cmccabe wrote recently about devoting 15 minutes a 
day to working on a project so that it gets 
done[1]. That seems like a very good approach to 
large projects, which can seem insurmountable if 
you start with the "I have to get the entire thing 
done" mentality.

So I've been doing that for the last little while.

I have a website devoted to keeping old BlackBerry 
devices running without a connection to 
BlackBerry's servers[2]. I let it go stale when I 
moved onto other phones and when I left CrackBerry 
for a while (which I really should do again -- it 
always turns into a real time waster).

In any case, I've been putting in my 15 minutes a 
day (sometimes more if I get caught up in the 
process) to update the pages, and I'm getting 
there. I've also started work on an OTA 
(over-the-air) app store, since BlackBerry World 
is shutting down at the end of the year, and I 
already had a lot of links to OTA software. As an 
interesting side note, it is possible to host the 
software on a pygopherd server and install it on 
the handset seamlessly via pygopherd's built-in 
http/html converter.

I considered re-writing the whole site as a set of 
gophermaps (it's full of links), and actually did 
re-write the main page, but then abandoned the 
idea, because the pygopherd http/html converted 
page text is very tiny on the device if the 
browser font size is set within the normal range.

Using the Bold 9900 as an everyday device is quite 
nice. Text editing is brilliant as usual and all 
the little things (memos, tasks, calendar, 
contacts) are designed so sparsely, but with so 
much attention to detail. There's little in the 
way of distraction, though I confess that Ray 
Lopez's gopher proxy has facilitated the odd 
time-wasting episode[3].

On that note, I wonder how many people visit 
gopher sites from their handheld devices? I've 
been formatting my phlogs at 60 columns, which I 
find quite readable on my laptop, but my intention 
is also to make the phlog readable on mobile. For 
mobile, it might be better to go down to 50 
columns. So I'm trying it with this phlog entry, 
just so I can test it on a few devices (and apps). 
Perhaps I'll try 40 columns in the future.

On the XMPP server front, the Let's Encrypt 
certificate is due to be renewed in about two 
weeks or so. It should renew automatically and 
I've scripted it to copy the certificates to the 
right location for Prosody, hopefully with all the 
permissions intact, but we'll see. There could be 
a short service interruption.




[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/
    %7ecmccabe/13-fifteen-minutes-a-day.txt

[2] http://darkstar.x10host.com/nibble/index.html

[3] http://gp.ratthing.com/ 
    Add any gopher URL to view the site: 
    e.g., http://gp.ratthing.com/circumlunar.space