Last-minute entry for ROOPHLOCH 2025

This post has taken a bit longer than I had planned. Strangely it has had to be composed in three parts, in three separate countries, all outdoors.

Regular readers of my gemlog will be only too aware that most of the content is *not* about Gemini, but about UK housing policy. I really prefer not to do "meta" posts, because I consider Gemini just a regular part of the internet nowadays.

This post isn't particularly interesting: tl;dr is that for various boring reasons I don't have mobile data or WiFi on my laptop, which you might think makes participating in ROOPHLOCH *harder* but in fact it was the opposite.

First attempt

Two weeks ago I set out on a trip, beginning in Warsaw for the FUN OCaml 2025 conference. My plan was to write up my experiences at the conference from the roof garden of the hotel, and stick it on my Gemlog as my ROOPHLOCH 2025 entry. But disaster struck when the roof garden was closed. So the post was composed indoors. But it showed up an interesting angle on ROOPHLOCH, which is that I don't have mobile data, and so simply posting using my phone isn't an uncomplicated option.

The original blog post is here on my Gemlog, as well as being on my web-based blog, and it does vaguely reference the challenge of not having data on one's mobile phone ...

but the references to ROOPHLOCH (or ROOF-FAIL-LOCH, in my case) were removed.

Second attempt

I then started writing this post you're reading, on the next stop in Germany, just using the Titan upload feature of Lagrange on the phone over WiFi from outdoors. I had not signed the certificate that my phone's Lagrange instance uses (indeed I'm not sure how I would import a signed cert into Lagrange on mobile), and so the server would not accept the upload.

Third attempt

However I did manage to cut-and-paste the text from "## First attempt" above, and send it to myself via Signal. Anyone who's tried to exfiltrate data off Android to a UNIX-like device will know what a monumental pain this can be. My own hack is to set up a group on Signal, remove all the other members, and the just use it as a pastebin between mobile and desktop. Then again, cut-and-paste from Lagrange on X11 is a little bit interesting in itself!

So here I am now, back at home, outdoors on the balcony of the top-floor flat where I live. I'm not using the laptop's WiFi so much as my phone's Wifi via USB tethering, because the RF is b0rked and Lenovo Support is disputing whether to fix it. Technically I think this qualifies, as I am outside the manmade structure, and definitely not plugged into any walls!

It is now three minutes to midnight on 30 September, UK time, so I'll leave it here.