Regarding Someodd

wmpixel: a pixel-art animation studio in your Window Maker dock

2026-06-09T00:00:00Z

an indexed-colour pixel-art editor and frame animator that lives as a Window Maker dockapp --- the dock icon plays your animation, click it for a full editor: mouse + keyboard drawing, a 16-colour palette and RGB picker, wrap-around scroll, animation frames at an adjustable frame rate, GIF / indexed-PNG import and export, fullscreen, a viewer window, and a NeXT-style colour-grouped tool panel. it auto-saves your work to ~/.wmpixel-session and reloads it on the next launch. one self-contained literate-Haskell file, doctested with LiquidHaskell refinements on its numeric core. by regarding_someodd

irc.md

2026-06-15T00:00:00Z

=============== IRC.SOMEODD.ZIP =============== #main is the only channel and it's set to voice-only--private message someodd to get speaking privileges. Hold on to your nickname, also you may want to register with nickserv! We may ban tor/VPNs, sadly, due to abuse. CONNECTION INFO --------------- * SSL only * Port 6697 * irc.someodd.zip * Main room is #main OPERATOR INFO ------------- Oper is someodd. GOPHER gopher://gopher.someodd.zip/ EMAIL hi@someodd.zip MASTODON @someodd@fosstodon.org https://fosstodon.org/@someodd Most reliable way to check the status/contact me in case the server is down (which runs almost all my services). CONNECT VIA XMPP ---------------- xmpp:%23main%25irc.someodd.zip@irc.xmpp.someodd.zip?join Register a nick via XMPP in the server window: privmsg NickServ :REGISTER password email RULES ----- * Don't be lewd * Don't be rude * Be a rad dude ETC --- Statistics on the IRC server can be found here: gopher://gopher.someodd.zip/0/gateway/status/dashboard

#main went voice-only: a post-mortem

2026-06-15T00:00:00Z

# #main went voice-only: a post-mortem ## Summary A persistent ban evader kept coming back to #main, and bans would not stick. Rather than keep chasing them, I moderated the channel (voice-only) so that coming back accomplishes nothing. Regulars were barely affected. ## What happened Someone kept rejoining to cause trouble. I would ban them; they would reconnect from a different address, or under a different name, and carry on. Standard ban evasion. ## Why the bans did not work On IRC you cannot ban a person -- only a resource: an address, an account, a name. A determined evader just swaps the resource and walks back in. Chasing each new connection is a game you lose by playing. ## What I did Changed the shape of the room instead of guarding the door: moderate the channel so only voiced users can speak, voice the regulars, and make coming back pointless for everyone else. They can return as often as they like and accomplish nothing. ## How it was done The server is ngircd with Atheme services (ChanServ, NickServ). It comes down to a handful of commands. Moderate the channel, and auto-voice the regulars: /mode #main +m /msg ChanServ FLAGS #main +V `+m` makes it voice-only; `+V` auto-voices that person on every join, so a regular never has to ask twice. (For an unregistered regular you can match a hostmask instead of an account.) Pin the state so it survives restarts, with ChanServ: /msg ChanServ SET #main MLOCK +mnt /msg ChanServ SET #main GUARD ON /msg ChanServ SET #main KEEPTOPIC ON /msg ChanServ SET #main TOPICLOCK ON MLOCK locks the modes so nobody can quietly drop `+m`; GUARD keeps ChanServ sitting in the channel so it never empties out; the topic stays put. Make #main the only room. In ngircd.conf, predefine the channel and set, under [Options]: AllowedChannelTypes = (empty), then rehash. Ordinary users can no longer spin up channels. Point people at registration, so their voice is durable: /msg NickServ REGISTER /msg NickServ IDENTIFY An identified nick gets account-based voice that follows them across addresses -- no hostmask juggling, nothing to re-ask. ## The gopher angle The gopher-to-IRC bridge (the girc applet) kept working through all of this. The trick under `+m`: it connects over loopback, **waits until ChanServ grants it a voice, and only then speaks** -- otherwise its line would be sent in the same instant it joined, before the voice landed, and dropped. It posts under its own throwaway handle, not as the channel bot, so a hello from a passing gopher visitor still lands and is still attributable. ## Impact - Regulars: barely noticed. - Evader: neutralized -- present but silent, with no way to earn a voice. - Tradeoff: a brand-new visitor has to ask for a voice before their first word. ## Lessons I would rather leave a small gap than risk silencing someone who belongs here. The defenses lean permissive on purpose, and the evader gets handled directly when they turn up -- better than a wall so tall it locks out my own people. ## Status Resolved. #main is usable, the regulars are talking, and the evader is shouting into a void. Connection details and rules: /someodd/services/irc.md

Last Letter to St. Lumena

2026-06-03T00:00:00Z

A farewell.

