[jay.scot]
[028]


--[ What's the crack?


It's been a while since I posted anything here. Usually, I posted after
tinkering with something cool, but a few things happened and left me
with very little enthusiasm and drive to write anything. Anyway, here's
some general things that's happened over the year; it's just going to be
a bit of a mind dump on tech related things.


I never stopped using gopher; in fact, my browsing habits have changed
dramatically in the last year that I use gopher more. My main browser is
now lynx, used in conjunction with rdrview to make the html more
readable. With bongusta, lobste.rs and metafilter being daily visits on
gopher, along with quarry/floodgap for searching and gopherpedia for
everything in between. The only reason I open up a “normal browser” like
qutebrowser or librewolf is when either cloudflare blocks the site or
that new AI bot blocker anubis does. Anubis is the worst as you *need*
javascript enabled for it to work, and so many sites are using it now.
Some sites seem to allow you to bypass anubis if your user-agent is set
to lynx, so with rdrview, set the following environment variables.


	export RDRVIEW_BROWSER='lynx'
	export RDRVIEW_USER_AGENT='Lynx/2.9.2'


Man, the www is truly dead.


I am still using my nokia 105 phone daily, I have my old smart phone
which sits next to my work laptop, it is purely used for the
authenticator app to login for work. I wish they allowed the use of a
yubikey or similar. I also have a SIP desk phone, a snom 370, which is
hooked up to a local asterisk box I am running, outbound / inbound calls
to this are via localphone.com. I used to work in an ISP where asterisk
and voip was the main product for them, I loved playing around with it.
Being of the generation brought up with redboxing, and blueboxing if you
could find (or told) a number for a foreign operator as it wasn't
possible to bluebox directly on BTs network. I even contributed quite
heavily to rapid7 warvox wardialer many moons ago, when it was still a
thing. Oh to be young again! The snom only cost £5 on ebay, and I pay
£1.20 a month for my sim with lebara. It gives me unlimited text/calls
and 10gb data, I don't use any data though with the dumbphone. No
contract. So works out quite a cheap tech toy for the amount of time I
spend messing around with it. I always wince a bit when people say they
are paying £30+ a month, while also hooked into a 24 month contract -
expensive!


OpenBSD is the go to for all my servers still, gopher and public git
repos are hosted over on openbsd amsterdam. I had a replacement beelink
u59 sent to me which I use for my own self-hosting, it has around 4TB,
and setup as a nas, along with hosting git, asterisk and jellyfin. My
daily driver is still alpine linux, if something happens to it, I will
switch the desktop back over to openbsd, but it's been rock solid for
well over a year now.


The only replacement I really want to do is a fire stick I use on my TV,
it runs the jellyfin app. The problem, outwith the fact it's an amazon
device, is it fails to work if there is no internet connection.  So
while I do have everything selfhosted, I still can't watch stuff on
jellyfin if the internet is done - madness!


Looking a head at tech projects, and more specifically, these are some
of the gopher related projects I want to take a crack at this coming
year, mostly focus on things I still use the www for. So getting them
under gopher would be pretty handy!

	- brutalist report clone
	- search for films now in the public domain
	- www page dump / archive using rdrview
	- pastebin type service


.EOF