The "Old Gadget" part of Magic Margin is a bit of a 
potpourri. There isn't just one project I am working on and 
old and gadget are very much up to my discretion. Recently I 
have taken a trip down memory lane and been playing around 
with Gopher. I actually remember Gopher because of AzTec.

In the very early 90s, getting online was an expensive 
prospect for my lower-income family. We couldn't afford 
Compuserve or Prodigy. Instead, a friend of mine turned me 
onto a local Freenet called AzTec hosted at ASU. It was a 
free service where you could dial up to their bank of 2400 
baud modems and connect with other computer users.

There was the regular BBS-type stuff on there. Clubs, 
organizations, and meetings were discussed in community 
bulletin boards. You had email through Pine or something 
else. I remember that my email address was 
tryanpa@aztec.asu.edu -- just typing that takes me back! 
There was one way to go father afield than our local 
community; Lynx.

Lynx, of course, is a text-based web browser. I still use 
it to this day. It's a great tool to have and a fun way to 
make even the oldest computer part of the internet 
experience. Being text-based it worked better 20 years ago. 
Modern CCS and graphic-heavy web pages are notoriously text
-limited and make for a poor experience in text-only mode. 
Interestingly, typecasts are not readable in Lynx. This 
effectively keeps the prying eyes of Big Brother at bay. (We 
may want to revisit this for those who are visually 
impaired.) It's one of the best browsers out there. In 
addition to being a powerful web browser, it also is a 
pretty good Gopher client.

Gopher is a unique way to access text on the internet. I 
think there is a charm about it. It's simple to understand. 
Most human-readable content is text (although you can use 
images). The file-folder concept is a departure from the 
web's interconnected threads. It feels like those early days 
of computers.

With this memory, I decided to set up my own Gopher hole. I 
read a few tutorials and decided to use Pygopherd on a 
Raspberry Pi. I used a popular dynamic DNS service to reroute 
the traffic to a subdomain of Magic Margin and within a few 
hours I had a Gopher server running next to my tiki mug 
collection.

If you have Lynx or another Gopher tool, you can check out 
the link at:

gopher://gopher.magicmargin.net

There's not much there, but what is there is just for Gopher. 
It's Gopher premium content!