What plain text resources do you all use? Are there good repositories
you frequent? Interesting web places with text archives? Share and be
merry.
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

What plain text resources do you all use? Are there good repositories
you frequent? Interesting web places with text archives? Share and be
merry.

Though well known, I'll mention The Internet Wiretap because it
might have been the first Gopher site that I really discovered, or
at least that got me interested enough to install a dedicated
Gopher browser rather than just viewing it in Firefox. At that
point it was very broken, obviously in some late state of
abandonment, and now it's dead altogether, but it's archived
at quux.org:
gopher://gopher.quux.org/1/Archives/mirrors/wiretap.area.com

I found this little graveyard of classic-era Gopher holes on my
last visit: gopher://gopher.quux.org/0/Archives/mirrors/wiretap.area.com/alt.etext/151.gopher

On Usenet, rec.humor.oracle is good for a laugh.

The dict protocol and dict.org.

There must be lots more, but they usually never change so one tends
to forget about them after a while.

Oh there's wttr.in, except that because I'm using old PCs I don't
generally have UTF-8 support, so I actually use the PNG output
function to view that (when it works). The finger service at
graph.no (finger [city]@graph.no) does work, only I'm a bit too
far from a city myself.
--

- The Free Thinker | gopher://aussies.space/1/%7efreet/
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

From the electronics world, there's also The Giant Internet IC
Masturbator. :)
http://www.kingswood-consulting.co.uk/giicm/
--

- The Free Thinker | gopher://aussies.space/1/%7efreet/
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2022-03-24, The Free Thinker <freet@aussies.space> wrote:

From the electronics world, there's also The Giant Internet IC
Masturbator. :)
http://www.kingswood-consulting.co.uk/giicm/

Whoa! I wouldn't have expected this to be so available in text. Very
neat.
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2022-03-22, The Free Thinker <freet@aussies.space> wrote:

James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

What plain text resources do you all use? Are there good repositories
you frequent? Interesting web places with text archives? Share and be
merry.

Though well known, I'll mention The Internet Wiretap because it
might have been the first Gopher site that I really discovered, or
at least that got me interested enough to install a dedicated
Gopher browser rather than just viewing it in Firefox. At that
point it was very broken, obviously in some late state of
abandonment, and now it's dead altogether, but it's archived
at quux.org:
gopher://gopher.quux.org/1/Archives/mirrors/wiretap.area.com

Interestingly, this leads me to another topic: kiwix. Over at kiwix.org, they are essentially making offline archives of websites that you can read on a computer, phone, etc. It includes Wikipedia, and also some videos like TED talks. I have prepared a ZIM (the offline file format) for gopher.quux.org and need to get on with getting it included in their catalog. Download from:

https://archive.org/details/gopher.quux.org-zim

For more on kiwix, see https://www.kiwix.org/ The readers have integrated Bittorrent downloading of content, but you can browse what's out there at https://library.kiwix.org/?lang=eng and https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages (the clients have a nicer interface). Of particular note, you can download all of Wikipedia as text only,
or with images. Also all of Stackexchange is available.

There is a whole set of people experimenting with novel ways to use Zettelkasten-like approaches to presenting text information. For instance:

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/ - sort of a ringleader of this space.

https://notes.arne.me/about-these-notes/ - with source on Github

Over on my own site at https://www.complete.org/ I have taken to export the site
from an Emacs org-roam database, process it through hugo, and generate a static site that is almost entirely textual. If I've done things right, it has no external dependencies and features private search (for browsers that support Javascript, the search is performed locally so search terms are never leaked anywhere, not even to me.)

It would probably be possible to dump this to Gemini some day also, since the process is literally org-mode -> ox-hugo markdown export -> hugo -> static HTML.
(Note that Markdown step!) But I haven't had the time.

Over at https://www.complete.org/old-and-small-technology/ I have some links to some interesting text-only or text-mostly sites:

- Low-Tech Magazine has a solar-powered website that, although it does contain a
few graphics, has compressed them to an extreme to conserve power.

- There's the Plain Text Project.