New Rain

2026-06-03T00:00:00Z

First letter after almost all the sisters left.

window_maker_rofi_window_switcher: a rofi switcher that shows minimized windows

2026-05-20T00:00:00Z

A rofi-driven window switcher for Window Maker that actually lists minimized windows -- rofi's native -show window silently drops them under WMaker. Bash + wmctrl + xdotool: MRU order, per-app icons, off-desktop tags, reliable de-iconify, no title-parsing ambiguity.

How I Host My Friends on Gopher

2026-05-17T00:00:00Z

SFTP-based per-friend gopher hosting on someodd.zip. Per-user chroot at /srv/sftp// bind-mounted from /var/gopher/hosted//, so the gopher daemon (venusia) keeps reading and writing while friends only ever see their own hole. Bartleby auto-regenerates the friend's catalog at SFTP disconnect via a PAM session_close hook. Includes the bootstrap script.

gophervr: walk around gopherspace in 3D, again

2026-05-13T00:00:00Z

Cameron Kaiser's 2015 Motif port of UMN's 1995 GopherVR, with a small patch to build on Debian forky / gcc 15. One zip, one script, ~5 minutes from clone to clicking on a gopher menu inside a rotating 3D scene.

peepy_wmcube: peepy for your dockapp

2026-05-13T00:00:00Z

A heavily-decimated wireframe of Nam Lemonade's Low poly Peepy, converted to wmcube's .wmc format so the round goose-thing can spin in your Window Maker dock and speed up under CPU load.

README.txt

2026-05-11T00:00:00Z

I like handwriting letters to others. Here's an archive of some letters I've sent to others. Please don't share these. This is all very intimate. It includes poems, reflections on literature and poems and philosophy and theology. I'm missing a bunch.

2026_05_10_mothers_day_for_father.jpg

2026-05-11T00:00:00Z

2026_05_andrew.jpg

2026-05-11T00:00:00Z

2026_05_for_a_friend.jpg

2026-05-11T00:00:00Z

Mother's Day 2026, for the Sisters

2026-05-10T00:00:00Z

Missionaries of Charity Devotionals

Sister Lumena's Rose Photo

2026-05-10T00:00:00Z

Literate Haskell with dependencies, speedily in gopherspace.

2026-05-07T00:00:00Z

bartleby

2026-04-28T00:00:00Z

I would prefer not to use the web.

Presents of Presence

2026-04-24T00:00:00Z

Summary of a philosophical realization. Special booklet I handed out for a special event.

Per Sister Lumena's Request

2026-04-22T00:00:00Z

Devotional on Presence

2026-03-06T00:00:00Z

Sagatagan Devotional

2026-02-25T00:00:00Z

DRAFT -- Room 1436: What Gopher Is (Philosophy)?

2026-02-25T00:00:00Z

Draft of 'Room 1436,' a dialog with screwlisp about Gopher's underlying philosophy. Still in early form.

Faithfully Lost

2026-02-20T00:00:00Z

A devotional letter about the rosary I wrote to the sisters (Missionaries of Charity).

Lord, it is winter

2026-02-11T00:00:00Z

On Suffering Devotional

2026-02-07T00:00:00Z

Letter for a White Rose

2026-02-02T00:00:00Z

4-ch over Gopher

2026-01-25T00:00:00Z

I wrote a tiny open source **4-ch.net viewer** that runs over **Gopher**. The interesting part is the format. It uses my *gopher applet* style: a **README that is also a literate Haskell script**. You run it directly: ./4_ch.md No build system. No framework. Just `runghc`. Writing it this way felt like a strange inversion of TDD. Instead of tests, the README comes first. The code exists to obey the explanation. "README-driven design." This works especially well for: - small scripts - teaching Haskell - self-documenting infrastructure It breaks down for large systems. That is a feature. The applet plugs straight into **Venusia**, speaks RFC 1436 natively, and keeps dependencies close to zero. A 2000s textboard, viewed like its the 90s, implemented like a literate essay. Live here: gopher://gopher.someodd.zip:70/1/gateway/4_ch Source: https://github.com/someodd/small-gopher-applets/blob/master/4_ch.md

README.txt

2026-01-23T00:00:00Z

Information about services I provide (self-host!), like IRC, XMPP, Counter-Strike 1.6. My XMPP server is linked to IRC, so IRC and XMPP users can communicate with each other on my #main chat. This mostly documents services you might need documentation for. This doesn't include The Internet Gopher Protocol services like the following (for that just check the root menu of this gopherhole): Phorum. gopher://gopher.someodd.zip/1/phorum/ Interlog: experimental log-like phorum. gopher://gopher.someodd.zip/1/interlog/ Gopherspace (mmo)RPG: the world *is* gopherspace! ChatGopherPT (it's like ChatGPT) https://gopher.someodd.zip/1//gateway/ollama/list Gopherhole hosting gopher://gopher.someodd.zip/1//hosted You can also check out the "my_servs" tag on my phlog, which mostly serves as an index for service launch announcements. Beyond that I host a variety of things I'm too lazy to document, like a Gopher proxy.

