SERVICES RESTORED

Firetext and Gopher Banker have been failing to get updates for a 
few weeks. I've now switched the system that updates them on the 
now static-only aussies.space Gopher server, so hopefully they 
should be working again. Nobody actually complained that they were 
broken, of course.

I'm not sure if I'll make more Gopher services here, the 
maintenance burden of hosting them on tildes where things change 
all the time seems to be much greater than on a machine under one's 
own control, and there's always a set of weird system configuration 
decisions by the admin/s which trip me up. Plus I get the distinct 
impression that nobody else finds the services useful anyway, so I 
really might as well save myself the effort of making them publicly 
accessible.

But really I'm just a bit off the whole attraction of messing with 
computer software entirely at the moment. Upgrading to the latest 
OpenWRT failed in the most miserable way yet when I attempted it a 
couple of weeks ago - it boots up fine but neither Ethernet, WiFi, 
or USB are operational, even though they seem to be detected by 
drivers. It's a good thing I do these upgrades on a spare so I can 
keep using the old one. But can I be bothered debugging it? Is 
there really anything insecure about still running the previous 
version? Since it's not listening to connections from the internet 
anyway, and attacks from within my LAN are highly unlikely, it's 
basically assuming some Linux kernel networking bug allowing 
unauthorised incoming connections, which hopefully I would have 
heard about if it were known.

On the other hand there's still my big website idea that, like this 
time last year, I'm pondering making a start on. I really only see 
that making me more annoyed and fed up with computers, but unlike 
non-computer occupations I can see it maybe making me some decent 
money on my own terms. Maybe I should just make a start before I 
get too fed up anyway?

 - The Free Thinker