Also, in the past 6 months, I've gotten back into -- yes -- Usenet. https://www.complete.org/usenet/ Not the Usenet that is the realm of warez, but the plain-text Usenet, which makes up the bulk of the groups. It is an odd mix of utter wasteland, troll heaven, and fantastic relevance. My favorite group right now is alt.folklore.computers. I learned about alt.coffehouse.amethyst here on Tilde, which is also pretty nifty.

I set up a Usenet server at quux, and offer peering to people over NNTP or NNCP.

- John
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2022-03-29, John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:

On 2022-03-22, The Free Thinker <freet@aussies.space> wrote:

James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

What plain text resources do you all use? Are there good repositories
you frequent? Interesting web places with text archives? Share and be
merry.

Oh, and I forgot: the BBS scene!

Take a look at https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/ . These are sort of like tildes in concept but differ in technology. The Synchronet ones seem to have an amazing mashup of BBS and Unix technology; see http://www.synchro.net/sbbslist.html (look at that End of the Line BBS, for instance; it speaks Fidonet, NNTP, ssh, FTP, web, gopher, IMAP, and irc!)

John
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2022-03-29, John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:

On 2022-03-22, The Free Thinker <freet@aussies.space> wrote:

James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

What plain text resources do you all use? Are there good repositories
you frequent? Interesting web places with text archives? Share and be
merry.

There is a whole set of people experimenting with novel ways to use Zettelkasten-like approaches to presenting text information. For instance:

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/ - sort of a ringleader of this space.

https://notes.arne.me/about-these-notes/ - with source on Github

Whoa, that's some sexy personal wiki/knowledge-base stuff. I was just
recently lamenting that I've had 2 great data losses in life. One was a
website of film reviews and the other was my first personal knowledge-base/wiki, which had the majority of my college notes, book
notes, etc. I've been hesitant to get back into it again because that
wound is still pretty painful. Perhaps this is worth some effort when
I'm on vacation in a couple weeks.

(Along with NNTP)
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2022-03-22, The Free Thinker <freet@aussies.space> wrote:

James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

What plain text resources do you all use? Are there good repositories
you frequent? Interesting web places with text archives? Share and be
merry.

Though well known, I'll mention The Internet Wiretap because it
might have been the first Gopher site that I really discovered, or
at least that got me interested enough to install a dedicated
Gopher browser rather than just viewing it in Firefox. At that
point it was very broken, obviously in some late state of
abandonment, and now it's dead altogether, but it's archived
at quux.org:
gopher://gopher.quux.org/1/Archives/mirrors/wiretap.area.com

I found this little graveyard of classic-era Gopher holes on my
last visit: gopher://gopher.quux.org/0/Archives/mirrors/wiretap.area.com/alt.etext/151.gopher

On Usenet, rec.humor.oracle is good for a laugh.

The dict protocol and dict.org.

There must be lots more, but they usually never change so one tends
to forget about them after a while.

Oh there's wttr.in, except that because I'm using old PCs I don't
generally have UTF-8 support, so I actually use the PNG output
function to view that (when it works). The finger service at
graph.no (finger [city]@graph.no) does work, only I'm a bit too
far from a city myself.

On old PC's, if you have Linux/BSD try Unifont, you have both TTF
and X/PCF/BDF formats.

The X11 font for that is:

-misc-unifont-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso10646-1

you have to install Unifont OFC.

On text services, I'd add gopher://magical.fish with
even language translators for gopher.
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113

On 2022-04-07, anthk <anthk@texto-plano.xyz> wrote:

On 2022-03-22, The Free Thinker <freet@aussies.space> wrote:

James Tomasino <tomasino@cosmic.voyage> wrote:

What plain text resources do you all use? Are there good repositories
you frequent? Interesting web places with text archives? Share and be
merry.

Though well known, I'll mention The Internet Wiretap because it
might have been the first Gopher site that I really discovered, or
at least that got me interested enough to install a dedicated
Gopher browser rather than just viewing it in Firefox. At that
point it was very broken, obviously in some late state of
abandonment, and now it's dead altogether, but it's archived
at quux.org:
gopher://gopher.quux.org/1/Archives/mirrors/wiretap.area.com

On text services, I'd add gopher://magical.fish with
even language translators for gopher.

There is a lot of cool stuff on http://textfiles.com/

Below is a Gemini mirror:

gemini://gemini.spam.works/mirrors/textfiles/
--- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113