I Replaced My Web Stack With Gopher (1991) and Failed Less

2026-01-22T00:00:00Z

A love letter to RFC 1436 and the author's choice to replace a modern web stack with plain Gopher, with fewer failures and more joy. Draws 'intimacy over scale' as the thesis and invites pre-publication feedback.

ChatGopherPT: talking to LLMs over Gopher

2026-01-20T00:00:00Z

I'm the bastard who brought Chinese AI to the pre-web Internet. I wanted a way to talk to a language model that felt closer to a daemon than a platform. So I put `ollama` behind Gopher, using DeepSeek's models. Available here: gopher://gopher.someodd.zip/1/gateway/ollama/list ChatGopherPT runs on my own server. It exposes local models as a plain text Gopher menu, accepts a prompt, and streams the reply line by line. Port 70 in, text out. That is the whole interface. There are no accounts to create and nothing to install beyond a Gopher client. There is no analytics pipeline, no consent banner, no invisible third party deciding how fast you get an answer. When it responds, it is because my machine did the work. Gopher keeps things honest. The protocol is small enough to understand fully. You can watch the traffic, reason about the behavior, and write a client in an afternoon. The result feels calm and legible. I like that this works from a terminal. I like that it works from Lynx. I like that it works from something you hacked together after dinner. It fits naturally alongside the other quiet services that make up a personal server. This is not a startup and not a demo. It is a thing I wanted, so I built it and left it running. If you miss small servers, plain text, and systems that stay out of your way, you might enjoy talking to a language model over Gopher. It's open source: https://github.com/someodd/small-gopher-applets The source is a single README, which is a Literate Haskell file. You literally mark the Markdown file as an executable and run it.

gasm: 1.5 KB Gopher server that runs on 24 KB of RAM

2026-01-15T00:00:00Z

Announcing gasm, a 1.5 KB Gopher server that runs on 24 KB of RAM. Demonstrates how small a functional gopher daemon can be, with a photo of the binary's size on disk.

I Made a Multiplayer RPG Where You Explore Gopherspace With Others

2025-11-17T00:00:00Z

An MMORPG where the game world is literally live gopherspace itself. Find treasure where people haven't been before, so the more gopherspace pioneering you do, the better your stats can be. You can leave your words in gopherspace, but also kill people and steal their loot. The idea of this game is to encourage people to *really* explore gopherspace and to showcase how [Venusia](https://github.com/someodd/venusia) (my Gopher daemon) lets you, for example, run [Literate Haskell](https://wiki.haskell.org/index.php?title=Literate_programming) as scripts (`runghc`), to give rich application experiences in gopherspace. [The game code (open source)](https://github.com/someodd/grpg) is literally a `README.md` -- literally try running it `./README.md`. This is part of a format I've been using I call "gopher applets," which is probably a more generally useful concept, about Markdown README files which are also the code for the game (even tests), so the documentation and code are all-in-one and it's all nicely self-contained. Play the game by finding the right link at [the root of my gopherhole](/) # More info The script is very half-baked and will likely need to undergo many iterations. The biggest glaring issue is that there's no password system so you can literally just type in someone's username to hijack their account. I plan to implement tripcodes. At the moment, I don't really care as I'm busy with other things, but I will get around to fixing that. This just started off as a proof-of-concept of my Gopher state system/script.

I was interviewed on screwtape 2025-11-04 about Gopher, Haskell, Category Theory

2025-11-17T00:00:00Z

A November 2025 interview on screwtape covering Gopher, Haskell, and category theory. Archival notes around the session.

README

2025-09-30T00:00:00Z

peepy-amor-theme.zip

2025-09-30T00:00:00Z

bird-on-cross-sky.jpg

2025-09-30T00:00:00Z

counter-strike.md

2025-09-30T00:00:00Z

# someodd's Counter Strike 1.6 Server Counter-Strike 1.6 is a classic First Person Shooter computer game. You can easily download it via Steam. Server is at: cs16.someodd.zip Add this server location to your favorites in Counter-Strike 1.6. You can view stats at this address: gopher://gopher.someodd.zip/gateway/cs16_stats ## Weekly event Weekly. Saturday from 7-9pm, US/Pacific (LA time). This is the special time/day of the week I've carved out to encourage people to join the server. See the flyer: gopher://gopher.someodd.zip/assets/posts/counter-strike-event/flyer.png Official announcement: gopher://gophers.someodd.zip/phlog/announcing-counter-strike-16-weekly-event.gopher.txt ## Game and chat Mumble (voice chat): mumble.someodd.zip People often like to use Mumble to talk via voice when playing. Please see `mumble.md` in this directory, or visit one of these URIs: * gopher://gopher.someodd.zip:70/0/services/mumble.md * https://mumble.someodd.zip/ ### BONUS: text chat (we hangout here) We primarily chat textually on IRC and XMPP when we're not playing Counter-Strike: * `irc.md` or `xmpp.md` in this directory * gopher://gopher.someodd.zip:70/0/services/irc.md * gopher://gopher.someodd.zip:70/0/services/xmpp.md This info for IRC and XMPP *might not* be out-of-date (you should really look at the above links/files for up-to-date and accurate info): * IRC: ircs://irc.someodd.zip/#main * XMPP: xmpp:%23main%25irc.someodd.zip@irc.xmpp.someodd.zip?join ## Features * Hand-picked, small maps ## More info I wrote an article about running your own Counter-Strike 1.6 server on Linux. gopher://gopher.someodd.zip:70/0/phlog/linux-counter-strike-16-server.gopher.txt More info on my personal website: https://www.someodd.zip/showcase/counter-strike-1.6-server/

