Pocket Gopher / Grumpy old man phone rant

A recent phlog post by psztrnk[1] alerted me to the existence of Pocket Gopher,

an Android gopher client available on FDroid. FDroid is the only place I get

software for my phone (which runs LineageOS), as I don't want to have anything

to do with Google. The last time I checked for a gopher client in FDroid I

didn't find anything, so either Pocket Gopher is newish or I just missed it

somehow.

Like any sane person, I really prefer to do my gophering (and everything else)

on a real computer. But when I really have to catch up on phlogs on my phone,

until now I have just been using Firefox, with the Overbite extension

installed. The user experience is complete and utter crap (mostly due to the

continual need to zoom in and out due to the small font size), but then that

goes without saying, because we're talking about a smartphone. Phone userx

experience is always complete and utter crap, due roughly 50% to the

inherent crapiness of the physical interface and roughly 50% to the baffling

culture amongst phone app developers of designing bizarre and non-discoverable

interfaces. They are miserable devices whose portability and ubiquitious

internet connection are their only virtues.

Compared to Overbite, Pocket Gopher is still complete and utter crap, but less

so. The fonts are large and clear so I don't need to do any zooming (which

means I can operate it with one hand while drinking coffee, an essential

usability metric), but because of this the ASCII art that many of us have at

the top of our pages wraps across multiple lines and looks like gibberish.

Those of us who use newlines to wrap our lines at 80 chars (i.e. most of us)

will have their entries appear full of randomly shortened lines for the same

reason. I guess there's not much to be done about the ASCII art, but I feel

like treating the text somewhat like in HTML (e.g. two consecutive newlines

count as a new paragraph but individual newlines are basically ignored and

text and nicely wrapped to fit the screen) would makes things a lot easier.

No doubt many would consider this contrary to the spirit of Gopher. Having an

option to enable/disable this would be a fine compromise, IMHO.

The most important thing is that Pocket Gopher boots up into a page of nice big

clear bookmarks. The SDF phlogosphere of course, was already installed by

default. So was something called Khzae, which was interesting in that I'd

never heard of it and I like having my mental map of the modern gopher universe

expanded, but not so interesting in that it appears to aspire to be the 4chan

of gopher, which is not for me. Anyway, the first thing I did was add Bongusta

to that list of bookmarks, so now it hits me right in the face every time I

open the app, which will stop me falling into the lazy habbit of just leaving

open a tab with SDF's phlog listing in it and treating that as a gateway to the

entire phlogosphere, which it very much is not.

As an aside, Tomasino recently phlogged about setting up custom stylesheets for

Firefox. Possibly this could fix my complaints about using Overbite as a mobile

gopher client, but actually investigating this would probably involve having to

make a .CSS file on my computer and then copying it to my phone, and I just

can't be assed doing that kind of thing these days. I would not have batted an

eye at it a few years ago when Android phones behaved remotely sanely, i.e. you

could plug them into a Linux machine with a USB cable and they would show up as

a USB mass storage device so you could just mount, cp and umount and be done

with it. This whole concept seems to have gone out of fashion (along with

other obviously good ideas like microSD cards for expandable storage), and now

you are expected to mess around with some bullshit protocol called MTP, which

solves the very important problem of...umm...I dunno, having to change

everything every few years for the sake of it? Last time I tried to do that

using some FUSE driver or another it was extremely slow and unreliable so I've

just given up on transferring files between my phone and my PC unless I

absolutely positively have to. Too much needless faffing around for too little

gain.

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/psztrnk/log/20180102.txt

[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/tomasino/phlog/20171228-custom-stylesheet-for-firefox-tor