I've been busy for the last several weeks (with buying a house, looking for work, publishing magazines, and working slowly on fiction) so I haven't had much time to devote to my DOS computer.
But it's still coming. I'm about half way to where I want to be, and I use it regularly.
For those that are new/don't remember what I'm talking about, I'll sum up:
- New Computer
- Boots directly in to a DOS emulator with the bare minimum of services running behind it to give me networking and removable drives and *nothing else*
- Carefully controlled list of TSRs and drivers running
- Launches in to a custom menu program I wrote
- only hase software for my most common computer tasks, and software I can use to write other software
- If I need to do a new thing, I build the tools to do it.
You can read more about the genesis of this ridiculous idea here: http://ajroach42.com/a-modern-office-with-vintage-hardware/
I am taking a couple of copouts.
The SSH client for DOS doesn't support modern encryption, and I need to SSH regularly as part of my job.
My workaround for these is to run a telnet server in the host OS that only listens over localhost, and to telnet in to my local machine, and then SSH from the local machine to the remote machine.
It's a kludge, but it's one I understand and can troubleshoot, which is the goal.
I may do something similar for the web browser, because arachne and minuette don't support HTTPS.
Dillo does, but it is very resource hungry, so I may emulate a *very* powerful DOS machine instead.
By that, I mean I may give it a whole 4MB of RAM, and a 486 processor.
Dillo is still pretty useless when accessing web apps, but it will render most web pages well enough.
And I don't want web apps! Even for Mastodon access, I want my work machine to require a dedicated application. In this case, probably a DOS batch file wrapped around some telnet commands to my host OS, which will have one of the command line Mastodon apps installed. (I dunno, I haven't built this yet.)
maple classic™ 
@ajroach42 hey i think building a python app that listens on telnet and works as a mastodon bridge would be pretty
would python work like that for you? do you want me to work on that
@squirrel Python would work, and this would be pretty.
And pretty cool.
@squirrel I don't like asking people to do work for me, but if this is a project that interests you, I would get use out of it.
Ideally, I could bind it to a port other than the standard telnet port, so that I can have other telnet stuff up too.
But yeah, it'd be neat, right?
@ajroach42 would be pretty easy to make*
i had a brainfart