mumble.md

2025-09-30T00:00:00Z

# someodd Mumble Voice chat that's been used for decades (?). Many clients for phone and desktop/laptop. Connect to: mumble.someodd.zip It’s a bit tricky to set up but offers strong encryption and full control. My server provides a lightweight, private alternative for high-performance voice chat. I primarily use this when playing on my Counter-Strike 1.6 server. Please see one of: * `counter-strike.md` in this directory * https://cs16.someodd.zip/ * gopher://gopher.someodd.zip/services/counter-strike.md Download Mumble: https://www.mumble.info/ ## Suggested clients I literally just use Mumble for Linux, but I think it's available for all kinds of platforms. Please see: https://www.mumble.info/ On Android I use Mumla. ## Troubleshooting When it comes to "voice activity," I was confused by silence below/voice above sliders--play with BOTH sliders. As of March 8 on Debian Sid, 2025, a global hotkey for push-to-talk does not work. ## See also: my text chats Please also see my IRC and XMPP service info for text chat, it's where we hangout and organize things: * `irc.md` or `xmpp.md` in this directory * gopher://gopher.someodd.zip:70/0/services/irc.md * gopher://gopher.someodd.zip:70/0/services/xmpp.md

whisper-radio.md

2025-09-30T00:00:00Z

https://radio.someodd.zip/ You can send in the music you've made to be broadcasted. I can also broadcast whatever else, spotlight your project maybe.

xmpp.md

2025-09-30T00:00:00Z

# someodd's XMPP server XMPP address: xmpp.someodd.zip My XMPP address: someodd@xmpp.someodd.zip It's hooked up to my IRC server. For example, you can join: `#main%irc.someodd.zip@irc.xmpp.someodd.zip`. xmpp:%23main%25irc.someodd.zip@irc.xmpp.someodd.zip?join Request an invite by contacting me (see the root of this gopherhole). Web page: https://www.someodd.zip/showcase/xmpp-server/ Compliance: https://compliance.conversations.im/server/xmpp.someodd.zip/ ## Tips for the gateway You can actually register your nickname and use nickserv and all that via XMPP. What I do in Gajim is in the server chat I use commands like this: ``` OPER someodd mypasswordhere PRIVMSG NickServ :REGISTER mypasswordherelol someodd@pm.me privmsg NickServ :IDENTIFY someodd mypasswordherelol mode #main +o someodd PRIVMSG ChanServ :REGISTER #main ```

Presenting smallnet documentary at brcon2025

2025-08-05T00:00:00Z

Presenting the smallnet documentary at brcon2025, a Bitreich conference. Situates the author as a Bitreich member working to preserve and extend the Gopher Protocol.

