OFFLFIRSOCH 2025 round up
Well, March is over, and the second installment of OFFLFIRSOCH is over with it! I managed to put up the official archive pages of all entries on Gemini and Gopher last night, but the round up post unfortunately had to wait until today.
Gemini archive of OFFLFIRSOCH 2025 posts
Gopher archive of OFFLFIRSOCH 2025 posts
A grand total of four people participated this year, which is undeniably a substantial decrease from the 13 we got last year. More would have been nice, but I'm not too bothered by this. After all, the second installment of ROOPHLOCH received about half as many entires as the inaugural event, but since that time participation has grown to new highs. Maybe OFFLFIRSOCH will follow a similar trajectory. Perhaps it won't, because it is after all the more difficult of the two events. We'll just have to wait and see.
Anyway, since there were only four entries total, here is a complete run down!
Degrowther, who submitted a slightly late entry to OFFLFIRSOCH 2024, wrote a little Python tool to simultaneously display the current time on both coasts of the US according to their computer clock and at the same time the current status of their NTP daemon, to reassure them that those times are reasonably accurate. This last bit replaces their habit of double-checking the time against services like time.gov. Some might consider this an edge case in terms of eligibility, NTP being, after all, the *network* time protocol, but I'm of the simple opinion that if a tool facilitates replacing a habitual web query with a query to the status of a locally running daemon, that's absolutely in the spirit of OFFLFIRSOCH.
Relative newcomer to the Zaibatsu and first time OFFLFIRSOCH participant r0ss wrote a simple text adventure engine, with a specific and rather unconventional use in mind, namely the development of "mind palaces" to help people memorise things. R0ss' specific motivation was to help with learning Spanish, but mind palace techniques can be applied to all sorts of things. I quite like that this entry is about using a computer to help commit things to your "actual" memory, rather than using the internet as a substitute for it!
Second-time participant Matograine released "wet", a command-lie client for the gwit protocol. Gwit is exploring the idea I sketched in a gemlog/phlog post a few years back about using git as a "low budget P2P content distribution system". Once fetched, gwit sites can be viewed offline, and the wet client also supports importing sites from local storage, so it works in "sneakernet" environments just as well as it does with intermittent access to the internet.
And I wrote a little tool for calculating the times of sunrises, sunsets, and related events. You probably already read about it on Monday!
Moving into the territory of "OFFLFIRSOCH adjacent" posts, adiabatic wrote a post with some thoughts on the challenge and suggestions for things in the spirit of OFFLFIRSOCH which people who didn't have the time or skills to bang out a program in a week could try instead. They sent me this right at the start of the month and I should have shared it widely here earlier than this, but didn't, which is a shame and is on me. But you can and should still read it now!
Adiabatic's post "OFFLFIRSOCH write small"
Thanks to that post I learned about Numbat, a fantastic piece of software which describes itself as a "high precision scientific calculator with full support for physical units". If you're the kind of person who uses Google queries for unit conversions but who isn't convinced by the standard unix `unit` tool as a replacement because of it's clunkier interface, try Numbat!
Going forward I fully support the idea of OFFLFIRSOCH also being a time that people can make posts raising awareness of existing offline first software and/or their experience of trying to adopt it to replace online habits!
Thank you to all of this year's participants!
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