[ USENET

In April this year, Japan introduced the term "Kokushobi". It consists of three
Chinese characters: "cruel", "hot" and "day". The term is used to describe days
when the temperature reaches 40c or more. The TV news now each day tells us to
stay inside when possible, keep the a/c on and drink plenty of fluids.

A few days ago I fell down another rabbit hole: USENET. What triggered it was
coming across a newsreader for PalmOS called Yanoff[1]. I kind-of-sort-of got
it working, but it was difficult and time consuming and not really all that
worth it in the end.

So I switched to tin, which I remember using back in 1998 or so. This, also,
was not easy to get up and running, because who runs news servers anymore? I
doubt my ISP does, and I cannot connect to news.sdf.org. I did a lot digging
around the WWW and I finally came across eternal-september.org.

Well, there are still tons of newsgroups out there, but not many of them are
active anymore. It was like walking around a dead mall, seeing all these groups
now completely empty of any posts. I was pleasantly surprised though, to see
FreeBSD there, and some familiar names from the Gophersphere. I subscribed to
about 15 groups and we'll see what happens.

Stay cool, if it's hot where you are.



[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/yanoff/