motidu day 15: bsd, nntp, and weechat

tldr:

playing around in netbsd

using nntp more

trying different irc clients

looking at maildir & co

tabs and spaces and bears, oh my

other thoughts

well, i'm halfway through the "month of things i don't use", and i'm regretting not using a simpler name like "month of new"!

netbsd

every few months, i turn on my netbsd machine. i play around with it a bit, then spend 4 hours trying to get suspend to work properly.

this time was no different. i really like netbsd, but it's not a desktop. i installed it on a y2k retro pc a long time ago, just to try out netbsd.

well, i finally decided to slap alpine linux on it. alpine is something i discovered /because/ of the motidu, so i'm counting it in. i'm happy that i'm discovering so many actual helpful things this month!

newsgroups!

i've been playing around more with nntp newsgroups, particularly news.tilde.club. it's heckin adorable and a cool idea. reminds me of reddit, but you're not downloading 10mb of data every time you load a page!

i've browsed newsgroups on slrn, tin, and gnus, but i prefer alpine. alpine is just so clean, and i like how it treats newsgroups as inboxes! that is to say, there's almost no difference between using alpine for mail, and using alpine for news, except that when you reply, it asks if you want to post to the group, or just reply in private to the author.

anyway, i'm liking newsgroups. i'll make an update if anything bad happens.

irc clients

i use irssi, but a lot of people say weechat is good, so i tried it out. i need to get used to it, and ssl doesn't work for me, but it's interesting for sure!

some of my monitors are 4:3, so the 3-pane default is a bit squeezed, but changing things around was easy, at least.

i also tried a few others like epic5, but ircii-style clients go over my head. i tried catgirl, just cause of the cute name, and it works, but it's ssl-only, and some of my friends self-host insecure servers for testing (i guess), so i'll try using catgirl with some other servers first.

i think irc is super cute, but most clients have a "powerusers first" philosophy. i'll probably rant about this more some other time.

mail stuff

for my mail i'm using alpine. i might continue using it, just because it feels like "rmail but the threads are collapsible", which is adorably clean!

people on the internet say "maildir" is a better email-storing format than "mbox". i like mbox, but maildir is apparently newer and fixes a lot of problems that mbox had. not that i have any problems with mbox, but since this is the "month of new", maybe i'll try maildir.

the only problem is that none of the email clients i like support maildir at all! mutt does. maybe i'll use that... or maybe i'll just use mbox, since it works for me.

tabs

tabs (the whitespace character) are cute and fun and weird and quirky. i like using tabs, and i might try using tabs for indentation more often.

i used to set the tabwidth in my text editors / pagers. bad mistake. ouch. never do that. tabs should be 8 characters apart all the time forever.

other thoughts

i re-wrote my lisp tutorial. makes me want to make one for gemini!

i burned alpine on a cd. cd's are cute.

trying to fill my old sdf gopherhole with more content.

trying to deep de-cringe all my sites. there's almost nothing left!

i want to do snail-mail, but the post system is confusing.

i want to do "literally talking face-to-face" mail, but that's scary.

i used a leave-in conditioner and my hair feels cool.

still bad at bass.

i'm sad that 15-inch laptops are mainstream. i want thick 8-inch laptops!

these lists are fun to make.

march 23, 2021