ROOPHLOCH 2024 (plugd, 09-30-24)

Location: A park near my appartment

Network protocol: NNCP over sneakernet

OS: Debian testing (whatever that is currently)

Software: exwm, emacs, MultiMail offline mail packet reader

Coffee: Yes

This is my extremely late and poorly thought out entry to ROOPHLOCH.

This is my first attempt at participating. Although I've contemplated

several hair-brained schemes over the years that might have qualified,

I never get up the time/energy to pull any of them off. This time I

seem to have set the bar low enough that even with procrastination

turned up to 11 it seems I'll be able to at least submit an entry. :)

Okay, following the long tradition of ROOPHLOCH entries, I suppose now

I need to explain my setup. I'm currently sitting with a bog standard

laptop out on a park bench in the middle of the night, attempting to

look as non-dodgy as it's possible to look while doing this.

I'm entering this post in MultiMail (running in a terminal emulator in

emacs) - apparently the last surviving QWK mail reader still

maintained. This mail reader is what I and a small number of others

use to interact with the Offline BBS [1] - a message board accessible only

via the NNCP friend-to-friend network utility. Once I'm done, the

reader will produce a ".rep" file containing my post. I'll then use

the nncp-exec utility to queue an encrypted packet destined for the

Offline BBS server, to tell it to add my post do the board. I'll then

close the laptop, and finish my coffee in peace.

The next time a particular cron job fires when my laptop is within

range of wifi, the queued packet will be sent to the BBS server, which

will unpack the .rep file and process the post. Usually these posts

are just added to a particular message area (or "conference" in

old-timey QWK terminology). In this case however, I'm posting to a

special message area named "Phlog" which I've set up on the board.

Any posts to this message area are mirrored to the following index:

gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/1/offline_phlog/

which is hopefully where you are now reading this.

Yes, you could argue that what I've done here is isomorphic to

simply writing some text on my laptop outside, then posting it

when I got back to the house... but it's not as fun when you say

it like that!!

[1] gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/0/offline.txt

--- MultiMail/Linux v0.52