Since this is my first post on my smol.pub account, I thought to reflect on how I ended up here.
My journey towards this moment started from a paper magazine, of all things. Skrolli is a Finnish language quarterly magazine about computer culture, from hobbyists to hobbyists. There was an article in which the author Janne Sirén mentioned something called permacomputing, a term I did not know. I was curious and searched for it.
Skrolli magazine
Skrolli issue 2022-3 with the article that mentioned permacomputing (FI)
A web search led me to permacomputing.net and Viznut’s (Ville-Matias Heikkilä, Skrolli magazine’s first editor) essays about the topic. I read the essays and browsed permacomputing.net and found out that many things resonated with my thinking about technology.
Viznut’s site
Viznut’s 2020 article about permacomputing
Viznut’s 2021 update
https://permacomputing.net
I have been a minimalist in my computing, preferring human-sized tools, shallow dependency chains and durability. I have liked to keep my old computers in running order, and keeping them useful with modern parts instead of storing them in nostalgia bubbles, which I find the difference between retrocomputing and permacomputing. Getting to know permacomputing introduced me to new ideas and gave me words and concepts to describe my existing thinking.
Browsing the permacomputing site, I found a page about Gemini, got curious and followed a link from to Gemini project website. The talk about Gemini as a place for serene reading resonated. I had kept Lynx in use alongside modern graphical browsers because it was a comfortable environment to read manuals and longer texts. Gemini promised a reading environment in which I would not be thrown to pages that were not navigable with a text browser (which turned out not to be entirely true since Gemtext documents like this can include links to the big web where madness may lie).
https://permacomputing.net/Gemini/
Lynx browser
I tried out Gemini for a while through a proxy, installed Lagrange and tried out other clients like Offpunk. At the same time I re-discovered Gopher, which I had used in the university before web stormed over it. In addition to Gemini capsules, I found a few interesting Gopher phlogs.
I discovered Gemini about two years ago, and have been “lurking” without posting anything myself. Who knows, my posts might amuse someone, although the real purpose will be a tool for self-reflection.
My reason for setting up a capsule was OFFLFIRSOCH (Awful Fur Sock). I found in 2025 the idea of writing an offline-first program interesting, but never got around to doing it since I did not have a capsule/phlog where I would write about it. This year I might participate.
I have a blog on my website, but the pubnix where I live, does not (at least yet) have a Gemini server, and I wanted to try out Gemini publishing. I chose to create another blog in smol.pub to reach Gemini and Gopher.
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pv@smolpub.mail.kapsi.fi