Best of Smallnet Zine #0: April 2025

2025-04-09T00:00:00Z

This is the 0th edition of Smallnet Zine (April Edition). The point of this is to just blab about the state of the smallnet, indieweb, and self-hosting. Originally I had this idea to start something called netring.cafe, which was a cool idea, but I really already have too much on my plate at-the-moment. So now I'm just going to use a tag on my phlog to act as a zine: 1bestofsmallnet tag /phlog/tags/bestofsmallnet You should also check out my lawn for links. You can reach out to me to get your content featured there and see other people's cool smallnet/indieweb/self-hosted stuff there: 1someodd's lawn /lawn If you want to be featured just contact me or join my IRC/XMPP, just check contact section at the root of my gopherhole: 1someodd's gopherhole / ## Spotlight I actually want to make an effort to archive these to: 1My person archive in gopherspace /archvies So keep an eye out for that... ### chud.cyou This guy definitely has some kind of background in 4chan or imageboards. He actually hangs out in 0my IRC. /services/irc.md hChud Airspace URL:https://chud.cyou Oldnet style website--actually kind of cool. He self-hosts various services, I believe, like the website, Mumble, a Wiki, git, an upload service called "UpChud." From what I've seen this website is pretty funny. To my surprise, I also find on his homepage he includes a link to me! hCHudHome URL:https://chud.cyou/home.html He also has an IRC server at `irc.chud.cyou`! ## webamp hWebamp URL:https://webamp.org/ Classic webamp in the browser. This isn't technically smallnet nor self-hosted, but I don't care and I'm featuring it here, anyway. ### Cameron's world hCameron's World URL:https://www.cameronsworld.net/ A cool geocities-looking art project from what I can tell. Cool thing to explore. ### Mozz.us This guy has some of the coolest content in gopherspace. He has games, a flash archive, etc. I believe it's all self-hosted. 1Mozz.us gopherhole / mozz.us 70 Another guy hanging out on my IRC server. ### Wired Sound hWIRED SOUND URL:https://fauux.neocities.org/ A neocities website that's an homage to Lain (a cyberpunk anime). ### htmlenergy hHTML Energy https://html.energy/ > HTML energy is all around us and in this very website. > > Building websites has become complex, > but the energy of HTML persists. > > What makes HTML special is its simplicity. > > HTML isn’t a vast language, yet you can do a lot with it. > > Anyone who wants to publish on the web can write HTML. > > This accessibility and ease of use is where its energy resides. > > Who’s writing HTML today? ### frstcomputer.com 1Bespoke computer store in gopherspace / frstcomputer.com 70 A boutique computer with a boutique shopping experience via Gopher! ### 250kb.club h250kb.club https://250kb.club/ My friend showed me this. Web pages that are under 250KB in size. > The 250KB Club is a collection of web pages that share certain values, especially a focus on performance, efficiency, accessibility and sustainability. ### Melon Land, Melon King This guy is a indieweb artistic genius. hMelonLand forums URL:https://forum.melonland.net This forum looks **amazing**. It's centered around indieweb type things. I talked to him about this in an interview and he said he found some really old software and themes. hmelonking website URL:https://melonking.net Amazing website, very artistic indieweb experience like none other. ## Some articles I've written on self-hosting Get started self-hosting! Running your own server is fun! 0Music server with MPD /phlog/music-server-mpd.gopher.txt 0Counter-Strike 1.6 Server in Linux /phlog/linux-counter-strike-16-server.gopher.txt 0XMPP audio/video call support /phlog/xmpp-server-video-audio-calls.gopher.txt 0Host your own XMPP server /phlog/xmpp-server.gopher.txt 0Host your own IRC server /phlog/irc-server.gopher.txt 0Make your own VPN /phlog/wireguard-simple.gopher.txt

My favorite parts of the bible: the two most important commandments

2025-04-04T00:00:00Z

I used to have a bad impression of Christianity. As a marginalized person especially I felt an antagonism. I thought religion was largely just a system of repression, hatred, judgement, etc. Religion had always been in the background of my life, but never at the forefront. I wasn't raised religious. Christianity probably started bubbling to the surface after reading philosophy like Heidegger and history in relation to Marx. It was really starting to awaken in me when I started listening to Cliffe Knecthle, whose system and interpretation of the bible seemed so cohesive and rock-solid theologically/philosophically, and the message really made sense to me. One of love and forgiveness--to love even my enemy. When I tried to live out those lessons from the sermon on the mount I felt a radical awakening, or the Holy Spirit stirring within me. I was so moved by the power of his word to fulfill that most fundamental of teachings: to love my neighbor as myself, and to let all else flow from this and be interpreted from this. It is so beautiful the community I've found, the guidance I've had, how much I've been able to lean on Christ in my darkest hours. In my best moments I try to be like Jesus and in my worst I think I know better. I will cite the Christian Standard Bible for these lessons. ## Matthew 22:34-40 34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they came together. 35 And one of them, an expert in the law, asked a question to test him: 36 "Teacher, which command in the law is the greatest?" 37 He said to him, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. 38 This is the greatest and most important command. 39 The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commands." ## Mark 12:28-34 28 One of the scribes approached. When he heard them debating and saw that Jesus answered them well, he asked him, "Which command is the most important of all?" 29 Jesus answered, "The most important is Listen, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. 31 The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other command greater than these." 32 Then the scribe said to him, "You are right, teacher. You have correctly said that he is one, and there is no one else except him. 33 And to love him with all your heart, with all your understanding, and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself, is far more important tahn all the burnt offerings and sacrifices." 34 When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And no one dared to question him any longer. ## Perhaps my favorite: Luke 10:25-37 25 Then an expert in the law stood up to test him, saying, "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" 26 "What is written in the law?" he asked him. "How do you read it?" 27 He answered, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind," and "your neighbor as yourself." 28 "You’ve answered correctly," he told him. "Do this and you will live." 29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" 30 Jesus took up the question and said, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him, beat him up, and fled, leaving him half dead. 31 A priest happened to be going down that road. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32 In the same way, a Levite, when he arrived at the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan on his journey came up to him, and when he saw the man, he had compassion. 34 He went over to him and bandaged his wounds

Counter-Strike 1.6 Server + Weekly Event

2025-04-01T00:00:00Z

Announces the author's Counter-Strike 1.6 server and a recurring weekly event. Accompanied by Chinese-language flyer artwork promoting the game night.

