2025-09-03 -- ROOPHLOCH 2025
============================

Here we go!

I just walked 3km into the woods, according to the GPS tracker on my
Android phone.

First of all, the hardest part of this challenge is finding a somewhat
secluded spot. The last thing I want to do is talk to people. :-)

I'm typing this on my Samsung NC10 Plus netbook, which runs OpenBSD.
Let's try to take a photo (with a smartphone).

Aha, next problem. There is no Internet here, says the phone. :-)  Let's
walk some more and put the netbook into suspend again ...

Next try. Found another bench. Yes, there are benches here, this isn't
some wilderness. But not a soul in sight, which is good. :-)

Let's try to get that photo from the phone to the netbook. In theory, I
should be able to set the phone to hotspot mode (smartphone acts as WLAN
access point and DHCP server) and then transfer the data to a little
webserver on the netbook.

That worked! Oh dear, photos are so large these days. Makes the netbook
swap, because it only has 1 GB of RAM.

Ouch! Some fruit fell on my head.

I'm trying to upload the photo, but the problem is, I'm too far "off
grid".  Mobile Internet is extremely slow, can't even connect to my
server via SSH. I'll have to get closer to civilization again. A ping to
8.8.8.8 takes 8 seconds. Yes, seconds. Now I get more replies, 21
seconds, 26 seconds, ... brb.

Alright, alright, I stand corrected. This is wilderness. Is Mobile
Internet even real? Is it a hoax?

I'm back in town now, sitting in a park. This has to be good enough. :-)
Let's try to upload that photo again. It worked! But I forgot to install
lynx on my netbook, I gotta do a quick "pkg_add lynx" in the park.
Alright, there you go:

gopher://uninformativ.de/I/phlog/2025/2025-09/2025-09-03--roophloch--a.jpg

This was a 2 hour outdoor trip.

Proofreading this entry one last time before publishing it ... Why does
groff not justify the text? Nah, too lazy for that now.

Going live in 3, 2, 1, ...

                                 _____


Edit at home: Forgot to mention, this is an entry for solderpunk's
ROOPHLOCH:

gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2025.txt

                                 _____


Edit at home: Maybe I should clarify some things. :-)  Writing  a  phlog
entry  while  sitting  on  a log in the woods is really weird, and I was
rushing it a bit, to be honest.

The setup was simple: Netbook + smartphone as a WLAN hotspot. Writing in
Vim in an XTerm. All my standard tooling runs  locally,  like  the  Atom
feed generation. Publishing the post via rsync over SSH.

(Why  did  the  netbook swap when doing stuff with that photo? Because I
was resizing it from 4624x3472 to 640x480.)