sharpikeebo
I was wondering if anyone has seen any interesting retro devices running the gemini or gopher protocol. I write regularly on my Psion 5MX and love the idea of being able to browse the smolweb on such a form factor.
So crazy I run into this now, cause I seen somebody on flounder made a post about using a PSP to use HTTP proxies for gemini/gopher (since the PSP has no TLS support)
THING IS, after i read that, it prompted me to LOOK into this: Turns out somebody, i think a couple years back or so, had actually gone ahead and gone through the effort of modding their *own* PSP with TLS 1.2 support. Neat idea?
I once tried to hack a kindle to repurpose it as an online web-pulled/dashboard type thing. The problem was, the kernel that Amazon used was very very old and I couldn't get any modern version gnu-tls to build on it without going through dependency hell. A surprisingly large number of websites that refuse pure http requests these days.
This all sounds very complicated to get running. It's definitely pesky finding ways to retrofit gradually obsolete technology especially given for archival purposes.
Even peskier trying to update software over potentially brickable hardware, making it all that much harder to try and preserve an older device. It's too bad there aren't a common amount of mobile version sites with support for older HTML like there used to be.
It's a shame, but I'm hoping that there's a force of change happening in the hardware world (driven by FOSS software enthusiasts) where people are looking to take control of their devices for the long term again. I'm hoping this is a trend that won't fizzle out.
I also notice the trend you're referring to, and i def have hopes for that growing interest in using your own device as fully personal and tangible to continue growing. Only time will tell.
So actually I have a very old Nook, that I’ve got running Android 2 I think. It’s currently an E-ink dashboard I’ve stuck to the wall that shows the upcoming weather forecast (and high/low tides near me). It doesn’t support any sort of https, so I have it just connecting to a local server running a Python script printing the dashboard, I wonder if I added some interactivity could it be used to browse the smolweb? (Over http of course…)
I have the same sort of setup on a Kindle 2. Shows weather, org-mode schedule, google calendar, and random motivational messages, produced by a local Pi server.
The calendar is just a chromium screenshot generated via the puppeteer web-automation library, so I think you could do smolweb too that way
That’s the great thing about this text only world, I am a rubbish designer but as all I’m dealing with is text, as long as the UI is functional, that’s all it needs!
raspberry pi?
I guess you could consider the first raspberry pi retro. Perhaps I should specify, I find the palmtop form factor great. Other option is something like MorphOS on a PowerBook G4.