OFFLFIRSOCH 2026 round up

Greetings, fans of offline computing who are temporarily slumming it online in order to read this! The first quarter of the year has already passed us by which means the window of eligibility for OFFLFIRSOCH 2026 had closed. Today I have published the official archival page of all the entries I'm aware of. If you participated but forget to inform me, or I somehow missed your email, please reach out to let me know!

Gemini archive of OFFLFIRSOCH 2026 posts

Gopher archive of OFFLFIRSOCH 2026 posts

Despite my concerns earlier in the month when I thought "I probably should have heard from someone by now, right?" but hadn't, participation this year actually turned out to come from a solid nine people. Not exactly a stampede, but more than double the four we had last year, so I'm happy! Those nine folks included quite a few newcomers, but there are also still two people have participated in every OFFLFIRSOCH to date, and one of them isn't even me!

Two of this year's entries are random outcome generators, one a dice roller and the other a password generator. These are first class examples of exactly the kind of modern madness that OFFLFIRSOCH is supposed to draw attention to and foster resistance against. Countless people would absolutely use websites to complete these tasks. Using a website to generate your passwords is madness from a security point of view, because you have no way to verify that the person running the site isn't just selling huge files of all the generated passwords to criminals as a kind of rainbow table. Using a website to roll dice is just silly because it's such a computationally trivial undertaking.

Three of the entries can be classed as conversion tools, which are something of a classic category for the challenge. There are tools for converting between different ways of measuring time, different ways of measuring location, or different ways of measuring rotations. The time conversion tool even features optional integration with the `day` tool I wrote for last year's OFFLFIRSOCH! It's extremely neat to see any degree of interoperability between OFFLFIRSOCH entries.

Two tools basically hinge on the idea that sometimes you need access to information which changes very slowly or not at all and takes up very little space, and therefore it makes sense to keep that data on disk for occasional use (this was the philosophy behind my `city` tool in 2024). One of those tools is to lookup French postcodes, which presumably can and do change but very rarely, and other is to look up the interpretations of Tarot cards, which I assume are essentially fixed?

The remaining tools don't really fit neatly into any category (which is in no way any kind of a problem!), being a spending tracker and an emergency-backup-to-removable-media-tool. The latter is self-confessed "memeware", but hey, online backups *are* the default assumption these days, so I don't see why this shouldn't count.

Thank you as always to everybody who took the time to participate! I hope to hack alongside some of you again next year.