ROOPHLOCH 2024 (plugd, 09-30-24)
--------------------------------

Location: A park near my appartment
Network protocol: NNCP over sneakernet
OS: Debian testing (whatever that is currently)
Software: exwm, emacs, MultiMail offline mail packet reader
Coffee: Yes

This is my extremely late and poorly thought out entry to ROOPHLOCH.
This is my first attempt at participating.  Although I've contemplated
several hair-brained schemes over the years that might have qualified,
I never get up the time/energy to pull any of them off.  This time I
seem to have set the bar low enough that even with procrastination
turned up to 11 it seems I'll be able to at least submit an entry. :)

Okay, following the long tradition of ROOPHLOCH entries, I suppose now
I need to explain my setup. I'm currently sitting with a bog standard
laptop out on a park bench in the middle of the night, attempting to
look as non-dodgy as it's possible to look while doing this.

I'm entering this post in MultiMail (running in a terminal emulator in
emacs) - apparently the last surviving QWK mail reader still
maintained.  This mail reader is what I and a small number of others
use to interact with the Offline BBS [1] - a message board accessible only
via the NNCP friend-to-friend network utility.  Once I'm done, the
reader will produce a ".rep" file containing my post.  I'll then use
the nncp-exec utility to queue an encrypted packet destined for the
Offline BBS server, to tell it to add my post do the board.  I'll then
close the laptop, and finish my coffee in peace.

The next time a particular cron job fires when my laptop is within
range of wifi, the queued packet will be sent to the BBS server, which
will unpack the .rep file and process the post.  Usually these posts
are just added to a particular message area (or "conference" in
old-timey QWK terminology).  In this case however, I'm posting to a
special message area named "Phlog" which I've set up on the board.
Any posts to this message area are mirrored to the following index:

gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/1/offline_phlog/

which is hopefully where you are now reading this.

Yes, you *could* argue that what I've done here is isomorphic to
simply writing some text on my laptop outside, then posting it
when I got back to the house... but it's not as fun when you say
it like that!!

[1] gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/0/offline.txt
 
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.52