Gemini, Feeds and Being a Little Offline

The way I consume gemini, feeds and other internet material is sometimes all over the place. Particularly over the last year it has changed and evolved. For a while I was mainly using amfora on a couple different computers to browse gemini. I've had the miniflux feed reader running on my server and have it connected to newsboat to browse the feeds in the terminal. Then I started using Offpunk for some of my gemini browsing and experimenting with its ability to sync all the things I follow in geminispace for offline reading. Then Offpunk added the abilility to view traditional rss feeds and html pages and sync those locally as well. Long story short I'm still seeing where this leads me and how well I get along with it.

Currently I have my gemini subscriptions imported into Offpunk so whenever I sync I get all the new gemini posts I'm following downloaded locally and added to my "tour". A tour is a feature that came from solderpunk's AV-98 client which in turn came from solderpunk's own VF01 gopher client. Either manually by issuing the command or automatically if you are subscribed to a gemini feed posts can get added to your tour and then your tour can be displayed back to you in consecutive order until you've read all the new posts that were in that tour. It's a handy way to read through the new stuff all at once. I briefly tried adding all of my rss feeds to Offpunk and subscribing to them but quickly realized that having that many feeds, some of which have many new posts per day, all getting added to my tour along with gemini posts was just too much. The tour got too long and unwieldy and the feed articles were interspersed with the gemini posts. I think I like keeping gemini and feeds/web separate at least mentally even though they are in the same application.

In reality I also find it much quicker and easier to go through all the new items in my rss feeds with newsboat because it's just built better for that as you'd expect. Additionally, I prefer to read most longer articles on my ereader and with newsboat I can send articles to wallabag in an instant with a macro. So for now what I've done is hand pick some of the most interesting and lower volume sites and only added those feeds to Offpunk and instead of subscribing to them I've just put them in a list that gets synced but not added to my tour. This way I can sync Offpunk once a day or so and have new gemini posts in my tour and a small selection of rss feeds that I can browse manually if I'm looking for something to read, available whether I have a network connection or not.

A lot of my general computing is now done on my PineDA (a Pinephone with keyboard attachment and a custom mostly terminal interface) which I do not have a SIM card in. It has wifi and I'm near an access point most of the time but not always and sometimes I just don't want to be online. This Offpunk setup makes using the PineDA feel a bit like the old days of syncing some reading material to my Palm PDA. Of course the PineDA is much more flexible and capable in comparison. Some other things I'm considering or toying with are downloading some YT and Peertube channels' latest videos for offline viewing and doing the same for podcasts. So far I don't have anything interesting setup for the videos but I've been using a really nice TUI podcast application called Castero that is working well. It can download episodes locally, play them, build a queue and save your spot in every podcast so you can continue where you left off.

https://notabug.org/ploum/offpunk/

https://github.com/xgi/castero

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