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