________  ________  ________
   2019-01-08                                   /        \/        \/    /   \
                                               /       __/         /_       _/
   Get  me  to a  doctor,  I've  got  finger  /        _/         /         /
fever!  Everyone's  doing  it!  Finger  your  \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
friends, finger your boss, finger your mum!     /        \/        \/    /   \
                                               /        _/         /_       _/
   There had  been  some poking  around with  /-        /        _/         /
finger for a few  weeks or so in the  PUBNIX  \________/\________/\___/____/
space, I messed with trying  to get a custom
response  though lost interest  pretty  quick and gave it the flick, but  then
solderpunk not only pointed out the  very versatile finger daemon efingerd but
then nailed it with the  excellent fellowsh[1].  It's essentially a minimalist
social network, built on core UNIX utilities, with finger at its heart.

   The philosophy of it, inspired by a quote by Dennis Ritchie, is also really
compelling. That's the kind of  flavor that  really  "makes" UNIX for me. It's
interesting to me that plain text programs can have so much  personality,  but
that's probably something for its own file.

   I scratched the finger itch by throwing a few things up  on  baud.baby. You
can  finger cat@baud.baby  of  course, for the usual suspects  like  .plan and
.project nicely formatted for easy reading, but you can also finger @baud.baby
itself for the status of the  server, plus a  short list  of  recently updated
files. You can also finger weather@baud.baby for my  local weather  and  a few
other Easter eggs, maybe even the baby has a response for you!

   Around the traps, tomasino has @cosmic.voyage not only  returning a list of
the logged  in  users  but  also which  ships  they  write  for and  fingering
individual users will list their  ships for you too. jynx has phlog@1436.ninja
returning  the contents  of his most recent phlog file which is something I'll
add  to baud.baby when I get a chance and is something  I  genuinely hope gets
adopted  more widely,  keeping phlog@ as  the prefix. It seems like  a  really
elegant way to give  readers  a method  to  quickly  check if you've  updated.
You'll also find kensanata also doing some interesting finger-gopher crossover
stuff,  essentially  working  finger  into  a  simple  gopher  client;  finger
alex@alexschroeder.ch to check it out.

   Not too bad for a protocol that's just celebrated its 41st birthday!

   PS. I've started working  on something for my Gopher space on the Zaibatsu,
there's  a lot more work  to go into it before it's  ready but keep  your eyes
peeled.


[1] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/were-bringin-finger-back.txt



EOF