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Welcome to David Norris Central Data Service Gopher Site
(since the DFDN/ directory has no gophermap, it's simply listed)
Why I need to find additional income sources - any suggestions?
Outschool Introduction to Astronomy class
New Outschool Class - for the American market - others are welcome!
The classes are on a Tuesday and Wednesday starting at 22:00 UTC,
which is 14:00 PST or 17:00 EST. New for 2023!
Another brand new Outschool class - Chemistry!
New Outschool classes to be based on eBooks..
Teaching and Training Related Pages
My profile picture (a JPG file in the DFDN/ directory)
Gloria - who got this whole project started!
Shaki, who goes by the name of Sandy
The story of my fight to get to university
Why I am about to take everyone by surprise!
The Sequence of events which changed my life - Forever
Rule of three tens when making career choices
Had enough of life in he UK and it's brutal living costs?
You are not alone.
Scotland - What now for independance?
Will my ex-wife's debts affect me after I leave the UK?
If you retire in the UK, don't die from Dementia!
And another reason I have no wish to retire in the UK....
Yet another reason I have no future here! Age descrimination!
...And yet another example of the diabolical way this country is being run!
An example of how the cost of living is affecting the disabled
Another example of why starting a new family in the UK is out of th
question - as if government incompetance and the CMS aren't enough.
Our mortgage got so high we put off having a baby
PS: A young idiot refered to me as 'old guy Dave' in a group interv
last October. I asked if, I gave him a visit in office, he would sa
same to me in person - oh, and I worked in security...
DFDN Worldwide Network Radio Communications network (Approved users only):
New eBook publishing venture under development
New eBook publishing venture on Amazon >>>
Update: I plan to include a letter to my local member of
parlienment (Jeremy Corbyn) after I leave the UK over conduct of
the CMS! Details to be announced.
Britain's Metrification Fiasco
Only the Yanks can be this naive!
Mankind Initialtive (Supports male victims of domestic abuse)
Christmas Statement 2023 now online!
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<BREAKING NEWS!!!>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
MY VISA IS IN TRANSIT FINALLY!!!
SHIPMENT STATUS: IN TRANSIT
Shipment Information
Origin:
Burkina Faso
Package:
BOXED
Status:
In Transit
Destination:
United Kingdom
Carrier:
USPS
Type of Shipment:
Air Freight
Product:
Visa Documents ( CONFIDENTIAL )
Expected Delivery Date:
2023-03-15
Departure Time:
11:00 am
Pick-up Date:
2023-02-22
Pick-up Time:
10:00 am
PLEASE COMPLY WITH THE SHIPPING PROCESS AND PROCEDURES TO
FACILITATE DELIVERY
Packages
Metric Weight : 0.02kg.Total Volume : 0.00012cu. m.Total
Actual Weight : 5.00kg.Shipment History
Note: Please check back for further updates as some
rescheduling is highly likely around the time of my relocation;
I will have to travel, quarentine and install fibreoptic internet
service; I will keep my students in the loop. I sure hope that
quarentine facility has Wi-Fi!!! This site will eventually
appear on a .bf domain, which I can only register when I arrive
in the country.
Students should continue to schedule classes until further
notice - I will update regarding travel details and the
contingency plan. This will aim to minimise disruption.
I will feel young again soon when I leave here!
(Don't believe me? See an explanation here:)
Please lord, may my visa arrive ASAP so I can vacate
this hell - before I lose my sanity?!
Sadly, much of the UK's electricity generation (not to mention
heating) comes from gas. For an explanation of the lack of storage
facillities (due to this incompetent government's lack of strategic
planning skill), see below. Note that environmental campaign groups
have said for decades now, 'well if you had listened to us, we
wouldn't be in this mess now, would we?
Why has the UK almost no gas storage?
Cost of living crisis - or cost of GOVERNMENT crisis???
The unprecidented level of industrial action sweeping the UK as a result
Prepayment meters: It is about time a 'civilised' country banned this inhumane practice!!!
Update: Energy firms face action over prepayment meters!
You can get an idea of the traffic on the system here
English (Specifically British) slang terms
I.T and Software related vocabulary
Classification scheme for undergraduate coursework (UK)
Ten Things your domestic cleaner doesn't want you to know
Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leader?
Time management - very important!
DFDN: Link to the entire contents of DFDN/
Gopher clients for the various opperating systems
UK Frequency Allocation Table:
UK Frequency Allocation Table (Unwrapped for gopher):
The Story of Britain's Fight for legal CB
Radio Scanning as it used to be - 1992
International Phonetic Alphabet
UK Parlienment debate pirate radio (2006)
The following is not word wrapped - download to view:
A trip down memory lane: UK Scanning Directory 2009
Is gopher still relevant today?
