Yesterday's Tomorrow, Gopher, Web, and self-hosting, and Voice.
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Yesterday's Tomorrow:
One of the things I've been doing lately is taking some of the
content on https://town.hall.org, converting the .au files to .mp3,
and putting them a) up on gopher:
(DIR) Yesterday's Tomorrow
and b) adding to an RSS file so that I can subscribe to it on my
phone and listen to the episodes as a podcast. Originally this was
publicly hosted on a web server which was stood up for me by an old
coworker, decades ago, who runs a small computer store / web services
business out west (where I lived at the time). Unfortunately this
didn't work out as I quickly used up the small quota of disk space
(500mb).
I think his business model better suits small local businesses
wanting some kind of online presence with simple "business card like"
web sites. This is something a lot of businesses don't even bother
doing anymore and just gravitate toward "The Platforms" instead. So
hosting around 1GB of mp3 files isn't really what his system is set
up for, especially for me who is only paying yearly for the domain
name.
I'm only interested in the computer / internet related content
because it's an interesting look at the past and the early internet.
It's interesting to listen to people back then looking forward to
what the internet will become, might become, afraid it could become,
how it is changing society and may change it in the future.
Self-Hosting:
So, I deleted those and am now self-hosting the content on my LAN but
accessible only on my LAN which means only I can hear it. I can
listen to them when I'm away from home by using a self-hosted VPN
(not something I set up specifically for this). However I have been
wanting to try to make these available to the general public. Of
course you can listen to them on town.hall.org but most of the audio
files are in .au format which a) is bigger than .mp3 and b) much less
compatible with modern systems (such as smart phones). And, of
course, you can listen to my converted MP3s via the gopher address
above but obviously not through a podcast app.
I thought about trying to configure my home Apache server to allow
one directory to be accessible to the outside world but in the end
decided publicly facing, self hosted, web servers are too troublesome
in 2026 with LLM's crawling content, scammers, spammers, and various
intrusion bots looking for any way they can get a foothold into
another system so that they can install backdoors, trojans, turn you
into a zombie in a botnet and do DDOS attacks against whatever
company some other company wants attacked. The web, it's just ugly
out there.
Gopher, Web, and Bots, oh my!:
I also wonder how long before this ugliness finds its way into
gopher-space. For now the obscurity of the gopher protocol is
protecting us humans and the lack of money-interests in our space
helps to keep it obscure but that probably won't go on forever and I
worry about the day we start to see these robots encroach into our
little niche.
I think what I will do is wait until I've converted everything I'm
going to convert and then upload all of my MP3s to archive.org, then
use either archive.org or the aforementioned site my old colleague
has set up for me to host an html file and XML file for the RSS feed.
Voice:
I hate my voice. I know a lot of people say they hate their voice.
But I don't have a normal voice. It's not the worst, I have heard
worse, but I have a pretty high and nasally voice for a male. I also
have a post-nasal drip thing that's been getting slowly worse over
the years which causes the back of my throat to get excessive
phlem, making me have to constantly clear my throat, as demonstrated
on one of my online finds:
(TXT) Online Finds
The "Pink Trombone" at https://dood.al/pinktrombone if you have a
closed up back-of-the-throat, that gives you a higher pitched voice
If you do that on this simulator it sounds very much like my voice
and I believe my phlem "pocket" is largely to blame for that.
It's something I've been working on, trying to keep the cat hair and
other potential allergens down (not sure if that's the cause or not),
trying to drain my excess phlem when I can, and working on speaking
by reading to my wife when we have some downtime. Breathing while
reading aloud is very different than just normal, not talking,
breathing and I don't do a lot of talking (never really have) so I
just kind of suck at it, even having to learn to take breaths
mid-sentence and finding opportune times to do that.
You'd think this should be pretty much automatic especially for an
adult. But I think it's just that my brain works so much faster and
I want to get the sentence out because my mind is already onto the
next one and I have to force everything to slow down and remain in
sync.
The reason I even post this, somewhat embarrassing, topic concerns
Chips 'n Dip:
(DIR) Chips 'n Dip
In an upcoming episode (not the next one, but the one after that)
will be a "special" episode called "Battle of the Chips". In this
episode I'll play chiptunes from the Atari 8-bit (pokey chip) and
Commodore (sid chip) and I'm going to have the listening audience in
COM and IRC upvote (or downvote) each song, which will add / subtract
to the score for Atari vs Commodore.
I want it to feel like a sporting event with a running score, which I
could post in COM/IRC of course but for someone in the future
listening (audio only, no chat) it would be more entertaining if the
running score was read out between songs.
So far any verbal announcements that go along with one of my shows
I've been using a text-to-speech system and it's done fine for little
things like the Final Fantasy episode (#3) explaining that it's not a
chip-tune or demo-scene episode etc...
But for live score updates this isn't practical and it really only
makes sense to use my real human voice. So I'm just going to try to
get over myself and use it even if I hate it and I'll cringe if I end
up having to listen to it.