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   Three pints  
   July 30th, 2022
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   Written on my phone first, then on my
   laptop, connected via SSH to the server
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  A couple of days ago I invited a friend at work. I hadn't seen him since
  before covid! He arrived in the late afternoon and after a quick tour we
  went to the Jazz bar to get something to drink and have a chat. A few
  colleagues joined and I had a very good time.
  
  My friend reads this phlog -hi Nicola! ;)- and as in my previous posts I
  had promised updates about my findings in the gopherspace a good part of
  our conversation revolved around it. The rest included war stories from
  our old times at the uni, Korean movie directors, and juke-box hacking
  (I might have exaggerated this a bit, as it boiled down to pushing the
  volume button on its remote, but it definitely sounds more heroic this
  way... also which old-time juke-box has a remote control?).
  
  I think having someone to chat with about my experience here was good,
  as Nicola's questions helped me better focus on the main things I wanted
  to write about. 
  
  
  Q: How did you start?
  
  First things first, I set up a minimal environment to both publish and
  browse the gopherspace. This is what I started with:
  
  - client: bombadillo, Lagrange
  - server: gophernicus
  
  For what concerns the client, I am quite happy with bombadillo because
  it gives me a consistent experience on all of my devices. Even if I have
  installed it on my laptop with brew, I mostly use it on my self-hosted 
  servers together with screen, so I can disconnect anytime and pick up
  where I left from any device (phone, tablet, any computer). Lagrange is
  more integrated with my OS, so if I want to do a lot of back and forth
  between reading and writing, copy/paste URLs, and so on I revert to it.
  
  For the server, I chose gophernicus as it seemed to be quite mature and
  reliable. Setting it up and creating your first gopherhole is quite easy
  and well documented both in gophernicus' github page [1] and in many
  other blogs/phlogs [2,3].
  I found that, despite the simple syntax, updating gopherfiles can become
  quite bothersome when your gopherhole starts growing and/or you want to
  provide any extra features (e.g. latest k posts, reverse chronological 
  phlogs organised by month/year, etc). For this reason, a few people
  started building their own scripts so their indices are automatically
  generated. While some of these scripts are available, I think I will use
  this as an excuse to write a custom one :-). I'd like the workflow to
  become similar to prose.sh, where you basically just have to scp a
  Markdown file to upload a new post.
  
  
  Q: What did you do / what did you see in these couple of months?
  
  I started following links available in the clients I had installed,
  avoiding search engines at the beginning as I wanted to access recent
  stuff, enter communities, and see what the current trends were rather
  than accessing stale content. As usual, I followed a lot of links and
  I opened a lot of tabs :-)
  
  What did I find? Well, here's a brief list of posts/places I really 
  enjoyed:
  
  - How I use SDF in daily life [4]
    agk describes how she uses SDF, a public-access UNIX system, as an 
    alternative to google suite (and much more!) from her GPD Win 1
    device. After years of self-hosting, her post made me want to start
    using pubnix systems again, not much for the software alternatives
    but for the kind of people I could find there.
  
  - Szczezuja's Gopherhole [5]
    I do not remember whether I have first read Szczezuja on usenet, on
    SDF's bboard, or his gopherhole. What I know is that he has done
    some super interesting research work on gopher and the communities 
    around it.
  
  - gopher.black [6]
    On Mastodon, Tomasino defines himself as a "reader of things". He
    definitely is if you look at the "Books" section of his gopherhole,
    and he is a writer too. I enjoy reading his phlog and I loved his
    MCH2022 talk about the small internet [7]
  
  - Ploum’s Offline Typewriter [8]
    Ploum has decided to start a quest in 2022, one aimed at spending the
    whole year offline (or, well, reducing his time offline as much as
    possible). To do this, he is developing Offpunk, an offline-first, 
    command-line based Gemini client, which allows him to sync his
    computer once a day with new material and use Internet in a more
    mindful way.
  
  
  So, this was just the beginning of my journey and what I found was 
  already way more fulfilling than hundreds of algorithm-suggested short 
  updates about everything and nothing. This kind of stuff could keep me 
  engaged for weeks, even if I stopped reading it now, as it already gave 
  me plenty of ideas about new things I could do or write. And the best of
  it is that it is just the start, and as Tomasino says in his talk "You
  will not finish browsing Gopher today".
  
  
  During the time of those three pints I have been asked other questions,
  which I will address in my following posts. I hope that's ok, I am still
  trying to find the best trade-off between writing something meaningful
  and not letting it overflow on other things I'd like to do... In the
  meantime if you want, feel free to add further questions or comments by
  dropping me a message at mala@sdf.org or @mala@fosstodon.org.
  
  
  
  
  [1] https://github.com/gophernicus/gophernicus
  [2] https://www.ecliptik.com/Making-a-Gopherhole-and-Phlog/
  [3] https://gopher.zone/
  [4] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/agk/phlog/2022-06-07-sdf.txt
  [5] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/szczezuja/
  [6] gopher://gopher.black:70/
  [7] https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-83-rocking-the-web-bloat-modern-gopher-gemini-and-the-small-internet
  [8] gemini://rawtext.club/~ploum/