The rise and fall of the Gopher Protocol
Overbite browser for Android version 25
Overbite browser for Android version 26
Why I am, have never been, and never will be, interested in the UK property market
...And renting is no better!!!
Domestic abuse, father's alienation and how UK family law colludes,
aids and abets this vile behaviour: and why I plan to campagin
against it - I have my book entitled "when the nightmare came", an
accompanying video entitled "The UK Child Maintainance Service
exposed" and I also plan to write to the local member of
parlienment after leaving the UK...
Why UK Family Law is an Abusers' Charter
My son was killed by his girlfriend - a horror story
Domestic abuse stories list (PDF) for download
Attacked with hammers, boiling water and lit cigarettes
An excellent tool to format text for Gopher pages
(Use options: 'Retain existing paragraphs' and 'Keep blanks'.
Line length needs to be 67 charactors as per the standard.
Amid the laughing stock of the UK's goverment fiasco...
Why I am desperate to leave the shambolic UK...
An example of why medical treatment in developing countries lags behind
70:70/9/DFDN/Glossary.pdf Glossary of Medical Tarms for English Language Students
Jokes from the Chamber of horrors
These are jokes about those whose parents would get a visit before
they were conceived, and given contraceptive advice - if only I
owned a time machine..
Blagues de la Chambre des horreurs:
Ce sont des blagues sur ceux dont les parents recevraient une
visite avant leur conception et recevraient des conseils sur la
contraception - si seulement je possédais une machine à voyager
dans le temps.
Анекдоти з кімнати жахів:
Це жарти про тих, чиї батьки відвідали б ще до того, як вони були зачаті, і дали б поради щодо контрацепції - якби у мене була
машина часу.
Connection and security issues for users:
Connection of I.T Based Systems to the DFDN
So, you need to run a secure Unix system, do you?
Ports blocked at the DFDN gateway
Friendly Probing on the DFDN - Please Read
Security issues for users - and two tales of woe
Living Dangerously - the importance of regular Backups!
Guidance for connecting a device to the DFDN
Five ages of the Universe (will blow your mind!)
Timeline of our future - simplified but thought provoking
How life will become extinct - most likely scenarios
A brief story of Earth's inception
How humanity might outlive the Earth
How did owning a home in the UK become unaffordable?
Thirty common business phrases used in the office
English Idoms - an explanation for TEFL/EFL Students
I will be asked in lessons (sigh), so I say my piece only once...
Making your own Alcohol - an introduction for beginners
See also my own article on home winemaking
Also available in Micro$oft reader format
Monitoring cordless phones in the USA - those were the days
Circuits Analysis Course (PDF)
Circuits Analysis Course (ODP)
Circuits Analysis Course (XPS)
Circuits Analysis Course (OXPS)
Some early radio scanner sheets by Nigel Ballard - from 1990, but
informative nonetheless:
My scanning triumphs and disasters
Best of the early scanning sheets
Again very informative: early copy protection - still as relevant
today as it was back then!
The following are good reading practice....
Copy Protection: a history and outlook
UK Parlienment debate - Pirate Radio Stations
Electricity Supply (December 1990)
Doom was the (more or less) groundbreaking action shooter game,
although Wolfenstein 3D was almost as advanced. Here is the
origional Doom FAQ from 1993. Another trip down memory lane.
This gopher site is being tested as a website alternative as many
people in Africa pay for data by the megabyte. It has very low
overheads and will use less data. For your information, gopher was
a forerunner of the world wide web and, although largely plaintext,
it uses less data and only fetches the files requested by the user.
Besides, it has a nice aspect sadly lacking on the web! As Tim
Gihring, one of the origional developers of the gopher protocol at
the university of Minnesota puts it:
“It’s actually rather nice to have a small ecosystem because no
one’s running annoying ads in Gopherspace or trying to track your
browsing habits,” he says. “The protocol makes the former hard and
the latter almost impossible.”
As the Web has become synonymous with the internet, and we conduct
more of our lives online, we’ve learned to abide the misinformation
solicitations, and scams that thrive in its chaos — though it has
changed us and society in ways we are only beginning to understand.
If Gopher had won out, who knows how things would be different.
The only downside is that, like all protocols of its time, it does
not encrypt data over the network, so it is not suitable for
business transactions! All traffic is plaintext.
Another protocol under evaluation is gemini; a very new protocol
which operates on port 1965 TCP and transport layer security is an
integral part of the standard. As Project Gemini FAQ states:
"Gemini is a new application-level internet protocol for the
distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration
for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linkin
between files. You may think of Gemini as "the web, stripped right
back to its essence" or as "Gopher, souped up and modernised just a
little", depending upon your perspective (the latter view is probab
more accurate). Gemini may be of interest to people who are...
