EASTER BROWSING I never travel around Easter - too much traffic on the roads. Now there's no traffic, but we're not allowed to go anywhere without a good reason, so its the same anyway. I'm getting a bit bored about hearing so much about the novelty/horror of "life under lockdown" when day-to-day there's bugger all difference to my own routine. It turns out that if everyone lives like me they all go nuts and start doing silly things in front of their web cams, go figure. Now I've gone to write one of these posts twice over the long weekend, but keep considering how long they always take and deciding that I'd better get something else done first. Certainly fixing the down pipes on the shed during the sunny daylight, and typing nonsense into my old PC in the evening, is the better order of daily tasks, but it does mean that I can't quite remember what I wanted to discuss in the first place. Well I left a heading and some links the last time, so I guess better start with those. With a couple of extra days I've been catching up on many of my half-forgotten bookmarks left for following up when I've exhausted the content of my usual URLs. Those in the audience with a vague mechanical interest may be familliar with the excellent TV series "The Secret Life of Machines". If you're interested in how everyday things work, and the history of their development, then I really couldn't recommend it more. The practical demonstrations and detail of the show, combined with a relaxed quirkyness completely of its own, make it quite unique. The host, Tim Hunkin, has a facinating website detailing a near endless variety of electromechanical marvels to his name, most in the form of unconventional one-off arcade machines. Checking today I saw that the co-host of the show, Rex Garrod, recently died. The story there was quite interesting: http://www.timhunkin.com/a229_rex.htm Browsing around some more, I found some things to look at when I'm allowed to go back to roaming endlessly through the state's back roads again. It turns out that somewhat nearby there's an old experimental wind generator that was errected in the late 80s and possibly still working today. The closest that it has to a website seem to be this, there are some interesting things there but I doubt that it's really of general interest. Still, so long as I have the link: https://www.suburbia.com.au/~mickgg/breamlea/ Also there's a tank museum as the Puckapunyal army base! Must check that out some time. You might as well see that link too: http://australianarmytankmuseum.com.au/ On Gopher I'm one post away from reaching the start of Cat's FAX SEX phlog, which I've been intermittently reading in reverse since before I started my own. Certainly the style isn't much like how my Gopher presence has turned out, and he's clearly not much akin to me either, but quite a facinating insight nonetheless. Reading these Phlogs is quite enlightening really, seeing as I haven't really looked at the personal lives and thoughts of others very much before. That said, I'm not sure that I won't get bored with it at some point. My morning internet has long consisted of Email, Usenet, then _something_. That _something_ has previously drifed between various websites and somehow never really stuck (though in a few cases that was due to the websites, or the communities behind them, dying). Still what do you care? Either way I probably won't be able to resist the temptation to shout my own thoughts out in the chorus echoing within the internet void. gopher://baud.baby/1/phlog Beyond the web and Gopher, I still quite enjoy having a browse around the anonymous FTP sites that are still running, or nobody remembered to turn off. I have quite a fondness for FTP. While Gopher's advantages are mainly in not providing the features that are abused on the web, FTP has its own genuine features for file handling. Unlike the web, and certainly Gopher, batch download operations are supported by many clients and work very reliably. Being able to select a group of files, and even directories that are downloaded recursively, make easy many download tasks that are prohibitively tedious on the web. You're also pretty sure to have the file size listed, as well as modification time. Plus beyond the graphical clients, there's a certain fun in logging in with an old-fashioned command line FTP client and observing the quirks of different server software while roaming around with a curious sequence of "cd", "dir", and "get" commands. Today I just logged into ftp.scene.org to grab some of the tracker modules from the Revision 2020 tracked music compo. Some other sites that might be fun for a browse: ftp.modland.com - Lots and lots of tracker modules ftp.ibiblio.org - All things open-source distro.ibiblio.org - Linux distros ftp.funet.fi - An old favourite for software etc., and hosts many mirrors of other sites that haven't survived. ftp.zimmers.net - Commodore stuff ftp.cbm8bit.com - Commodore 8bit Stuff ftp.exotica.org.uk - Amiga and other vintage computing stuff - Browsable mirror of High Voltage SID Collection at: /pub/exotica/media/audio/High_Voltage_Sid_Collection/C64Music major.butt.care - Lots of mirrors, including of the great Garbo and SimTel FTP sites that finally died during the last decade. ftp.photonlexicon.com - Laser projector stuff of all description. Includes some pictures and videos. ftp.riken.go.jp ftp.gwdg.de ftp.lyx.org ftp.bom.gov.au - Seeing as its the basis of my improved Australian Gopher weather forecast plans. Plus of course you can upload, so it gets no end of practical use on my LAN, while SFTP/FTPS are there for uploading over the big scary internet where people might be poking their nose into your passwords. There's no shortage of more obscure internet protocols lurking out there though. This is a very interesting webpage ready to fill up your time with needless experimentation by connecting to public servers still talking the lingo of software long ago forgotten, plenty more FTP sites to explore listed there as well (mixed in amongst all of the dead ones): http://www.jumpjet.info/Offbeat-Internet/Public/access.htm DICT is a more obscure one that I do regularly use, grabbing definitions from the dict.org server. www.dict.org brings you a web interface, but hey there's no fun in web interfaces. Speaking of protocols, I updated OpenWRT on my router and now due to the age of the ssh client on this PC I can't connect to the router in order to ssh into the server hosting my gopher hole anymore. Like the server, the router software now insists on newer encryption protocols. As I don't expect anyone to be spying on my LAN, I'd be happy to Telnet in, but the OpenWRT devs have apparantly got so snotty about unencrypted shell access that they're not packaging a Telnet server anymore, and cross-compiling for a router doesn't look trivial. Of course I've been complaining already about my past two attempts at compiling a new OpenSSH client for this PC, and even though I know the next step to find out what the configure script is doing wrong, I wasn't keen on stuffing about with that this weekend (I get little fun out of spending hours getting software to work just the same as it used to work before). So I'll just save this and upload it using my laptop tomorrow. Hopefully I remember. I might also pop up some pictures of inside a WWII Wavemeter Power Supply (yeah sorry, no wavemeter, but I would have had to pay more than $5 if there was). There's also a new set of musings in the Ideas section about some very unusual concepts for electronic displays, which sneeked in before the router update. - The Free Thinker.