First thing in the morning. I'm a 
creature of habit. I make coffee and 
read the phlogs and the news.

It occurs to me these days that I'm a 
free rider -- and you really shouldn't 
be a free rider in gopherspace. We 
create the content. If we don't, 
there's nothing.

So I've been benefitting from the 
regular posts put up by many of you, 
without contributing as much as I once 
did. I really started to notice that 
recently when reading tfurrows' and 
jirka's regular entries. Then this 
morning, I saw solderpunk's graph with 
it's initial fury of activity a few 
years ago and more recent sporadic 
posts. I understand that, especially 
when other projects get in the way. 
But I am resolving to do something 
about it in my own case.

Life these days just floats along. I'm 
not complaining. It's good. I'm 
getting a lot of time to do the things 
I love and to catch up on a lot of 
work that I've long wanted to do. 
Without interruption. And I still have 
a job. That's so fortunate.

But it's a floating dream world. When 
people mention dates I really have to 
think about what month and day it is. 
Otherwise, I get up, spend an hour on 
the internet, have a shower, go down 
to my office and work, spend the late 
afternoon on some project of my own, 
have dinner with my wife, watch a TV 
show, and go to sleep. Repeat. Repeat. 
Repeat.

Apparently, that cycle may be destined 
to continue for some time. My employer 
is planning for me to work from home 
until January (and then we'll see).

I have never maintained high levels of 
contact with other people outside of 
work. That may need to change. The 
floating, unchanging dream world 
probably isn't the healthiest thing. 

       *     *     *     *

I've reorganized my gopherhole 
(there's a selector for it on my phlog 
page) and plan to do a little more of 
that. For the time being, I've added 
selectors for a number of gopher holes 
that maintain lists of active servers. 
A couple also maintain lists of 
inactive servers. Some time ago I 
wrote about how I like creeping 
through gopherdom, exploring what's at 
the back of everyone's metaphorical 
sock drawers, and I still do it 
frequently. I thought that perhaps 
some of you might enjoy it too.

I've also been playing around with 
bash scripts for scraping www sites to 
text files that I can read on my 
phone. It's so old that TLS is just 
killing it -- and so far, the 
Pinephone is not ready for everyday 
use. In any case, I have been enjoying 
the whole process of experimentation, 
learning and re-learning how to use 
the text formatting tools that are so 
basic to UNIX.

In the process of looking into keeping 
the old BlackBerry Bold going for just 
a little while longer, I came across a 
configuration that allows you to use a 
self-hosted instance of NGINX as a 
kind of relay between you and that 
TLS-demanding website you want to 
read. I'll have to spin up my 
dormant pi zero with the flaky 
ethernet adapter and give it a try. 

I know that a number of you make use 
of old tech too, so I thought I'd 
share the NGINX config details:

server {
  # default_server not needed if its first server in config
  listen 80 default_server;
  location / {
    # x.x.x.x - IP address of DNS server
    resolver x.x.x.x;
    # port may be omitted
    proxy_pass https://$host:443;
  }
}

There is more information at:

https://superuser.com/questions/1487553/proxy-or-other-solution-that-can-allow-vintage-browsers-before-https-era-wi