I am considering a relaunch of my old gopher hole and dusting off the[...]
old phlog.
After some thought, it seems like a cool idea to mirror that content on
my finger service.
Opinions?I never heard a thing silliest. Cheers for Freedom,
After some thought, it seems like a cool idea to mirror that content on
my finger service.
If a gopher blog is a phlog, what would a finger blog be? A flog? Too
similar I think.
Daniel wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
I am considering a relaunch of my old gopher hole and dusting off the
old phlog.
After some thought, it seems like a cool idea to mirror that content on
my finger service.
If a gopher blog is a phlog, what would a finger blog be? A flog? Too similar I think.
To: Daniel
Daniel wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
I am considering a relaunch of my old gopher hole and dusting off the
old phlog.
Bring it on - I'm enjoying seeing new Gopher content.
After some thought, it seems like a cool idea to mirror that content on my finger service.
If a gopher blog is a phlog, what would a finger blog be? A flog? Too similar I think.
I have my old .plan file saved, and Synchronet BBS does support the
finger protocol - but I don't know where you'd enter a .plan file?
kurt weiske | kweiske at realitycheckbbs dot org
| http://realitycheckbbs.org
| 1:218/700@fidonet
Daniel wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
My finger service is custom and there are no plan files. Feel free to peruse. I spent many hours setting it up and even more hours thinking about how I"d do it. It's been a blast.
Have you ever thought that you could look up wikipedia articles on a finger? Or get local movie theater times? Or, even, lookup scientific papers? Enjoy.
To: Daniel
Daniel wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
My finger service is custom and there are no plan files. Feel free to peruse. I spent many hours setting it up and even more hours thinking about how I"d do it. It's been a blast.
Have you ever thought that you could look up wikipedia articles on a finger? Or get local movie theater times? Or, even, lookup scientific papers? Enjoy.
I love self-contained, lo-tech systems. I started using a 2-way pager
for outage notification and had a lot of fun finding data that you
could scrape and send via email, either on-demand or in cron. With a
little twiddling, I was able to get my Outlook notes and address book
on it as well.
Being able to get random text via finger would have been interesting --
Now, I think we should encourage people to post to finger!
I spent some time investigating whether I ought to restore an old
Tandy terminal or a model 4, but, thought I'd rather use something
modern like a RC2014 rig but running CP/M for its low power
consumption.
I love self-contained, lo-tech systems. I started using a 2-way pager
for outage notification and had a lot of fun finding data that you
could scrape and send via email, either on-demand or in cron. With a
little twiddling, I was able to get my Outlook notes and address book
on it as well.
On Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:35:30 -0700, Daniel wrote:
I spent some time investigating whether I ought to restore an old
Tandy terminal or a model 4, but, thought I'd rather use something
modern like a RC2014 rig but running CP/M for its low power
consumption.
The Raspberry Pi seems to be the most popular solution for this sort
of application: powerful enough to emulate any of those old machines
and their OSes, yet consuming much less power than any of them, and of
course better supported with more up-to-date tools and documentation.
And user/developer community!
It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.
Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
On Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:35:30 -0700, Daniel wrote:
I spent some time investigating whether I ought to restore an old
Tandy terminal or a model 4, but, thought I'd rather use something
modern like a RC2014 rig but running CP/M for its low power
consumption.
The Raspberry Pi seems to be the most popular solution for this
sort of application: powerful enough to emulate any of those old
machines and their OSes, yet consuming much less power than any of
them, and of course better supported with more up-to-date tools and
documentation. And user/developer community!
A Raspberry PI is just a modern linux system, and comes with all the annoyances of modern software that is abstractions on top of
abstractions on top of abstractions on top of ... to the point that
no-one knows what's going on anymore and stuff breaks all the time.
On Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:09:51 -0000 (UTC), Koen Martens wrote:
A Raspberry PI is just a modern linux system, and comes with all the
annoyances of modern software that is abstractions on top of
abstractions on top of abstractions on top of ... to the point that
no-one knows what's going on anymore and stuff breaks all the time.
It?s not a Windows system -- it?s not a black box, so don?t treat it
like one. Linux has inbuilt tools so you can diagnose problems and fix
them -- there is no big sticker across the cover saying ?NO
USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE?. It?s designed for tinkering. If you?re
a retrocomputing enthusiast, you?re probably already a hardware
tinkerer, but perhaps you?re not accustomed to thinking of software
the same way?
Running a Linux system like a Raspberry Pi is much less work (and less
money spent) than trying to keep old authentic hardware running.
On 2026-06-11, Koen Martens <gmc@metro.cx> wrote:
It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.
Clear analysis of any situation is often mistaken for pessimism.
-- Barbara Hambly: The Walls of Air
My wife's Macbook is running more and more slowly and web sites
are hanging. The word from the local Genius Bar is that she
needs a new machine. Not because there's anything wrong with
it, but the current generation of bloatware is bogging it down
(sometimes, I suspect, deliberately).
Oh well, it's a licence to print money, if you can stomach it.
Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
On 2026-06-11, Koen Martens <gmc@metro.cx> wrote:
It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.
