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Three pints
July 30th, 2022
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Written on my phone first, then on my
laptop, connected via SSH to the server
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A couple of days ago I invited a friend at work. I hadn't seen him since
before covid! He arrived in the late afternoon and after a quick tour we
went to the Jazz bar to get something to drink and have a chat. A few
colleagues joined and I had a very good time.
My friend reads this phlog -hi Nicola! ;)- and as in my previous posts I
had promised updates about my findings in the gopherspace a good part of
our conversation revolved around it. The rest included war stories from
our old times at the uni, Korean movie directors, and juke-box hacking
(I might have exaggerated this a bit, as it boiled down to pushing the
volume button on its remote, but it definitely sounds more heroic this
way... also which old-time juke-box has a remote control?).
I think having someone to chat with about my experience here was good,
as Nicola's questions helped me better focus on the main things I wanted
to write about.
Q: How did you start?
First things first, I set up a minimal environment to both publish and
browse the gopherspace. This is what I started with:
- client: bombadillo, Lagrange
- server: gophernicus
For what concerns the client, I am quite happy with bombadillo because
it gives me a consistent experience on all of my devices. Even if I have
installed it on my laptop with brew, I mostly use it on my self-hosted
servers together with screen, so I can disconnect anytime and pick up
where I left from any device (phone, tablet, any computer). Lagrange is
more integrated with my OS, so if I want to do a lot of back and forth
between reading and writing, copy/paste URLs, and so on I revert to it.
For the server, I chose gophernicus as it seemed to be quite mature and
reliable. Setting it up and creating your first gopherhole is quite easy
and well documented both in gophernicus' github page [1] and in many
other blogs/phlogs [2,3].
I found that, despite the simple syntax, updating gopherfiles can become
quite bothersome when your gopherhole starts growing and/or you want to
provide any extra features (e.g. latest k posts, reverse chronological
phlogs organised by month/year, etc). For this reason, a few people
started building their own scripts so their indices are automatically
generated. While some of these scripts are available, I think I will use
this as an excuse to write a custom one :-). I'd like the workflow to
become similar to prose.sh, where you basically just have to scp a
Markdown file to upload a new post.
Q: What did you do / what did you see in these couple of months?
I started following links available in the clients I had installed,
avoiding search engines at the beginning as I wanted to access recent
stuff, enter communities, and see what the current trends were rather
than accessing stale content. As usual, I followed a lot of links and
I opened a lot of tabs :-)
What did I find? Well, here's a brief list of posts/places I really
enjoyed:
- How I use SDF in daily life [4]
agk describes how she uses SDF, a public-access UNIX system, as an
alternative to google suite (and much more!) from her GPD Win 1
device. After years of self-hosting, her post made me want to start
using pubnix systems again, not much for the software alternatives
but for the kind of people I could find there.
- Szczezuja's Gopherhole [5]
I do not remember whether I have first read Szczezuja on usenet, on
SDF's bboard, or his gopherhole. What I know is that he has done
some super interesting research work on gopher and the communities
around it.
- gopher.black [6]
On Mastodon, Tomasino defines himself as a "reader of things". He
definitely is if you look at the "Books" section of his gopherhole,
and he is a writer too. I enjoy reading his phlog and I loved his
MCH2022 talk about the small internet [7]
- Ploum’s Offline Typewriter [8]
Ploum has decided to start a quest in 2022, one aimed at spending the
whole year offline (or, well, reducing his time offline as much as
possible). To do this, he is developing Offpunk, an offline-first,
command-line based Gemini client, which allows him to sync his
computer once a day with new material and use Internet in a more
mindful way.
So, this was just the beginning of my journey and what I found was
already way more fulfilling than hundreds of algorithm-suggested short
updates about everything and nothing. This kind of stuff could keep me
engaged for weeks, even if I stopped reading it now, as it already gave
me plenty of ideas about new things I could do or write. And the best of
it is that it is just the start, and as Tomasino says in his talk "You
will not finish browsing Gopher today".
During the time of those three pints I have been asked other questions,
which I will address in my following posts. I hope that's ok, I am still
trying to find the best trade-off between writing something meaningful
and not letting it overflow on other things I'd like to do... In the
meantime if you want, feel free to add further questions or comments by
dropping me a message at mala@sdf.org or @mala@fosstodon.org.
[1] https://github.com/gophernicus/gophernicus
[2] https://www.ecliptik.com/Making-a-Gopherhole-and-Phlog/
[3] https://gopher.zone/
[4] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/agk/phlog/2022-06-07-sdf.txt
[5] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/szczezuja/
[6] gopher://gopher.black:70/
[7] https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-83-rocking-the-web-bloat-modern-gopher-gemini-and-the-small-internet
[8] gemini://rawtext.club/~ploum/