I'm an indie software developer, with an interest in music. I tend to
prefer bands like Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, The Prodigy & Unheilig, but
I also like pop music. I'm a fan of the Eurovision Song Contest, and
I've even been to Eurovision live 4 times. Flying all the way from
Australia to see it. And this was before Australia was admitted into the
contest!
Like many here, I also have some interest in retro computing. It isn't a
big thing for me, but I tend to keep every computer I've had and in
working condition. So there's a Commodore 64 & an Apple IIGS here, an
LC630 68k Mac, a 486 & a Celeron, and a few Intel Macs, plus my current
ThinkPad X1 as my daily driver. But my favorite retro computer is a
Pismo G3 Mac PowerBook. It's the computer I always wanted as a kid in
high school, it was so stylish. If you've ever seen Sex And The City,
it's the same Mac that Carrie types on. A friend sold it to me for $150
and it still works, it can still get online, though parts of the web
are getting too bloated for it to handle, and it can't handle newer
HTTPS websites because it can't support TLS 1.2.
So I'm here in Gopherspace because I like the idea of a stable, widely
compatible protocol. I'm sad at how the HTTPS web is disappearing to
old hardware (like my 20 year old PowerPC Macs), especially since the
web was meant to gracefully downgrade on lower spec devices so it was
accessible to everyone. So when Gemini and Gopher were mentioned on
Hacker News, it reminded me that there's a 30 year old unencrypted text
protocol that still works on those devices. I'm not interested in Gemini
because of the mandatory TLS, which rules out those old machines. But
Gopher? We should still be able to even get that old Apple IIGS connected
to that. I love the speed of low-bandwidth Gopher on our high-speed 21st
Century internet lines - 50 Mbps is a lot faster than the 2400 bps I
started out with.
I'd love to host my gopherhole on my own domain, but sadly my usual
webhost isn't too keen on running a Gopher daemon (though at least they
(considered it). So I'm starting out at SDF, which I seem to resonate with
more than the other gopher hosts I've found.
You can contact me at syneryder [at] namesuppressed.com.
