title: Finger for the First Time
date: Wed Jun 24 2026

# Finger for the First Time

I am not a techie person, so I am
finding out about decades-old technology
for the first time on a regular basis.
Last week I learned about finger, and
made a little .plan file for myself so
people here on SDF can check in on me if
they see my username around the place.

Then today I saw a post on bboard which
lead me to plan.cat, a board something
like twitter, where you update a remote
plan file and can read other people's
over the finger protocol.  Just a nice
place to discover people doing
interesting things.

run: 
finger @plan.cat | head -n 20

To get a list of the last 20 people to
update their plan, and then you can
query people individually after that.

Will I get any value out of this?
Maybe!  I can imagine a world where I
check this regularly, start to recognise
names of people who post interesting
things, and write a script to pull them
in to me periodically.

As it stands I've written my own little
script that updates my .plan here on SDF
and my remote one at plan.cat at the
same time.