To respond to just some of your points:

useful to someone who lives in US west

IME, so long as they invoice in my currency and are responsive during my hours of business it doesn't matter too much where they are so you might consider casting the net a little wider. Exceptions are for jurisdictional matters (GDPR, etc ad nauseam)

allows me to have a *nix system with sudo privileges

Any hoster offering a VM/VPS/Cloud Server these days will give you this. Expect to pay the equivalent of 5 to 10 GBP per month for an entry-level VM.

will finally let me install Mojolicious

As above.

doesn't assume that I'm some huge business: I'm not

This one can cut both ways. I am generally happiest dealing with smaller providers (simpler APIs, panels, etc. and more often a more personal approach) so I know what you mean. Just make sure you have an exit strategy - anyone can go bust with almost no warning, even the big beasts.

That bit about being one of the few places without smoke has certainly changed, and I am stuck inside.

Stay safe, brother.

Get a VPS. I second perlfan's recommendation of DigitalOcean. 20i are also great, but UK based so if you need to contact support staff, might not be ideal because you're in America. (Time zones.)

Get a VPS. I second perlfan's recommendation of DigitalOcean.

Thanks all for replies. I went with DigitalOcean. In figuring out what to do, I realized I had to square up with ionos and then set the nameservers differently. It will take another 24 hours at least for my payment to be processed.

$ whois merrillpjensen.com >1.txt
$ cat 1.txt
   Domain Name: MERRILLPJENSEN.COM
   Registry Domain ID: 1628124514_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
   Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.ionos.com
   Registrar URL: http://www.ionos.com
   Updated Date: 2020-08-02T00:22:44Z
   Creation Date: 2010-12-01T02:08:14Z
   Registry Expiry Date: 2020-12-01T02:08:14Z
   Registrar: 1&1 IONOS SE
   Registrar IANA ID: 83
   Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@ionos.com
   Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.6105601459
   Domain Status: ok https://icann.org/epp#ok
   Name Server: NS1035.UI-DNS.BIZ
   Name Server: NS1035.UI-DNS.COM
   Name Server: NS1035.UI-DNS.DE
   Name Server: NS1035.UI-DNS.ORG
   DNSSEC: unsigned
   URL of the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://www.icann
+.org/wicf/
>>> Last update of whois database: 2020-09-16T00:18:23Z <<<
[download]

I didn't know that domain names were case insensitive. Tja. I used this personal site for personal business. I wonder what domain names are out there now, and for how much.

Do the companies who issue domain names compete?

Yep, domain names are case-insensitive, but in most cases shown in lower-case.

It leads to the odd situation where in an email address, the part after the @ is case-insensitive, but the part before the @ is theoretically case-sensitive. (Depends on how the server treats it. Most treat it case-insensitively.)

toby döt ink

Do the companies who issue domain names compete?

Does the pope wear a funny hat?

---

🦛

Rightpondia here, so I can't advise on specifics. But see who sponsors Perl conferences, mongers, workshops etc. near you. If they appear possible, email them with your requirements & ask them to quote. Telling them that their sponsorship is what attracted you will help their marketing.

Regards,

John Davies

I haven't looked into it in any depth yet, but I know that AWS has an "always free" tier.

Hi Aldebaran!

Hello bliako,

So good to "see" friendly faces when I'm otherwise pretty cooped up. My dog might be getting sick of me.

I don't mean to roll in here and be all OT; it's a bit of a crash landing for me sometimes, before we can set up and start writing perl again. Right about now I miss usenet. It was as my subscription to news.indiviual.net went dead despite my bill being paid that I started back into the monastery and switched from bash to perl scripting. I'm glad for that, but I wish there were a room around here where we talk about all the gadgets where this stuff is supposed to work. I did notice how much of the perl conference was about issues that border on perl as opposed to on perl itself. An exception to that was Sawyer's talk.

As he was talking, I thought, "I want to get hooked up to an audio-visual capability like his." I frankly didn't realize how big a hole I was in. This hole exists in proportion to the size of the number of people who rely on me and their frailties as well. For the first time ever, my family might not be getting together for Thanksgiving. I want to have the capability to do a zoom thanksgiving for those who stay put.

