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Published January 27, 2023
I love plain text and I love terminal applications. I used to frequent http://textfiles.com quite frequently but don't as much these days. I am rediscovering new things every day the reinforce this love of plain text. The gemini and gopher protocol exploration has been a boon to my daily computing experience. I love information and learning and these two protocols focus solely on information and content without the need for superfluous design. That wonderful text hard wrapped at 72 or 80 characters is hard to ignore. While markdown has it's uses I'm finding myself preferring to write my documentation in plain text rather than markdown. If only my text files looked as neat as an RFC Document, but manually copying this design is tedious and I don't know of anything as of yet that would make it easer.
A couple months ago I was reading some articles and viewpoints on plain-text and ascii. The content i was reading was mostly centered around avoiding proprietary file formats and arguments were made for writing only in plain text. Through these readings that I was doing I stumbled upon the ascii ribbon campaign and few other great items. For the first time in 10 years I've updated my email signature to be plain text only and have configured my emails to be composed in plain text by default as well. I'm still using thunderbird for my email client but I'm considering migrating to mutt. I vaguely recall that I was also reading a lot of back and forth in regards to use of GnuPG/PGP in today's world that started me down the rabbit hole.
Drop me an email and show me you plain text signature if your so inclined to do so. Together we can help each other with ideas.
-- Kindest Regards, Casey C. Richins Information Security Professional Directory: http://caseyrichins.tel Telegram: https://t.me/caseyrichins Website: gemini://caseyrichins.online ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Please consider your environmental responsibility. Before printing this e-mail message, ask yourself whether you really need a hard copy. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Warning: Although taking reasonable precautions to ensure no viruses or malicious softwares are present in this email, the sender cannot accept responsibility for any loss or damage arising from the use of this email
Below is a excerpt from textfiles.com on why one should prefer plain text files over other formats.
/======================\
Why I prefer Textfiles 2/27/87
- Jason Scott - Written during an illness.
\======================/
Being the owner of one of the largest Textfile Clearinghouses in the US, I've
been asked a few times why I prefer textfiles over anything else for computers.
So, I decided to put my reasons into a textfile (Wraparound city) and exaplin
to you my reasons:
Textfiles won't erase yer Hard Drive, then print "HeyHey EATME!"
Textfiles don't require a joystick.
Textfiles don't make you rely on your hand-eye coordination at 3:00am.
Textfiles never have to worry about compatibility, or DOS versions.
Textfiles don't feature little green things on the screen named "Glorks".
Textfiles don't become "Old Warez" in 3 days.
You can change one byte in a textfile, and the computer won't crash.
Textfiles don't take up a whole disk every time.
Textfiles don't require 4-color advertising in COMPUTE!
Textfiles don't need programs, but most programs need textfiles.
Textfiles can be drastically changed in a matter of minutes.
Textfiles won't watch you log on, and copy your password to a secret file.
Textfiles are cheap, or free.
Textfiles won't do anything if you're not there.
Textfiles don't need to be compiled.
Textfiles don't can run at any speed you want.
You can tell how good or bad a textfile is, AS you're downloading.
Textfiles don't make sounds in the middle of the night, while your parents
are sleeping in the next room.
If you take your eyes away from a textfile, it won't go "GAME OVER".
Textfiles don't bring out hidden surprises.
You can bring textfiles to school, and the teacher won't accuse you of
being a pirate. [Usually. My old Computer Teacher took away some Blue Box
plans I was printing on the school computer. Fuck him.]
You can read textfiles during a blackout, with a flashlight.
You won't be accused of being a nerd if you have textfiles in your school
notebook [Unless you're Scott B. (Heh)]
Everyone can use a textfile on the first try.
I've been exploring gopher these past few weeks and even setup a test gopher instance that isn't public because I'm still deciding for myself if it's worth maintaining a gopherhole. I will say that I did set it up as a docker container using docker-compose for ease of deployment and also to allow for separation from other services. Below is the docker-compose I had used if you're curious to try out gopher in docker. The one gripe I had about the software I was using was that I don't like advertising versions of software being ran. From a security perspective it gives an attacker more than they need, I tried using the disable switch but I think because I'm running in docker some of the switches just don't work. The text width flag didn't work either when passed to docker and the text width was set to the default 67 characters. It took a bit of research to figure out how to pass arguments to the image in docker-compose but I finally found the "command" option in docker-compose documentation. Since my server also support ipv6, the networking section enables ipv6 in the container.
I honestly don't know what I would even host on gopher since I wouldn't want to have to maintain two different versions of my content. I purged my http site when I converted to gemini so that I would only have one site to maintain. If anything I'd probably try to find some historical content to host for posterity to ensure that it doesn't fully disappear from the internet. A prime example would bet setting up a ppp connection for a dial-up connection under linux.
version: "3"
services:
gopher:
container_name: gopher
image: joshkaiju/gophernicus:latest
entrypoint: './init.sh'
command: "--hostname caseyrichins.online -w 72 -nu -nt -nf"
ports:
- "70:70"
restart: always
networks:
- gopher
volumes:
- ./gopher:/var/gopher
volumes:
networks:
gopher:
driver: bridge
enable_ipv6: true
ipam:
config:
- subnet: fd03::/64
gateway: fd03::1
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Endnotes