Assorted replies and acknowledgements
-------------------------------------

Lots to respond to today!

First up, my condolences to Jynx[1] and Bradmac[2], and their families, who
both lost loved ones over the holidays.

Logout[3] responded to my request for more details on his hobbyist use of PMR446
radios.  These are low-power portable radios which can be used license free
anywhere in the EU.  The other day I was digging back into many phlogger's old
archives, including Logouts, and realised that in fact he has written about this
before (e.g. [4]), so sorry for asking you to repeat yourself and thanks for
taking the time to do so!  I think it's pretty cool that people get 100s of km
of range out of these things from mountain tops.  Sadly, it's pretty flat where
I live in Finland, so even if this practice is not limited to former
Czechoslovakian countries there probably aren't many prospects for me.  I might
pick up some PMR446 radios anyway, I can get Motorola's entry level model, the
T40, from Amazon in Germany for just over 10 euro per radio, which is
ludicriously cheap for anything from a "real brand" like them.  No doubt the
performance is not great, but I would just use these when hiking or camping so
my requirements are very low.  The next model up, the T60, is also quite
affordable, but the T40 appears to be the only model in the family which uses
standard AA batteries, which means they're the only one which might still be
useful 10 years from now when Motorola discontinue the proprietary rechargables
in all the other T-x0 radios.

tfurrows[5] and pet84rik[6] have both commented on my teasing about my gopher
client.  Fear not, pet84rik, it will run on *BSD - it will even be BSD licensed.
:)  It will be simple in the sense of being small and not needing much in the
way of system resources, but perhaps not simple to use.  Or at least, not at
first.  Think of it like emacs or vim, when you first come to them from Notepad
they seem insanely overcomplicated, but once you learn a few basic concepts it
becomes very quick and easy to do powerful things.  That's what I'm aiming for,
at least.  It is written in Python 3, so it should work no problem on Linux or
BSD, but it uses common Unix commands (less, fold, lynx, feh, mpg123, etc.) to
do various tasks, so I don't know how well it will work on OS X (maybe?) or
Windows (probably not).  I am hacking on it in a very informal way right now,
just one big .py file in vim.  After this weekend I will share what I have.  If
people think the idea is worth developing I will set it up properly in a git
repository somewhere, write a setup.py and submit it to PyPi, etc, etc.  Stay
tuned!

pet84rik also spent ~24 hours compiling Firefox on an old i686 machine.  That
brought back memories!  Back when I was using NetBSD as my primary desktop, the
binary package situation with pkgsrc was not the best.  I think it's a little
better now, especially with tools like `pkgin`, but back then I compiled pretty
much everything from source.  I remember Firefox being one of the worst!  This
was on an 800MHz Celeron, so it did not take 24 hours, but it certainly was not
a quick process.  Makes me a little nostalgic, although no doubt if I actually
had to put up with that on a regular basis the charm would soon wear off!

Tomasino[7] has recently received an SGI Indigo2.  More generally, like I said,
I have been rummaging through people's old content, including Logout's writings
about his old PowerPC machines, and Jirka[8]'s assorted portable machines.  All
of this is making me really jealous and lust after obscure old hardware.  Back
when I was a student I had a big collection of old game consoles, home computers
from the 80s and various old PCs (nothing exotic, though, all x86 stuff).  When
I moved overseas for the first time after graduating I had to find new homes for
or recycle all of it.  Since then I have been strictly a laptop or tiny SBC
user, for the sake of portability.  I kind of miss big old machines, I and I
would *love* to play around with something exotic.  I have no idea how to even
go about finding anything like this in Finland, though.  There are a few
websites here which are the local equivalents of Craigslist, but whenever I look
for interesting old stuff there (old computers or game machines, film cameras,
etc.) there are very, very little results.  I don't know if I am searching the
websites wrong due to my very sketchy Finnish or if all the nerdy collectors
here use some other channel for trading their stuff.  If there are any Finns in
gopherspace who want to dump sexy old machines on me, feel free! ;)

Finally, I will join in the chorus of people welcoming Yin Feng[9] back to the
phlogosphere.  Like apparently many others, I too have some interest in
Buddhism, and actually many years back I actually identified as a practicing Zen
Buddhist.  I imagine Yin Fang would probably consider the brand of Zen I
subscribed to "defective"[10], which is fine, even if I'd like to think I had a
slightly more nuanced understanding than the "beat hippes" (I haven't even
*seen* The Big Lebowski!).  I might write more about this if there is interest.

[1]  gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jynx/dat/20180111.post
[2]  gopher://sdf.org//users/bradmac/Log/2018-01-12.txt
[3]  gopher://i-logout.cz//en/phlog/01-2018-phlog.txt
[4]  gopher://i-logout.cz//en/phlog/archive_2011/2011-11-28.txt
[5]  gopher://grex.org//~tfurrows/phlog/2018/ano_miscResp.txt
[6]  gopher://sdf.org//users/pet84rik/BLOG/JAN18/Jan11-manythings
[7]  gopher://sdf.org//users/tomasino/phlog/20180112-little-updates
[8]  gopher://sdf.org//users/jirka/Phlog/
[9]  gopher://tomatobodhi.twilightparadox.com/phlog/
[10] gopher://tomatobodhi.twilightparadox.com:70/1/phlog/01-10-18