
scary internet where people might be poking their nose into your 
passwords.

There's no shortage of more obscure internet protocols lurking out 
there though. This is a very interesting webpage ready to fill up 
your time with needless experimentation by connecting to public 
servers still talking the lingo of software long ago forgotten, 
plenty more FTP sites to explore listed there as well (mixed in 
amongst all of the dead ones):
http://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Public/access.htm

DICT is a more obscure one that I do regularly use, grabbing 
definitions from the dict.org server. www.dict.org brings you a web 
interface, but hey there's no fun in web interfaces.

Speaking of protocols, I updated OpenWRT on my router and now due 
to the age of the ssh client on this PC I can't connect to the 
router in order to ssh into the server hosting my gopher hole 
anymore. Like the server, the router software now insists on newer 
encryption protocols. As I don't expect anyone to be spying on my 
LAN, I'd be happy to Telnet in, but the OpenWRT devs have 
apparantly got so snotty about unencrypted shell access that 
they're not packaging a Telnet server anymore, and cross-compiling 
for a router doesn't look trivial. Of course I've been complaining 
already about my past two attempts at compiling a new OpenSSH 
client for this PC, and even though I know the next step to find 
out what the configure script is doing wrong, I wasn't keen on 
stuffing about with that this weekend (I get little fun out of 
spending hours getting software to work just the same as it used to 
work before).

So I'll just save this and upload it using my laptop tomorrow. 
Hopefully I remember. I might also pop up some pictures of inside a 
WWII Wavemeter Power Supply (yeah sorry, no wavemeter, but I would 
have had to pay more than $5 if there was). There's also a new set 
of musings in the Ideas section about some very unusual concepts 
for electronic displays, which sneeked in before the router update.

- The Free Thinker.