💾 Archived View for dronecatcher.space › 16112023.gmi captured on 2024-07-08 at 23:40:16. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)
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Being a PowerPC Mac enthusiast, the inevitable question when any new online trend appears is "can I do that on an old Mac?"
Luckily, the PowerPC community is quite resourceful and plenty of solutions have materialised over the years to keep PowerPCs in the running with solutions for Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Mastodon and Tik-Tok for example.
Initially, my thinking was because of Gemini's text only format, there's bound to be a solution for modestly powered vintage Macs? Alas, there was no browser available - the nearest attempt would be pointing a site specific instance of TenFourFox or InterWebPPC to an online proxy - hardly the same experience.
But then I discovered that the Amiga community had been more inventive and they had their very own Gemini browser - AmiGemini, so as convoluted as it might seem, by using an Amiga emulator it was possible to browse Gemini spaces on PowerPC.
Doing just this on my 12" Powerbook was my first taste of browsing Gemini and I must say the reduced screen resolution of an emulated Amiga 1200 only adds to the charm and warm intimacy of Terminal based browsing. And despite being downclocked to around half speed (about 800Mhz) the CPU overhead is so modest that browsing on the Powerbook is in no way hampered.
But it turns out I was a little hasty assuming there was no 'native' Gemini solution for my old Mac - not long after playing around with my Amiga In A Powerbook, I discovered two Terminal based browsers that promised to have no dependencies other than the standard Python libraries. So, via the pip Python package manager I installed AV-98 and Offpunk and to my amazement they all worked.
But it didn't stop there - I also found that plugged into a Public Access Unix System (in this case sdf.org) Terminal can also remotely use their browsers (Amfora and Bombadillo.) Wow - now I'm spoilt for choice!
Switching from the built in Terminal app in OSX Leopard to iTerm has also made browsing more comfortable with the full screen rendering but the real icing on the cake has been using GLTerm - a vintage terminal emulator that can if desired give you all the quirks of a well used early 80s VDU dialed back to speeds as low as 300 baud!