[HN Gopher] Offpunk 1.0: Offline Gemini/Gopher/Web Browsing
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Offpunk 1.0: Offline Gemini/Gopher/Web Browsing
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 137 points
Date : 2022-03-14 08:31 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tildegit.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (tildegit.org)
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| You know.. this gives me a thought. I've not followed Gemini
| much, so pardon if this is stupid..
|
| I've (very) slowly working on a knowledge base and planning
| features. All focused on myself/FOSS. A big desire i recognized
| early on is being able to store immutable references to the
| source material. Good for offline usage, but also nice as a
| "Reader". I would probably ingest direct to some reasonably bare
| HTML or Markdown format.
|
| Alternatively, i wonder if adhering to Gemini/etc would be a good
| way to achieve this?
|
| Ie rather than store data in some adhoc format, you just write a
| "Traditional Web -> Gemini" converter, and then just build the
| Reader ontop of that. Clearly i'm just speaking of Gemini as a
| storage format, ignoring transport mechanisms or protocols. Ie
| the HTML aspect of Gemini. I am unclear if Gemini is just
| literally a subset HTML - but even if it is, it adds a nice
| constraint on what HTML this Reader would produce.
|
| Seems neat and general purpose. As long as Clients can markup
| Gemini content with enough semantic visual meaning as to not
| detract from the experience in my eyes. Ie i'd want to be able to
| view Codeblocks with some simple syntax highlighting.. not sure
| if Gemini prevents that somehow.
|
| Now i need to look into Web -> Gemini scrapers, got me interested
| mattlondon wrote:
| I think what you are thinking about is "Gemtext" which is a
| restricted thing very similar to markdown:
| https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/gemtext.gmi
|
| In my mind Gemini is like HTTP, and Gemtext is like HTML -
| closely linked yes, but you can view more with Gemini/HTTP than
| just Gemtext/HTML.
|
| I am not sure on the value of using Gemtext vs e.g. Markdown
| for what it is worth - Gemtext has been simplified for the
| purposes of minimal implementation headaches for client authors
| and consistency. If you are just writing your stuff for
| yourself, just pick a Markdown flavour and use that.
| ploum wrote:
| I use Offpunk as a knowledge base. Stuff are stored in ~/.cache
| in their original format (html or gemtext). I add them to list
| and edit list to add notes.
|
| So for example :
|
| go gemini://rawtext.club/~ploum list create toread add toread
| list edit toread
| Fnoord wrote:
| Nice, this is what I loved about the Web 1.0 before always-on
| broadband. You would download something and then 'consume' it
| offline. You could only download so much as you had to find it,
| and then get offline (every minute cost money). The adrenaline
| rush whilst online was sweet. Then offline, you would
| read/watch/listen/use.
|
| You can do the same nowadays. Mirror Wikipedia, download maps for
| your navigation app, grab a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain (ugh),
| use Git to clone a plethora of repos, and so on. Great for if you
| have an airgapped environment. You can even set it up so you
| never have profiling. The beauty of this specific example is its
| mostly text, so you can very quickly grab a lot of data, and
| nobody's gonna figure out which specific you (in this case) read.
| bityard wrote:
| I don't remember the terminology anymore but when dial-up BBSes
| were a thing, some popular ones limited your connection to 5
| minutes. You were supposed to connect just long enough to
| download a file containing all of the forum threads and replies
| posted since you last connected (and upload a file with your
| own posts, if so inclined) and then hang up so someone else
| could use the line to do the same thing.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > Mirror Wikipedia
|
| The Kiwix app on iOS is good for that. It handles .sim files
| which consist of offline versions of some major resources.
|
| Then there's the RACHEL project that creates mini offline
| internets of edu resources, but I don't think it's a free
| download: https://worldpossible.org/
| ploum wrote:
| I plan of adding .zim support to Offpunk if people are
| interested. I don't like Kiwix UI and already had a basic zim
| browser hacked thanks to libzim-python.
| 0des wrote:
| Interested, thank you
| kall wrote:
| This reminds me of the good times I had using opera to download
| all my RSS feeds while in class to read at home where I had no
| internet. Then I would queue all the links from that as tabs so
| I could fetch them all via "refresh all" the next day, and on
| and on with the links from those pages...
| londons_explore wrote:
| > nobody's gonna figure out which specific you (in this case)
| read.
|
| It also has the downside that you can be accused of reading it
| all... For example, if there was some illegal content in there
| (child porn, nuclear bomb plans, extremist material, etc.),
| then you have now got that content on your computer for when
| the police are looking for a reason to imprison you.
|
| I say this from a country which has put people in prison for
| possessing text which could easily be accidentally be
| downloaded by this 'subscribe-for-offline-reading' feature.
| [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-
| northamptonshire-58926...
| rbetts wrote:
| I was curious about this case and googled a bit - seems to be
| this person?
|
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10037721/Terror-
| sus...
| unresisting wrote:
| This is real neat.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| Nice to see this here, I've been following Ploum's gemlog as
| they've developed this. Here's a mirror of their gemlog post
| where they announce this 1.0 release. It's a little less
| technical than this README.
|
| https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/rawtext.club/~ploum/2022-03-14...
| throw10920 wrote:
| This tool seems to bundle an extremely primitive hand-rolled
| browser along with its archiving tool. This is a weird design
| decision - if you're a fan of the Unix philosophy, then why not
| separate the two? And, if you're a fan of the modern web
| standards, why not use a tool like ArchiveBox[1] so you can
| actually use a modern browser?
|
| [1] https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox
| omaranto wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that Gemini users are for the most part _not_
| fans of the modern web!
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(page generated 2022-03-14 23:01 UTC)