I'm now a member of Bitreich!

2025-03-28T00:00:00Z

I am now officially a member of Bitreich! I'll talk a bit about my membership and about Bitreich itself. 1Check out Bitreich's gopherhole / bitreich.org 70 I really admire the Bitreich group for being such a powerful and vocal, noticeable force for the Gopher Protocol in the modern era. I think I ran into their gopherhole randomly while surfing gopherspace. The Bitreich group carries a lot of the whimsy and not-taking-itself-too-seriously that you find surfing Gopherspace. For example, look at this joke about the excesses of the web made by *20h* on a Debian mailing list: hG3C announces: GML, Gopher and XHTML URL:https://lists.debian.org/gopher-project/2021/04/msg00001.html Of course, Bitreich has their own manifesto. Here's a quip: > We form a movement to improve our daily software life. Software has to > not misbehave, it has to follow our rules, it has to be reusable, it has > to be easily maintainable, it has to provide its recompilable source and > it has to be easily understandable. 0Bitreich Manifesto gopher://bitreich.org:70/0/documents/bitreich-manifesto.md h20h, the main person behind Bitreich, is a member of suckless.org URL:https://suckless.org/people/20h/ I had been helping out tangentially by working on my Whisper Radio project, because they also had their own radio service. I also have been working on uncovering history regarding the Gopher Protocol and working on a lot of Gopher software. 1You can see my previous Halloween post about Bitreich /phlog/bitreich-haunted-hosts.gopher.txt 0Official Bitreich announcement: /usr/20h/phlog/2025-03-27T18-29-56-532851.md bitreich.org 70 > # 2025-03-27 18:29:56.532851 UTC (+0000) > > Welcome someodd as new Bitreich member! > > The council has decided to make someodd a new member of Bitreich. He has > contributed to Bitreich by being a burning fighter for gopher and > simplicity. He works on radio, gopher software and did ground breaking > research into gopher history. There is much to come for the whole of the > community. > > Welcome! > > > Sincerely yours, > > 20h > Chief Community Manager (CCM) They gave me an SSH account which has some very interesting/fun services. For example, they have their own gopher service: 1My Bitreich gopherhole /usr/someodd bitreich.org 70 I'm very honored and happy to be an official member. I really admire the community vibes and their work.

Becoming a Hackage uploader

2025-03-28T00:00:00Z

I was working on [Venusia](https://github.com/someodd/venusia) because I keep writing Gopher servers. I realized I wanted to just create a library/dependency. So I wanted to actually put this on Hackage, which is Haskell's package repository. I had to go through an approval process and I'm now a Hackage uploader! ## Prepping my project and then getting it uploaded! These are some messy notes, but I hope it's still useful for you! This is what I did, roughly, to prepare Venusia for Hackage and getting it on Hackage. I edited my `package.yaml`. Then I used these commands: ``` cabal check stack sdist ``` That command might suggest you use upper bounds. I lazily used `cabal gen-bounds`. I had to wrestle with the bounds because stack complained about them not being available in the snapshot. I made one of the bounds more relaxed. This also generated a file `/home/tilde/Projects/Venusia/.stack-work/dist/x86_64-linux/ghc-9.8.4/Venusia-0.1.0.0.tar.gz` which I uploaded as a package candidate. I'll get back to that later. Registered for an account: https://hackage.haskell.org/users/register-request I then emailed the hackage trustees to get approved, although they had an option to send people an endorsement link, and someone responded rather quickly. They gave me some notes about the first package I wanted to submit (one of the requirements they listed for asking to be approved). he told me of these notes: > 1. Hackage is intended to be a permanent record. Therefore uploads cannot be changed or removed. > 2. Only upload things that work, are useful to other people, and that you intend to maintain. > 3. Use `cabal gen-bounds` to put PVP-compliant version bounds (lower > AND upper) on ALL your unique dependencies so your package will still > be buildable years down the road. One important thing to note is that > you only need to include version bounds once. For example, if you > depend on the same package in your library and your test suite, you > only need to put the version bounds for that dependency in one place. > This keeps the dependency bounds information DRY. > 4. Package candidates CAN be changed, so use them to test things out > and get everything right before you publish permanently to the main > index. You should check that your source bundle builds, including the Haddock documentation if it's a library. Here's my candidate, for now, which may be a dead link: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/Venusia-0.1.0.0/candidate Be careful, Hackage, at least when defining a dependency, is case-sensitive! This really threw me off! I feel like this is actually really bad and has potential to be exploited if, say someone uploads a package of the same name, just lowercase, if it's capitalized, or something like that. Hopefully they prevent that somehow. I couldn't figure out how to install a candidate dependency using Stack, so in the project I wanted to use Venusia as a depnency in I just used: ``` extra-deps: - git: https://github.com/someodd/venusia.git commit: ffae72d03d3b24e7507354071490f539868c6821 ``` Oh also i think i may have had to create a `src/` for my project? Maybe that was just a warning. ## Haskell's versioning: PVP Package Versioning Policy and have version bounds on all dependencies indicating which versions they are known to build with. See: [Package versioning and curation](https://hackage.haskell.org/upload#versioning_and_curation) and [Haskell PVP Specification](https://pvp.haskell.org/). Something that really helped me was in the Haskell PVP FAQ ["How does the PVP relate to SemVer"](https://pvp.haskell.org/faq/#semver)? I took the time to understand the Haskell PVP Spec and the section on "package versioning and curation." I think I understand, mostly, now, that the spec is about not breaking other people's code, but also describing how much it might break code (almost like an estimate of how long it'd take to adapt new code) as well as signaling if there were non-api-breaking features/changes, for the most part. So in that sense for A.B.C, 'a' seems to be like "super major" like "the API