Clear analysis of any situation is often mistaken for pessimism.
-- Barbara Hambly: The Walls of Air
My wife's Macbook is running more and more slowly and web sites
are hanging. The word from the local Genius Bar is that she
needs a new machine. Not because there's anything wrong with
it, but the current generation of bloatware is bogging it down
(sometimes, I suspect, deliberately).
Oh well, it's a licence to print money, if you can stomach it.
It's not just the bloat on the machine itself, it's the bloat on the
site as well. The modern web is a dumpster fire.
Agreed. Web sites could be lightning-fast if they weren't downloading
all sorts of additional cruft. "But don't you want to have a rich
User Experience (UX)?" the devotees will ask me. My reply: "NO!"
Linux is as bad as windows these days. With one big poorly
documented daemon that does everything and is opaque as heck.
With competing audio standards that all fight for access to the
underlying ALSA sound device, sometimes emulating each other,
sometimes not.
Wayland that makes screen capture involve at least 3 daemons, of
which many variants exist and you need the exact right combination
for it to work ...
And I haven't even started to talk about the different bloated
desktop management systems and their associated GUI libraries and
plethora of daemons that need to be running to start the most basic
of graphical applications (and yes, you'll need all of them running
for all of the variants if you use a decent selection of
applications).
Oh, and they all have their own equivalent of what is known as 'the
registry' in windows, and to change something silly like a font or
DPI scaling, you need to make sure all those registries agree.
I still use Linux on the desktop (various distros on different
machines). It's just the least bad of the lot, but only marginally.
Running a Linux system like a Raspberry Pi is much less work (and less
money spent) than trying to keep old authentic hardware running.
I prefer the simplicity of CP/M on the RC2014 over the pain of
managing a modern Linux install on a Raspberry PI. Also, RC2014 is
not old authentic hardware, it's brand new. But even old authentic
hardware takes a lot less effort to keep running than modern Linux.
And I have ample experience of both.
daemon that does everything and is opaque as heck. With competing
And I haven't even started to talk about the different bloated desktop >management systems and their associated GUI libraries and plethora
of daemons that need to be running to start the most basic of graphical >applications (and yes, you'll need all of them running for all of the
Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
On 2026-06-11, Koen Martens <gmc@metro.cx> wrote:
It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.
Clear analysis of any situation is often mistaken for pessimism.
-- Barbara Hambly: The Walls of Air
My wife's Macbook is running more and more slowly and web sites
are hanging. The word from the local Genius Bar is that she
needs a new machine. Not because there's anything wrong with
it, but the current generation of bloatware is bogging it down
(sometimes, I suspect, deliberately).
Oh well, it's a licence to print money, if you can stomach it.
It's not just the bloat on the machine itself, it's the bloat on the
site as well. The modern web is a dumpster fire.
On Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:20:45 -0000 (UTC), Koen Martens wrote:
Linux is as bad as windows these days. With one big poorly
documented daemon that does everything and is opaque as heck.
What daemon would would that be?
On 2026-06-11, Koen Martens <gmc@metro.cx> wrote:--^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.
Clear analysis of any situation is often mistaken for pessimism.
-- Barbara Hambly: The Walls of Air
My wife's Macbook is running more and more slowly and web sites
are hanging. The word from the local Genius Bar is that she
needs a new machine. Not because there's anything wrong with
it, but the current generation of bloatware is bogging it down
(sometimes, I suspect, deliberately).
Oh well, it's a licence to print money, if you can stomach it.
On 2026-06-12, Jonathan Lamothe <jonathan@jlamothe.net> wrote:
Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
On 2026-06-11, Koen Martens <gmc@metro.cx> wrote:
It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.
Clear analysis of any situation is often mistaken for pessimism.
-- Barbara Hambly: The Walls of Air
My wife's Macbook is running more and more slowly and web sites
are hanging. The word from the local Genius Bar is that she
needs a new machine. Not because there's anything wrong with
it, but the current generation of bloatware is bogging it down
(sometimes, I suspect, deliberately).
Oh well, it's a licence to print money, if you can stomach it.
It's not just the bloat on the machine itself, it's the bloat on the
site as well. The modern web is a dumpster fire.
Agreed. Web sites could be lightning-fast if they weren't downloading
all sorts of additional cruft. "But don't you want to have a rich
User Experience (UX)?" the devotees will ask me. My reply: "NO!"
Jonathan Lamothe <jonathan@jlamothe.net> wrote:
Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
On 2026-06-11, Koen Martens <gmc@metro.cx> wrote:
It's always something, we're at the point where the house of
cards that is modern software is collapsing. Add in slop from
LLMs, and you have the bankrupcy of computing. It's over.
Clear analysis of any situation is often mistaken for pessimism.
-- Barbara Hambly: The Walls of Air
My wife's Macbook is running more and more slowly and web sites
are hanging. The word from the local Genius Bar is that she
needs a new machine. Not because there's anything wrong with
it, but the current generation of bloatware is bogging it down
(sometimes, I suspect, deliberately).
