Miscellaneous, etc.
-------------------

Okay, I'm back from my work travels, so let the regular phlogging schedule
resume!

Speaking of regular phlogging schedules, I noticed that unless they take
tomorrow off, gunnarfrost is on track to have phlogged something literally
every single day in January, which is to say every single day since he started
his phlog.  That is impressive as heck, so well done Gunnar!

Speaking of folks in the phlogospher, welcome to newcomer kvothe[1]!

I would like to say a big thank you to everybody who has tried my VF-1 gopher
client and either phlogged about it and/or commented on the BBOARD thread about
it.  I have received a lot more feedback about this little project than I
expected and I appreciate the effort everybody has put into testing it out.
I'm continuing to expand and improve VF-1, but I don't want it to grow into any
large and complicated, it is supposed to be small and simple so I will probably
call it "done" quite soon and just fix bugs rather than add new features.  So,
if there is anything that you *really* want to see added, try to convince me
quickly!

A number of people have recently phlogged about the range of computing devices
they owned[2,3,4, sorry if I missed you], and there was also some talk of
trying to get this number down[5].  I approve of this, as long as still-working
machines are either found loving new homes or, if necessary, recycled, rather
than thrown out.  As for myself, I posted a list of computing devices
earlier[6] and not much has changed.  I all the chaos of moving overseas, the
GameBoy mentioned in that entry ended up accidentally being left behind in
storage in Australia, but all the rest is here.  I still need to find something
really worthwhile to do with the spare Rasperry Pi 1.

There has also been talk about hostnaming schemes[7.8,9, sorry again if I missed
you].  This is obviously a vast conspiracy to reveal me as a gigantic nerd,
because most of my computers have been named after female anime characters.
Well, I never claimed to be cool.  I have previously had systems named motoko,
tsuruko, naru, kitsune, shinobu (all from Love Hina), sasako (Chobits), moeka
(Steins;Gate), miku (Vocaloid), yuki (Harui), and noa (Patlabor).  At some point
I started to feel like I was outgrowing this scheme, and switched to using
generic female Japanese names without any connection to anime, which I suppose
is slightly less cringey.  The Thinkpad X220 that I am currently typing this on
is the first machine to break from this system.  I named it stilgar, after the
character in the Dune novels.

Stilgar is an old-fashioned and hard-assed leader of a proud and ancient people
who live in an inhospitable world through discipline and strict adherence to
traditional ways.  He is deeply conservative and distrustful of new ideas.
Naming my Thinkpad after him was supposed to capture something of the mindset I
had in deliberately choosing to buy and upgrade a cheap seven year old laptop
and run a very lightweight Linux configuration on it, instead of buying
something new and flashy.

I don't know if I will continue the Dune theme.  I am not planning to acquire
any new machines any time soon (although I have been looking more and more at
the range of interesting old machines available on eBay and it will take some
force of will not to end up with some old SGI or Sparc machine some day).  Oddly
enough, I've never bothered to name my Raspberry Pis.

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/kvothe/
[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jirka/phlog/2018_01_09.txt
[3] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/tomasino/phlog/20180118-my-computers
[4] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jynx/dat/20180121.post
[5] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/melton/phlog/01192018
[6] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/too-much-stuff.txt
[7] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/psztrnk/log/20180123.txt
[8] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/pet84rik/BLOG/JAN18/Jan25-updates
[9] gopher://grex.org:70/0/~jandal/phlog/show-me-what-you-got