Applying to Avantos AI (job)

2025-03-24T00:00:00Z

I saw a job listing on [Ask HN: Who is hiring (March 2025)](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243024). Seemed to be one of those fancy new cryptic challenge-based interviews. At first I tried doing a command like this: ``` curl -X POST https://apply-to-avantos.dev-sandbox.workload.avantos-ai.net/ \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"email": "my email"}' ``` That gave me a forbidden response. I was used to these, so I figured it had to do with blocking spammy-seeming requests. I neglected to read this part: > You'll need to make sure the user agent isn't something too bot-seeming or WAF will block you. (Sorry we're a startup no time to fix.) This user agent works: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/133.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 So here I ran the command in verbose mode: ``` ➜ post-apply curl -v -X POST https://apply-to-avantos.dev-sandbox.workload.avantos-ai.net/ \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:117.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/117.0" \ -d '{"email": "my email"}' Note: Unnecessary use of -X or --request, POST is already inferred. * Host apply-to-avantos.dev-sandbox.workload.avantos-ai.net:443 was resolved. * IPv6: (none) * IPv4: 18.190.42.252, 3.22.13.83, 18.117.63.32 * Trying 18.190.42.252:443... * GnuTLS ciphers: NORMAL:-ARCFOUR-128:-CTYPE-ALL:+CTYPE-X509:-VERS-SSL3.0 * ALPN: curl offers h2,http/1.1 * found 152 certificates in /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt * found 456 certificates in /etc/ssl/certs * SSL connection using TLS1.3 / ECDHE_RSA_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 * server certificate verification OK * server certificate status verification SKIPPED * common name: apply-to-avantos.dev-sandbox.workload.avantos-ai.net (matched) * server certificate expiration date OK * server certificate activation date OK * certificate public key: RSA * certificate version: #3 * subject: CN=apply-to-avantos.dev-sandbox.workload.avantos-ai.net * start date: Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT * expire date: Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:59:59 GMT * issuer: C=US,O=Amazon,CN=Amazon RSA 2048 M02 * ALPN: server accepted h2 * Connected to apply-to-avantos.dev-sandbox.workload.avantos-ai.net (18.190.42.252) port 443 * using HTTP/2 * [HTTP/2] [1] OPENED stream for https://apply-to-avantos.dev-sandbox.workload.avantos-ai.net/ * [HTTP/2] [1] [:method: POST] * [HTTP/2] [1] [:scheme: https] * [HTTP/2] [1] [:authority: apply-to-avantos.dev-sandbox.workload.avantos-ai.net] * [HTTP/2] [1] [:path: /] * [HTTP/2] [1] [accept: */*] * [HTTP/2] [1] [content-type: application/json] * [HTTP/2] [1] [user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:117.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/117.0] * [HTTP/2] [1] [content-length: 28] > POST / HTTP/2 > Host: apply-to-avantos.dev-sandbox.workload.avantos-ai.net > Accept: */* > Content-Type: application/json > User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:117.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/117.0 > Content-Length: 28 > * upload completely sent off: 28 bytes < HTTP/2 200 < date: Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:33:13 GMT < content-type: application/json < content-length: 404 < * Connection #0 to host apply-to-avantos.dev-sandbox.workload.avantos-ai.net left intact {"challenge_link":"https://fluttering-atmosphere-1b5.notion.site/Journey-Builder-React-Coding-Challenge-190d5fe264fa80cba39ec21afc6d42ec","instructions":"Submit your solutions as a link to a github repo named `045eb7` to the following email address: challenge-request-sub-aaaapriy22ktilybsd6gv7beiq@avantos.slack.com. Questions can be sent to challenge-help-aaaaprjeraoxiaa2wlnlda7vsi@avantos.slack.com"}% ``` I opened up [the challenge link](https://fluttering-atmosphere-1b5.notion.site/Journey-Builder-React-Coding-Challenge-190d5fe264fa80cba39ec21afc6d42ec). It kind of seemed like they didn't want me just copying-and-pasting the challenge into Claude or ChatGPT or something because they disabled ctrl+a (maybe not intentional), so I also assumed there was more logging than that going on. So I

My radio interview (Lispy Gopher Climate/screwtape)

2025-03-20T00:00:00Z

The author's radio interview on screwtape's Lispy Gopher Climate show. Archives the conversation and the accompanying flyer.

