Writing

I'm a big word fan. Not the biggest word fan, but a big word fan.

A more apt title for this page would be 'blogs', probably. Maybe I'll rename it. Either way these are locales where you can read words that I've written (other than this site's pages, of course!).

One snag about blogging is that it's temporal in nature. My goal here is to document those posts I've written and add a bit of commentary to keep it light and fresh. This won't necessarily be exhaustive, if it was it'd just take forever. However I have listed my Somnol group blog posts so far, so read on..

Somnolescent Group Blog

Chronological order!

snake crashes in: an introductory post from 2019. I have only written about Gopher of that list so far. In that list, Xfire (or, cross-fire) is a defunct instant messaging service, AvantGo was a web to PDA syncing application, and CCSO/ph is a cute directory search protocol that was often paired with Gopher (see RFC 2378). CCSO, I wrote a tiny server for.

Gopher is Not the Web: a rare essay! Within I talk about why I really wish to see more Gopher clients have a tree view, and take advantage of its hierarchial nature more.

I think I still have strong points here. We've seen that a very polished Gopher-browsing experience is possible by Lagrange and some of the Gopher Android apps out there, but I'm still really into the tree view idea, much so that I made a basic implementation of it for Pituophis. The unfortunate irony is that Lagrange's gopher support is in the form of a gopher menu to gemtext renderer.

More on gopher: I have a video of a ton of gopher clients running on Windows 2000 if you're interested, and I also wrote Pituophis, a client and server Python module.

AutoSite XL 0.9 release, and a retrospective: an especially tiny dcb talks excitedly about his new AutoSite project. Hey, I'm using that right now! 1.0 Gold in fact!

I also talk about some of my prior history with Visual Basic, which is fun. I do throw my older "flagship project" PhotoPage under the bus quite a bit here, but I think that's still a story for another time.

The mtlx Chronicle: A non-review of the infamous mtlx album, Last Summer. Perhaps the greatest alternative album of the mp3.com era, if anyone were to just find a copy.

Want to hear a funny story? When Cammy first sent me a copy of "Another Deserted Urban Complex", matching length and all, some time after I posted this, it took me a minute to realize he'd made it. I was like, Shazaming it on my phone as if there was actually an album called Last Summer from a band named mtlx. Maybe there was. Maybe there will be.

Reflections (and Reveries): A very sappy end-of-year post for the Somnolians,, from 2019, no less. It's kind of bizarre to read now, given how turbulent the dynamic was with certain people who uh, aren't in the group anymore. But overall it's just really, really nice to have folks that are into what I'm making. Definitely a turning point in my life and a topic worth coming back to.

The Raven LTE flies again: Using a cracked entry-level smartphone as a server! While I'd love to say this is still in service, after switching to cellular internet I wasn't able to port forward anymore, limiting its use case. I still want a proper line for server stuff or a VPS in the future.

Cool folder organization stuff: Leveraging alphabetical sorting and representing tasks as computer files. This didn't really stick with my process in the end but it was kind of fun to try.

Mac and Cheese disaster: I really need to get to shredding my own cheese.

Update Rollup for dcb services: Updates on goings-on, such as progress on this site (before I made a big breakthrough with how it's being organized, leading to what you're reading now), launching the Photo Bucket, and some ongoing AutoSite development. Also hopefully more blog posts soon??

Fully licensed campus printer: A journal on my awesome netbook-based cloud printing setup with PaperCut Mobility Print.

Upcoming: I have a Chrome OS Flex post for if not Halloween, then hopefully soon, depending on how the rest of the week goes. I'll cover some of the background with that system (and Chrome OS on PCs as a whole) as well as some of my experiences with it. It's outlined and I got a few paragraphs in..

Personal Blogs

Just links to those blogs right now; I'll do a more thorough dive later.

dcb's 32-bit patio

A personal blog that I kept through 2021. I rolled my shortlived LiveJournal posts into it, and then ended up closing it. Regardless there's a bunch of interesting niche stuff on here that I'll comment on above.

dcb's tumblog

A reblog blog! Not any writing to speak of actually but if you like cats...