Has anyone here tried to use perl to script with the target being an ipad?

Same question with Fire HD 8 tablet from amazon?

There were several people who talked about applications for phones in the conference. Which phones work better? The answer is not a google pixel. I can't even answer my damn phone with that reliably. I was able to run perl scripts on termux, but the gui just isn't good enough.

In particular, it's not big enough, and that's why I'm trying to crowdsource tablets.

Also, what is the difference between a phone, a tablet and a laptop besides the topology of the plastic that houses it?

It rained last night. There's so much relief in the air. Clouds have returned instead of the creosote, CO, SO2 umbrella. I think we're gonna make it.

I wish there were a room around here where we talk about all the gadgets where this stuff is supposed to work.

Cool Uses for Perl might be the place for that - see stevieb and jmlynesjr's Pi-related posts. There's plenty of such discussion which goes on in the chatterbox too, albeit in an ephemeral way. Corion and marto have been discussing various hardware-related projects in there recently.

Also, what is the difference between a phone, a tablet and a laptop besides the topology of the plastic that houses it?

I don't make much of a distinction between phones and tablets - certainly not these days now that phones are too big to fit in a pocket and some are now fold-outs to be double-width. OTOH, a laptop has a physical keyboard and pointer device, a hinged lid with a separate non-touch screen and lots of physical ports on the outside of the case. It is almost always fan-cooled. It is basically a portable desktop with integrated keyboard, pointer and monitor.

It rained last night. There's so much relief in the air. Clouds have returned instead of the creosote, CO, SO2 umbrella. I think we're gonna make it.

Very good to hear. With luck the worst has passed.

---

🦛

Rather than think about running perl Nativity on iPhone, tablets etc, couldn't you just write a web based app, accessible from anything with a browser? Various front end frameworks exist, Bootstrap is quite popular.

I second marto's idea of a web-app. And you can even do it without any paid or free hosting if it's for only a few hours per month. As you can run the web-app on your laptop for those special family meetings. You can even play scrabble in there, chat, video-conference, deposit photos!

You need a web server running on the laptop and with Linux (at least) that's easy. It will be accessible over the internet by using the (dynamic!) IP the ISP has given you for the day - just text it to your family. It's quite straightforward in Linux to open some ports in the firewall and run a web-server like nginx and serve your app. The disadvantage is that you are exposing your laptop to the world, so perhaps use a use-less, data-less laptop for this purpose. What I forgot to mention on your initial enquiry is that I am using Contabo and I am very happy about them and the cheap price/cpu power except that I get hit by quite a few robots scanning ports and trying to ssh in. But I guess that's anywhere. I remember I got a very good deal on a so-called black friday. So perhaps it's worth waiting.

Down south we hit 46 celsius a few days ago! Thankfully no major fires this year! bw, bliako

Has anyone here tried to use perl to script with the target being an ipad?

Same question with Fire HD 8 tablet from amazon?

"A mase of twisty little languages, all different" describes PCs much better than smartphones. Walled gardens making deployment difficult (e.g. Apple charging about 1/12th of what I earn as a Ph.D. student for the right to run own code on hardware bought from them¹), sandboxes breaking assumptions hidden in the language (there is a filesystem, but not for you. Only vendor's spyware has access to most of it), new APIs and paradigms for user interaction that nobody bothered to wrap for your $language_of_choice mean that, typically, you get one or two languages that work best on a given platform (Java & Kotlin for Android, Swift & Objective-C for iOS), a few more that you may be able to get running at the cost of reduced user experience (ever tried to run a command-line application on a 5" smartphone with no keyboard?) and the rest of them forever inaccessible to you despite the platform being very much Turing-complete and being able to run the code. In theory.

¹ With some very interesting clauses about what gets into the App Store. Last time I checked, all scripting languages were forbidden, but they probably relaxed that requirement since (otherwise there wouldn't be a JavaScript-capable browser).