Announcing ROOPHLOCH 2019 ------------------------- Today is the last day to submit your HAMMER-related content to Tomasino's zine[1], Jeff! Are you already breaking out into cold sweats of dread, wondering how you will get through September without an internet stranger assigning you arbitrary deadlines to dictate how you spend your free time? Fear not, gopherverse citizens! I hereby declare August 2019 to be the month of the first ever, possibly annual (if things go well), Remote Outdoor Off-Grid Phlogging Challenge, aka ROOPHLOCH (which I'm mentally pronouncing "Roo flock", but you do you). In order to participate in ROOPHLOCH '19, you need to: 1. Make a phlog post, 2. From somewhere other than the place(s) you normally make phlog posts when you aren't participating in ROOPHLOCH, 3. Whilst not inside a permanent human-made structure, 4. Without the *direct* use of permanent infrastructure for power or communication. 5. Email me (solderpunk@sdf.org) informing me of the URL of your ROOPHLOCH post, so I can publish a list of entries for everybody to enjoy. 6. Complete all of the above by midnight, your local time, on September 30th, 2019. Basically, if you don't have a roof over your head and your phlogging device is not plugged into a wall via any kind of cable, you're winning! You can phlog about anything you like. Obviously your fellow ROOPLOCHers are going to be curious about where you're phlogging from and how, but it's up to you whether your post is a detailed technical description of your remote gophering feat or whether you put a small footnote at the bottom of a post about anything else. I am deliberately setting the bar very low for this. If you take your laptop out into your backyard where your home WiFi still reaches and you make a post, you've successfully completed ROOPHLOCH and nobody can take that away from you! But obviously the true spirit of the event is to push yourself to do a little bit more than that; discover new places near to you (but not too near!), and experiment with new devices or new technologies. Try to come up with creative, interesting and unusual ways to comply with the above rules from unexpected locations. I will not be assigning an official winner or ranking entries by awesomness or anything like that, but rest assured that if you you do something like use your amateur radio license to transmit your phlog post back to a waiting upload script on your home computer via packet radio from a solar-powered RaspberryPi on the top of a mountain which you climbed yourself, the entire phlogosphere will consider you the unofficial winner and you'll retain serious bragging rights. So, put your hiking boots on, pump up your bike tires, or buy a train ticket! Put a laptop, tablet, vintage PDA, or SBC in your bag! Charge up your cell phone, your walkie talkies or your HT! Maybe get in touch with your local wireless community network[2]? Start studying a map, or perhaps the minimodem(1) man page? Have fun, get outdoors, learn something new and break your phlogging routine. You can do it! Even you, Jeff. [1] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20190719-zine [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_community_network