Welcome to peter garner's web site and gopherhole

petergarner.net

Picture of Rex the wire fox terrier contemplating a beer

About Us

Welcome to my web site! I'm Peter Garner, a retired software guy but still a full-time Geek. The site's hosted on a cheap VPS located somewhere in the UK and incorporates a very active Gopher server (see below). I also write a blog. This is primarily a technical site, but I do have other interests, such as beer, coffee, home-baked bread, walking/hiking and Paganism (Pantheism). I live in Calderdale, West Yorkshire with a hyperactive rescue Wire-haired Fox Terrier. Enjoy the site, and remember folks, this site is 100% human-created and maintained, with no AI slop to be found.

What I'm Up To, Right Now

We have a Now Page!

Blog Content

Our famed collection of technical and other ramblings is available in our blog. As is the norm here, there's an eclectic collection of articles that will inspire / amaze / offend / amuse you. Written by a human, AI-free.

Blog

RSS feed

A Couple of Miscellaneous Projects

... From the earlier days of computing! It was more of a case of using random bits of hardware for unusual purposes. All good fun!

Visit ..

The Projects

The Green Man, Paths and Beliefs

Quite some time ago, when I was neither young nor old, I experienced a life-changing event. Like many people who have been in that situation, I imagine, I decided to take a mental step back and re-evaluate my life. I figured that it was as good a time as any, and if it prepared me for the Road Ahead, then so much the better. I made a list of things to look at and maybe change if I needed to, and one of those things was what I actually believed in. Rather than fill this page, I've decided to write a blog entry, which you can read here.

Gopherspace

Why Gopher?

There are many reasons to use gopher: here's a summary:

Simplicity & Speed – Gopher’s plain-text, menu-driven structure makes it extremely lightweight. It loads fast even on low-bandwidth connections or old hardware.

Focus & Minimalism – No ads, no JavaScript, no tracking. It’s purely about reading and sharing text. Great for distraction-free browsing or retro computing enthusiasts.

Archival & Preservation – Gopher hosts valuable archives of early internet content and public-domain texts, many of which are hard to find.

Educational Value – It’s an excellent way to learn about early internet design, protocols, and networking fundamentals.

Nostalgia & Aesthetics – Some people simply enjoy its 1990s-era feel and the small, tight-knit Gopher community.

Can help to avoid difficult scenarios – If you're an Internet user in a region with Internet communications problems which can include intermittent connections and suppression of the usual ports, gopher represents a viable alternative due to its lean footprint and ability to "fly under the radar" of casual interception. This enables users with old, lower-powered hardware to retrieve valuable online resources more easily.

Client Apps For All Platforms – There's no shortage of client apps available to install. Click here for a list.

Latest gopher Uploads - Today

-- Nothing uploaded today -- 2026-03-29
--
-- Refresh page if date shown is wrong

Latest gopher Uploads - Yesterday

Type/
D/L

Description

File Size

JSON

Full JSON dump of each MAC prefix and going back to around 1998 (updated daily)

17Mb

CSV

Simplified CSV that maps each MAC prefix to the earliest registration record (updated daily)

1.97Mb

MMDB

An MMDB-compatible IP Geolocation database with ASN, country, and continent data (updated daily)

17Mb

TXT

Open Proxy List: HTTP/S (updated daily)

3.17kb

TXT

Open Proxy List: SOCKS4 (updated daily)

9.99kb

TXT

Open Proxy List: SOCKS5 (updated daily)

1.29kb

CSV

Daily Sea Ice Extent Data Files (Antarctic)

1.78Mb

CSV

Daily Sea Ice Extent Data Files (Arctic)

1.84Mb

XLSX

Sea Ice: Minimum and maximum extent values and dates for each month and year, with rankings

85kb

XLSX

Sea Ice: All daily (single day and five-day trailing average) extent values in one file

713kb

Last updated: Sun Mar 29 08:00:02 2026

Top 10 Gopher Download Categories: Mar 2026

Gopher Directory

Downloads

Political

1,642

Plant_Dataset

1,220

The_TPN_Papers

1,196

Prepping/Preparedness

1,045

Cybertech

1,040

Magazine-B3TA

932

Prepping/Food_Preps

818

Stuff

472

Mirror/WICCA

385

Herbal_Reference

284

Total Downloads in Top 10

9034

Last updated: Sun Mar 29 08:00:02 2026

Stats

As at Sun Mar 29 08:00:01 2026:
16,126 files, 18G bytes
in our gopherspace

Access Our Gopherhole Via This Site

Due to the changing needs of various visitors to the site, I've made the decision to open up the gopherhole content via this site. You'll now be able to access 99% of our 18Gb of content from the comfort of your browser!

