💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › on-physicality.txt captured on 2020-10-31 at 02:08:49.
⬅️ Previous capture (2020-09-24)
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On physicality -------------- At the bottom of the front page of Yin Feng's gopherhole is the disclaimer: ===================================================================== This Server may be powered-down during lightning storms, which are common in my region. It will be restored when the weather passes. ===================================================================== Even before Yin Feng's recent return to active phlogging, I have stopped by his gopherhole before and I have always found this notice *deeply charming*. It is positively quaint, and I don't mean that in a patronising or condescending way. I love this warning because it is a cloud burster. We are increasingly encouraged to think of computing as such ephemeral and intangibile, which happens "in the cloud". The internet is just some kind of magic and the stuff we read on it is "just out there somewhere". But this is not true. Yin Feng's gopherhole is not "out there". it is, in its entirety, confined to well less than one cubic square meter of space, located in the same house as Yin Feng the human being, plugged into the very same 110V or 240V power circuit as the toaster. Possibly, if standing in the right place, Yin Feng can *hear* it. Certainly, it could be lifted up and turned upside down. My own personal server was once like this, living under my desk, until I moved overseas and migrated it to a VPS. This is very convenient, in that I can move house without any downtime and I don't have to worry about blackouts brining down my site. But at the same time, I kind of miss my server being a physical thing that I had actually seen and touched and felt some kind of connection to. Something I had direct physical ownership and control of. I mentioned recently that I had a surplus Raspberry Pi and that I might install a gopher server on it. I had been hoping to host it at home to recover some of this feeling. Alas, as I mentioned even more recently, my home internet connection is not direct from the phoneline but part of some kind of building-wide LAN. I have no access to the actual internet-facing hardware so I can't set up port forwarding. So there goes that idea.