Privacy and Offline Writing I've been reading the various phlogs on privacy, surveillance, and getting off the grid. The three things go together, of course. The more time you spend off the grid, the less you're subjected to surveillance and the more privacy you have. dgold, your rant[1] was spot on. I've been working on a piece on the history of privacy over the last little while. The history is interesting in itself, but I'm not happy with the piece, so it will stay buried for now. #ROOPHLOCH Today I'm phlogging on Palm OS, with my LifeDrive. I don't have a treo and I'm really bad at Palm Graffiti, so I'm using the wireless infrared keyboard. It's not ideal. The LifeDrive's slippery sides don't make for a very stable 'cradle' experience. I also hit the hinge in the middle of the space bar with my thumb a lot. It's a really bad folding keyboard design. Sadly, this ROOPHLOCH post is not coming from anywhere exotic. I'm on my back porch... and I just realized that I don't know how I'm going to get this post off of the LifeDrive. Maybe I can sync it with an ancient Linux program. I'm not sure. Edit: I copied it over to Documents to Go, saved it as a text file on an SD card, and then transferred the card to my laptop. Easy. Next time I'll just write it in Docs to Go in the first place. Narrow Column Widths It's nice to see that other phloggers (Palm users like Yargo and Jynx[2]) have started formatting their phlogs for mobile. I enjoy reading phlogs on my old BlackBerry and it's great when there's no side to side scrolling required. Solderpunk is currently surveying users about their favoured column-width[3] for Gemini purposes and mine is 38. It seems to work on everything I own. I don't find the narrower width awkward on my laptop, but apparently opinions differ. Tomasino's Zine Tomasino extended the deadline for the first zine issue (theme: Hammer) and I'm glad that he did. Shortly afterward, an obvious connection struck me and I wrote up and submitted a piece. That was also an off-the-grid bit of writing. Social Media A few weeks back, I created a Mastodon account. I'm still not sure that I like it, for all the reasons that other people have stated over the years. I feel like my involvement is limited to knee-jerk reactions and that I 'check in' for completely ego-centric reasons. That describes my reddit account too. Anyways, September is here. Work life moves back to the fore. Another season begins. Let's be careful out there, phloggers. [1] gopher://ascraeus.org/0/phlog/029.txt [2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7eyargo/clog/xw-palm-privacy-unix50.txt gopher://leveck.us/0/Phlog/20190826.post [3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7esolderpunk/files/text-wrapping-experiment.txt