History
This is the third year
in which
Solene
has run the
Old Computer Challenge
and I've tried to participate in each of them.
Participating in these requires a little flexibility
since I work remotely for
$DAYJOB.
The low-end computer challenges posed less issue
since neither the
VPN
nor
rdesktop
required much in the way of resources.
Using the smaller screen-dimensions
on the older laptops
made it a bit more challenging,
but I made it work.
None of these challenges shifted any usage to my phone.
I prefer not to use my phone for anything beyond the barest of essentials:
phone-calls,
texting,
podcasts,
timers,
lists,
and weather.
First year (2021)
The
first year
and
third year
both focused on limited hardware,
I chose a
Gateway Solo 1200
as my primary machine for the first year.
Boasting an 800MHz Celeron processor,
a 120GB spinning-rust
HDD,
a 10mbit wired LAN connection
(it also had an internal
wi0
wireless card
and a
PCMCIA
Intel wifi option,
but both only supported
WEP
rather than
WPA2
so I stuck with the wired option),
and upgraded to its maximum of 320MB of RAM.
This machine infamously arrived on 9/11
with the UPS driver delivering it
as I watched the twin towers fall on TV.
The machine ran the latest release of OpenBSD without issue.
The limited CPU & RAM limited my choice of software notably.
Fortunately, other than web-browsing,
much of what I do happens at the command-line.
- Email
-
I had used
Claws Mail
(a
GUI
mail program)
for many years but it started using more and more system resources.
So I had aspired to switch to
mutt
or
neomutt.
The Old Computer Challenge gave me the kick I needed.
Dealing with multiple accounts
and catch-all mailboxes
posed the worst pain-points.
Otherwise, it ran fine
within the limited system resources.
And they provide a lot of power
to mow through piles of email.
- Music
-
I've long used
cmus
for playing my music collection,
and
pianobar
for streaming.
Both ran fine even on this ancient hardware.
- Calendar
-
I've moved my calendaring to
remind
and it runs fine at the
CLI.
It did have a noticeable lag on startup
but I suspect that my 3000+ reminders/events
cause that.
When I winnow it down to a much more sensible volume
of reminders, it runs in a blink.
- Coding
-
All my coding happens at the CLI
using a mix of
vi,
vim,
and
ed
for editing,
and doing version-control with
git
or
rcs
so not much changed here.
I did find notable startup lag
both in starting
vim
and executing Python code.
It made me appreciate the fast startup times
for utilities that compiled down to native code.
I also found myself using
awk
in a lot of places since it had a faster startup time than Python.
- RSS
-
I've long used
rss2email
to gather my RSS feeds
and deliver them to my inbox,
reducing the RSS-reader issue
to a mail issue.
I experienced no disruption here,
since
mutt
let me keep reading my feeds
just as I had done in Claws.
- Social media
-
I accessed Twitter with
Rainbowstream,
Mastodon with
Tootstream,
and
rtv
(now obsolete)
for Reddit.
For text posts and commenting,
I loved them all.
But for image/video posts,
they fell short.
I wish I had a quality CLI interface for Facebook
to keep in touch with friends & family
who only share things there.
- Office stuff
-
Thankfully, I don't have to deal with Office documents often.
And almost never outside of
$DAYJOB
so I could use Word or Excel remotely.
I did install Abiword for the occasional MS-Word document
and Gnumeric for the occasional spreadsheet.
Both provided reasonable fidelity and speed
while running within the confines of the limited hardware.
- Gaming
-
-
I don't game much,
so this didn't impact me much.
I think I played a couple rounds of
cribbage(6)
and
atc(6)
as a proof-of-concept,
but certainly no high-end
FPS
games here.
Web browsing hurt the most.
Firefox & Chromium?
Completely unusable without gobs of RAM.
For some basic browsing,
lynx
and
dillo
provided lightweight options,
while Epiphany clocked in at barely-usable
(but still better than Firefox & Chromium)
for sites requiring JavaScript.
Second year (2022)
The
second year
focused more on limiting network usage
(both total-time and bandwidth).
I had to segregate life here since
$DAYJOB
requires remoting into my work machine
so I didn't count that time against my allotted 1hr.
I didn't know how to count my
cron
job that downloads my podcasts nightly
since I don't have much control over
how long they run
or how much data they download.
I decided that,
since the challenge only ran for a week,
and I batch podcasts roughly every three weeks,
I could load a fresh batch to my player
before the challenge,
disable the
cron
job for the week,
and then re-enable the
cron
job after completing the challenge.
Not quite the spirit of the challenge,
but also a lot like how I would download things in high-school,
where I would walk to the local campus library to download
large files
and bring them home.
Email didn't pose a great concern,
since
OfflineIMAP
let me batch download my emails from the server,
and my local
MTA
would batch up outbound emails until I reconnected,
sending them all to my smart-host mail-server in one go.
However, the second year really cut into social-media usage.
Its model simply doesn't accommodate offline use well.
Third year (2023)
Similar to the
first year
the tools remained largely the same.
However this year I did the challenge
while on vacation.
Cheating?
Maybe.
But also enforcing since I didn't take any other laptop.
This time I took a
Dell Mini10 netbook
with me.
This hand-me-down came to me with 2GB of RAM,
but I'd made a few upgrades:
-
replaced the 120MB HDD with a 60GB
SSD
giving a bit of extra pep
-
replaced the rubbish Broadcom wireless
half-height PCI card with an Atheros chipset
-
installed OpenBSD 7.3 in place of Windows Vista
The netbook has no fan,
relying on passive cooling instead.
This meant that using
apm -L
kept the system running cool.
I could manually
apm -H
to get the full 1.x GHz
but it came with a warm price,
discouraging me from doing so.
The tiny 1024×600 screen resolution
gave even greater constraints
when remoting into
$DAYJOB
but, that helped me stay in vacation-mode
rather than try to sneak in hours.
Additionally, X seemed to think the display
offered 1024×768 resolution,
so everything rendered with a squishing/scaling
that ruined friends' pictures.
And equally bad,
the Poulsbo chipset
lacked support in X,
so it rendered
very slowly
using VESA.
But I had times where I could watch text render character-by-character,
and could type full paragraphs of text
before the first couple words appeared on the screen.
With better graphics-support,
I suspect it would have felt notably snappier.
Future challenges
After returning from that vacation,
I purchased a new laptop for travel,
and got rid of four of my old junker laptops
(my beloved rejoices at fewer laptops on my desk).
I still have the Mini10
and a
PPC
iBook G4
running OpenBSD,
so I can participate in future challenges.