First thing in the morning. I'm a
creature of habit. I make coffee and
read the phlogs and the news.
It occurs to me these days that I'm a
free rider -- and you really shouldn't
be a free rider in gopherspace. We
create the content. If we don't,
there's nothing.
So I've been benefitting from the
regular posts put up by many of you,
without contributing as much as I once
did. I really started to notice that
recently when reading tfurrows' and
jirka's regular entries. Then this
morning, I saw solderpunk's graph with
it's initial fury of activity a few
years ago and more recent sporadic
posts. I understand that, especially
when other projects get in the way.
But I am resolving to do something
about it in my own case.
Life these days just floats along. I'm
not complaining. It's good. I'm
getting a lot of time to do the things
I love and to catch up on a lot of
work that I've long wanted to do.
Without interruption. And I still have
a job. That's so fortunate.
But it's a floating dream world. When
people mention dates I really have to
think about what month and day it is.
Otherwise, I get up, spend an hour on
the internet, have a shower, go down
to my office and work, spend the late
afternoon on some project of my own,
have dinner with my wife, watch a TV
show, and go to sleep. Repeat. Repeat.
Repeat.
Apparently, that cycle may be destined
to continue for some time. My employer
is planning for me to work from home
until January (and then we'll see).
I have never maintained high levels of
contact with other people outside of
work. That may need to change. The
floating, unchanging dream world
probably isn't the healthiest thing.
* * * *
I've reorganized my gopherhole
(there's a selector for it on my phlog
page) and plan to do a little more of
that. For the time being, I've added
selectors for a number of gopher holes
that maintain lists of active servers.
A couple also maintain lists of
inactive servers. Some time ago I
wrote about how I like creeping
through gopherdom, exploring what's at
the back of everyone's metaphorical
sock drawers, and I still do it
frequently. I thought that perhaps
some of you might enjoy it too.
I've also been playing around with
bash scripts for scraping www sites to
text files that I can read on my
phone. It's so old that TLS is just
killing it -- and so far, the
Pinephone is not ready for everyday
use. In any case, I have been enjoying
the whole process of experimentation,
learning and re-learning how to use
the text formatting tools that are so
basic to UNIX.
In the process of looking into keeping
the old BlackBerry Bold going for just
a little while longer, I came across a
configuration that allows you to use a
self-hosted instance of NGINX as a
kind of relay between you and that
TLS-demanding website you want to
read. I'll have to spin up my
dormant pi zero with the flaky
ethernet adapter and give it a try.
I know that a number of you make use
of old tech too, so I thought I'd
share the NGINX config details:
server {
# default_server not needed if its first server in config
listen 80 default_server;
location / {
# x.x.x.x - IP address of DNS server
resolver x.x.x.x;
# port may be omitted
proxy_pass https://$host:443;
}
}
There is more information at:
https://superuser.com/questions/1487553/proxy-or-other-solution-that-can-allow-vintage-browsers-before-https-era-wi
