OCC 2025 (Day 5-7) An Interesting Weekend
=========================================

There weren't any updates for the last 3 days of the challenge, but it sure was
an interesting weekend. Me and my family decided last minute to rent a summer
house to have a nice weekend together.

For this trip, to force myself not to work, I decided to not bring my work
laptop and only take my PowerBook with me. This turned out to make the weekend
even more interesting.


No Internet
-----------

Quickly I realized that the Wi-Fi router of the place was of course, way too new
for my old machine, meaning it only supported WPA2 authentication, something I
never thought as a problem ever since I started using a special router in my
house for retro computers (recently upgraded [1]).

My iPhone's hotspot wasn't any different, so this meant I had no internet on my
laptop, and since I planned on forcing myself on not using my phone, meant I
passed almost the entire weekend without internet, something that felt
refreshing and definitely made me less anxious, although I did miss the fun on
IRC.


Projects
--------

Although I had to put on hold the thin client server I mentioned building on
Day 4 for obvious internet reasons, I realized that there are no modern Gopher
servers for Windows, at least none that I could find on 5 minutes I spent
searching for it on my phone.

With that in mind and a need to have something to do on my PowerBook while
idling over the weekend I decided to write a tiny and ultra portable Gopher
server that I'll be releasing shortly into the wild.

The reason why it's not yet released is that I decided to also learn how to use
CVS, something I always wanted to play around with since clients work on almost
any old OS, something that always bugged me with Git for retro projects. Now I
just have to figure out how I can sustainably mirror my local CVS module to a
GitHub repository.


Future Work
-----------

If I have time, during this week I will finish setting up a secure way to tunnel
traffic from my public cloud server to the thin client on my local network, and
start serving at least my website from it, although these last couple of days
before the holidays are usually pretty intense at work, let's see how it goes.


Conclusion
----------

As happened last year, I simply continued the challenge [2], and I still plan to
continue prioritizing my old gear. I guess every year I reassess how bloated,
"unnecessarily modern" or complex my daily life/services are, and with each
reassessment I try to fix things, simplify, make them retro-friendly, meaning
each year I get closer and closer to an ideal scenario where I may be able to,
apart from work, only use my old computers. A great positive feedback scenario.

Sadly this year I couldn't commit more time to the challenge as I originally
hoped and how I was able to last year, life and work always gets in the way, but
I really enjoyed this time nonetheless.

To close things off, I would like to thank everyone that organized and
participated in this year's challenge, but also would like to thank everything
that made this challenge into an amazing community to hang around year-round.

Looking forward to OCC 2026!


[1]: http://nathancampos.me/blog/2025-04-21_best-retro-wifi/
[2]: http://nathancampos.me/blog/2024-09-20_occ-2024-wrap/