Lessons writing Haskell code for a 33 year old pre-web Internet protocol (Gopher)

2025-03-16T00:00:00Z

You may be asking "What even is Gopher?" I highly recommend [gopherproject.org](https://gopher.mills.io/gopherproject.org) for a wonderful introduction. The Gopher Protocol is what came before "the web," before HTTP, before webpages, before "web browsers." It's a different way of looking at information on the Internet (I affectionately refer to as "the net"). Haskell is... ## notes careful quickcheck isn't inductive proof not only that but it taught me to run servers better and make things more reliable. more reliable daemons, systemd, to whisper radio, dogfooding to the max libraries etc, to even server announcemen ## Let's dive in If you take a look at [my GitHub](https://github.com/someodd/) you'll notice two things: 1. It's pretty much all Haskell 2. Wow, there's a lot of stuff written for "the Gopher Protocol," what even is that? I had encountered The Gopher Protocol as a child, but never really got to know it until the last few years. I had heard about it from a friend who was describing a *debloated* and organized net. I'd come to learn that's fairly accurate, especially considering both how Gopher is mostly simple text and how it was even involved in some librarian conferences. A programmer I looked up to championed Haskell. In fact, lots of programmers I thought were cool were using Haskell. It tickled my fancy when it came to craft and the esoteric. I think really what started my journey was finally being fed up with Objected-Oriented Programming and (inconsistent) mutability. I also didn't like a lot of the conventions that were going on in that sphere, I often felt like people were twisting their code to be more sophisticated than just accepting the brutalist aesthetic of the fact that they were dealing with structured data and ways of mutating that data, which I would come to learn Haskell really drove home. **work on this** I started dabbling with the Gopher Protocol to learn Haskell. I'm a bit of a techno-romanticist. I like to host my own services on my server. Even old stuff. In fact, I think there's a lot of wisdom in the old stuff. Of those unix legends. Those old programmers I looked up for so long. I remember for a long time in programming, before AI kicked off, it really did feel like everything was just reinventing the wheel and you really could just use a tool made or started 30+ years ago to do "the latest thing." I really enjoyed the idea of such stable and historical software that was so practical. I really loved running my own software, writing my own code, fusing craft and art with it all (even with the concept of server-as-an-art-installation). It also was a gateway to interesting friendships. In many ways I still feel this holds true. I like the BSDs, I like Debian, I like the idea of code as a craft, or even code and serveradmin as an art, for example: * netring * I even like running Window Maker sometimes, swith all kinds of arts dockapps (link here, i should really update that shit with pictures too) * whisper-radio: an internet radio station (icecast) which reads the latest news in gopherspace, mastodon, responds to users, plays music, reads text However, I think over the years, for one reason or another, my enthusiasm waned, my ability to hold such a romantic view, have such a romantic relationship with tech waned. IT all just became a tool, a utility, plain and simple. My last attempt at rekindling this started with when I found Haskell and the Gopher Protocol. I found Haskell wasn't just one of these things I could quickly learn by doing--I actually felt the need to do a little bit of book learning. I decided to really start understanding Haskell, after reading the obligatory [Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!](https://learnyouahaskell.com/), by finally getting around to starting a project. I decided to make a text UI client for the Gopher Protocol, which would speedrun me understanding both, also incurring heavy tech debt and mistakes along the way, but that's what learning projects are for

Announcing netring.cafe: indieweb and smallnet zine

2025-03-08T00:00:00Z

I'm excited to announce a new project inspired by the spirit of smallnet and the indieweb—a zine-style webring for home-hosted netspaces! This project isn't just about the web; it celebrates any protocol you choose to run on your own server, whether that's HTML, Gopher, or something else entirely. Every quarter, we'll publish a fresh edition showcasing creative members, handy tutorials (including a beginner’s guide to running your own server), and more. Join us in building a diverse, protocol-agnostic digital space where your server is your canvas and your online identity truly shines! Check this out for more info/submission details: 1Netring.cafe in gopherspace /netring.cafe/ hnetring.cafe on the web URL:https://netring.cafe/ ## Monthly event **What:** Show off our favorite spaces on the net You can show off your own projects/updates We'll try to keep track of links and post them somewhere 0Game together on someodd's Counter-Strike 1.6 server /services/counter-strike.md **When:** first Sunday of every month. **Where:** 0Someodd IRC #main /services/irc.md You can also join via XMPP: xmpp:%23main%25irc.someodd.zip@irc.xmpp.someodd.zip?join 0Someodd Counter-Strike 1.6 server /services/counter-strike.md