The link is: https://petergarner.net/gopher

Monitoring Our Carbon Footprint

The whole point of this project is to run a useful, responsive web server that uses as few resources as possible. I'm attempting a design which balances form and function, and the carbon footprint of loading/viewing this, and other pages is low. This is normally just 0.01g of CO₂/view and you can verify this by visiting Website Carbon and The Green Web Foundation.

Lately, I'm taking more of an interest (and therefore an active approach) to where Skircoat's electric power comes from, and a few days of research has resulted in an up-to-date breakdown of the power sources that are used to generate the region's power. There's an update every 30 minutes via the API provided by the ESO/National Grid.

Suffice to say that the continued heavy reliance on fossil fuels is extremely worrying. Yes, 'biomass' as used in Yorkshire's Drax is still a fossil fuel, and the situation is made worse by the fact that it's "mainly imported from the Southern USA (by sea!) but also from Europe, Canada and Southern America". according to Drax. I smell greenwashing, but read this and decide for yourself. Oh, and there's a recent article in the Independent (alt link) that lays bare more of the unpleasant facts...

We run on Green Energy!

This website runs on green hosting - verified by thegreenwebfoundation.org

Skircoat Green Electricity Power Sources

See below for statistics, updated every 30 minutes.

Fuel sources for HX3, supplied by NG-ESO Region NPG Yorkshire

OK?	Fuel Type	Percentage Used
N	Biomass	18.3 %
?	Imports	0.5 %
N	Gas	2.2 %
Y	Nuclear	15.2 %
Y	Solar	1.9 %
Y	Wind	62 %

Fuel sources not used (0%) are excluded: Coal, Other, Hydro

Sample period 2026-03-29 08:00 UTC to 2026-03-29 08:30 UTC

Usage LOW, CO2 forecast 33g CO2/kW-h

Carbon-zero Fuel Percentage 79.1% Fossil Fuel Percentage 20.5%

[Link to file]

Download historical data from 2021-11-29 18:00 UTC to 2026-03-29 08:30 UTC.

[Link to file]

Download last 8 hours data (X axis=types) to 2026-03-29 08:30 UTC.

[Link to file]

Download last 8 hours data (Y axis=types) to 2026-03-29 08:30 UTC.

Data sourced from https://carbonintensity.org.uk E&OE

Local Weather Forecast, updated hourly

Weather for Halifax, GB

               overcast clouds
      .--.     4 (0) °C       
   .-(    ).   ↗ 29 km/h      
  (___.__)__)                 
               0.0 mm/h       

Updated  Sun, 29 Mar 2026 08:00:01 +0000

External Links

Host it yourself: it's the future! Visit Homebrew Server Club.
This site design was inspired by brutalist-web.design.
We really like Low Tech Magazine, and especially this solar-powered version.
We highly recommend the character-mode browser Links2 for this site.
The cheapskatesguide.org is a great resource and a model of clear site design. W00t!
This site is a member of the Bradley Taunt 1Mb club, for sites with home pages smaller than 1Mb.
We're helping to rewild Scotland - please visit our grove.
We're members of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust.
Visit The Pagan Federation - discover new pathways...
The Upper Calder Valley Plain Speaker - local news for local people.
Halifax People - Historic Halifax; Skircoat Green.
Mastodon verification
Carol Denney - "Music, Politics, and the Metal Reed", or, a snarkier Joni Mitchell ;)
A list of indie blogs - keeping blogging alive
Derek Siver's Now Page directory - what's everyone doing right now?

This site's Page load stats tested at pingdom.com.

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Privacy Policy

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System Info

System Statistics as at Sun Mar 29 08:00:01 2026
Uptime: up 3 weeks, 4 days, 51 minutes since 2026-03-04 07:08:59
Disk usage: 29%
Network: TX packets 270584331 bytes 385126502570 (358.6 GiB) RX packets 211555501 bytes 146751104941 (136.6 GiB)

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

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