Oh well, it's a licence to print money, if you can stomach it.
It's not just the bloat on the machine itself, it's the bloat on the
site as well. The modern web is a dumpster fire.
Absolutely. Up until recently all we had at my house was a crappy
4G uplink. The web was completely unusable with that. We now have
fiber, so I don't notice it too much anymore, except when the
laptop fan goes crazy on some particularly badly put together
site.
Thankfully, gopher is still around & active.
Cheers,
Koen
Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
On Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:09:51 -0000 (UTC), Koen Martens wrote:
A Raspberry PI is just a modern linux system, and comes with all the
annoyances of modern software that is abstractions on top of
abstractions on top of abstractions on top of ... to the point that
no-one knows what's going on anymore and stuff breaks all the time.
It?s not a Windows system -- it?s not a black box, so don?t treat it
like one. Linux has inbuilt tools so you can diagnose problems and fix
them -- there is no big sticker across the cover saying ?NO
USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE?. It?s designed for tinkering. If you?re
a retrocomputing enthusiast, you?re probably already a hardware
tinkerer, but perhaps you?re not accustomed to thinking of software
the same way?
I've been using Linux since the nineties, never used MS Windows
otherwise than at gunpoint for customers that refused to let me use
a Linux or BSD machine. My servers, at home and in the datacenter,
are mostly FreeBSD with some Linux VMs here and there. Throw in
some IlluminOS, NetBSD and OpenBSD for fun as well. Yes, I'm
pretty much a 'software tinkerer', thank you.
Linux is as bad as windows these days. With one big poorly documented
daemon that does everything and is opaque as heck. With competing
audio standards that all fight for access to the underlying ALSA sound device, sometimes emulating each other, sometimes not. Wayland that
makes screen capture involve at least 3 daemons, of which many variants
exist and you need the exact right combination for it to work, and
that makes your screen flicker constantly. And if you file a bug report, everyone's pointing to the other project.
And I haven't even started to talk about the different bloated desktop management systems and their associated GUI libraries and plethora
of daemons that need to be running to start the most basic of graphical applications (and yes, you'll need all of them running for all of the variants if you use a decent selection of applications). Oh, and they
all have their own equivalent of what is known as 'the registry' in
windows, and to change something silly like a font or DPI scaling,
you need to make sure all those registries agree.
I still use Linux on the desktop (various distros on different
machines). It's just the least bad of the lot, but only marginally.
Running a Linux system like a Raspberry Pi is much less work (and less
money spent) than trying to keep old authentic hardware running.
I prefer the simplicity of CP/M on the RC2014 over the pain of
managing a modern Linux install on a Raspberry PI. Also, RC2014 is not
old authentic hardware, it's brand new. But even old authentic hardware
takes a lot less effort to keep running than modern Linux. And I have
ample experience of both.
Cheers,
Koen
On Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:20:45 -0000 (UTC), Koen Martens <gmc@metro.cx> wrote:
Linux is as bad as windows these days. With one big poorly documented >>daemon that does everything and is opaque as heck. With competing
And I haven't even started to talk about the different bloated desktop >>management systems and their associated GUI libraries and plethora
of daemons that need to be running to start the most basic of graphical >>applications (and yes, you'll need all of them running for all of the
Gentoo with Openrc, X11, and the i3 window manager has made my computing life much simpler and responsive.
As for bug reports, this does touch a quite big issue, the amount of
projects that nowadays require using such bloated sites, with limited,
if any, browser compatibility. And that's besides sites being
Cloudflared. At least stuff like Anubis is better designed, besides
working on more browsers these days, it also has a default setting that enables users to access the sites if there is a problem passing the challenge. Unlike Cloudflare which actively changed their offering so
that it'd not support more than a few browsers. And that's besides their ability to screw-up, like when they required Origin: in every request
other than the first and turned their Browser Integrity Challenge in a self-DDoS, as their services kept redirecting non-Origin: browsers to
square one...
Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?= <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
On Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:20:45 -0000 (UTC), Koen Martens wrote:
Linux is as bad as windows these days. With one big poorly
documented daemon that does everything and is opaque as heck.
What daemon would would that be?
Try not to be an idiot. You know quite well which
daemon is being referred to, as you defend it frequently.
That particular daemon violates most of the philosophy
of unix.
To be fair, saying that $thing "violates the philosophy of unix"
feels like more of a religious argument than an actual technical
one. I think that the UNIX philosopy (of having multiple small,
tools that each do one thing well and can be piped together into
more complex workflows) is very powerful and valid, but it's not the
One True Way(TM).
I'm personally not a fan of systemd's complexity ...
If I wanted something simple and no-nonsense, I'd probably use a
BSD. I have toyed with this idea in the past. So far though,
pragmatism has won out for me.
Jonathan Lamothe wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-
If I wanted something simple and no-nonsense, I'd probably use a BSD.
I have toyed with this idea in the past. So far though, pragmatism has won out for me.
If I wanted something simple and no-nonsense, I'd probably use a BSD.
I have toyed with this idea in the past. So far though, pragmatism
has won out for me.
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