Opposed to the web's ubiquitous tracking of users
Tired of nagging pop-ups, obnoxious adverts, autoplaying videos and
other misfeatures of the modern web
Interested in low-power computing and/or low-speed networks, either
by choice or necessity
Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as
possible. Instead, the design strives to maximise its "power to wei
ratio", while keeping its weight within acceptable limits. Gemini i
also intended to be very privacy conscious, to be difficult to exte
in the future (so that it will *stay* simple and privacy conscious)
and to be compatible with a "do it yourself" computing ethos.
If you have a gemini browser instaled, here is the link:
(Gemini link; see below for client list)
For Gemini software, see here.
Now I intend to test gemini protocol also in addition to the
HTTP server and gopher. It is not a replacement for either, but
will be suplementry to both. The web is most frequently used,
gopher offers simpicity and as previously descriped VERY low
overheads, but has no capability of transport layer security and
is not flexibie by todays standards. Incidentally, gopher is
making a slight resurgence but most browsers cannot support it
without extra plugins, if indeed they are available.
Gemini on the other hand is only about 4 years old at time of
writing and it looks set to have a bright future, albeit little
known in 2022. I intend to experiment with it once I have found
a server which will execute on the OS I have - Agate has been
tried but so far, it compiles but will not xecute on my
operating system it would seem even though it will compile.
So far I am using Lagrange client on Windows 11 and Deedum on
my Android device; other clients are available for both Apple
& Android devices too and there are clients available for Linux,
Unix and Macintosh also - I have not tried these however.
Incidently, HTTP operates on port 80, HTTPS on port 443, gopher
on port 70 and genini on port 1965. All use TCP please note.
Returning to gopher, Take a look at how to structure your own
gopher pages.
The tab separates the display string and the selector (path). If
you don't use a full path, then it is relative to this one.
The item type tells the gopher client what that menu item is. It is
always the first character in a line with tabs. These item types
here were 1 (a menu), 0 (a text file), g (a GIF image) and 9 (a
generic downloadable binary).
Other item types include I = generic image or JPEG.
Item types
In a Gopher menu's source code, a one-character code indicates
what kind of content the client should expect. This code may
either be a digit or a letter of the alphabet; letters are
case-sensitive. The technical specification for Gopher, RFC 1436,
defines 14 item types. The later gopher+ specification defined an
additional 3 types.[23] A one-character code indicates what kind
of content the client should expect. Item type 3 is an error code
for exception handling. Gopher client authors improvised item
types h (HTML), i (informational message), and s (sound file)
after the publication of RFC 1436. Browsers like Netscape
Navigator and early versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer would
prepend the item type code to the selector as described in
RFC 4266, so that the type of the gopher item could be determined
by the url itself. Most gopher browsers still available, use these
prefixes in their urls.
Canonical types
0 Text file
1 Gopher submenu
2 CCSO Nameserver
3 Error code returned by a Gopher server to indicate failure
4 BinHex-encoded file (primarily for Macintosh computers)
5 DOS file
6 uuencoded file
7 Gopher full-text search
8 Telnet
9 Binary file
+ Mirror or alternate server (for load balancing or in case
of primary server downtime)
g GIF file
I Image file
T Telnet 3270
gopher+ types
; Movie file
< Sound file
Non-canonical types
d Doc. Seen used alongside PDF's and .DOC's
h HTML file
i Informational message, widely used.
image file "(especially the png format)"
document rtf file "rich text Format")
/ document rtf file "rich text Format") server 70
Sound file (especially the WAV format)
document pdf file "Portable Document Format")
/ document pdf file "Portable Document Format") server 70
X document xml file "eXtensive Markup Language" )
<- 67 chars ------------------------------------------------------>
If you just use a display string and a selector, then your host nam
and port are filled in. If you add a host and port, then it becomes
an external link like these:
Add a search engine link! This is external. Item type 7 means a
server you can send a request to.
Add links to other gopherspaces! Use item type 1 for a gopher menu
otherwise.
Add links to web pages! Use item type h and a URL: (a "hURL").
Don't use a host and port; that's part of the URL already.
A web link to www.floodgap.com
<- 67 chars ------------------------------------------------------>
DFDN: Link to the entire contents of DFDN/
<- 67 chars ------------------------------------------------------>
Send comments and suggestions on this tutorial to
davidn@dfdn.org.bf - once I arrive in Burkina Faso I intend to
register this domain; unfortunately it is not cheap and it also
requires you to have a physical presense in the country - which I
soon will god willing!
Darwin Streaming Server (For a later project)
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Gophered by Gophernicus/3.1.1 on Raspbian/11 armv7l