Wanting to dig into ActivityPub / ActivityStreams for a while I figured I'd read the specs and dive in. Having read plenty of RFC specs before, I figured this wouldn't take too long. Boy was I wrong.
This article is currently a WIP so it may get updated multiple times as I learn more and read deeper into the various specs/RFCs and their sub-dependencies.
I had a bunch of items on the todo list for the day and wanted to arrange them in order, but I needed to certain items before others:
cat todo.txt 10:00 resale resale 10:30 sunblock take_to_camp pack_snack take_to_camp pack_water take_to_camp pack_towel take_to_camp take_to_camp 8:30 8:30 soccer_camp soccer_camp 8:45 soccer_camp paperwork 8:45 home home 9:00 paperwork home home cut_hair home clean_bathroom home shower cut_hair shower cut_hair pick_up shower pick_up clean_bathroom pick_up cut_hair clean_bathroom clean_bathroom 10:00 10:45 pick_up 8:30 8:45 8:45 9:00 9:00 10:00 10:00 10:30 10:30 10:45 pick_up library
Now it just became a matter of passing these requirements to
tsort
tsort todo.txt pack_towel pack_water pack_snack sunblock take_to_camp 8:30 soccer_camp paperwork 8:45 home cut_hair 9:00 shower clean_bathroom 10:00 resale 10:30 10:45 pick_up libraryto sift them into the required order of my todo list for the day.
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.
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.
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.
cmus
for playing my music collection,
and
pianobar
for streaming.
Both ran fine even on this ancient hardware.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
I put this here mostly because I forget how to do it and have to make multiple starts to get it right.
ledger -f ledger.txt print \ -e 2022-1-1 > 2021.txt ledger -f ledger.txt equity -e 2022-1-1 > tempfile.txt echo >> tempfile.txt ledger -f ledger.txt print \ -b 2022-1-1 >> tempfile.txt mv tempfile.txt ledger.txt
CONGRATULATIONS! Your OpenBSD install has been successfully completed! When you login to your new system the first time, please read your mail using the 'mail' command.
Oh, no!
You have a fresh install
and the only way to read
your welcome message from Theo
requires using
mail.
chroot SFTP accounts
For
$DAYJOB
I had to create user accounts for customers
and give them access to
SFTP
files to/from secured areas of our server.
We wanted to use
chroot
functionality to ensure
that no customer could see other customers' data,
and prevent them from poking around
potentially sensitive areas of the server.
After a bit of trial-and-error,
I've listed the lessons-learned here
in a cook-book fashion
so that in case I ever have to do it again,
I have the steps documented.
This post was spurred to exist thanks to this Reddit post asking about creating an encrypted FTP server on OpenBSD so my reply there became the basis for this post.
Sometimes you want to turn some text
into "sarcastic Spongebob" text
so this little fragment of
awk
will make that transformation for you:
#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN { srand() }
{
n = split($0, a, //)
for (i=1; i<=n; i++) {
c=a[i]
printf("%c", rand() < 0.5 ? toupper(c) : tolower(c))
}
print ""
}
I wanted to do some full-justification of text.
So a little
awk
later,
I could set the desired width
and pipe to justify it.
#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN {c = "COLUMNS" in ENVIRON ? ENVIRON["COLUMNS"] : 80}
{
if (NF > 1) {
s = $0
wc = split(s, a)
gsub(FS, "", s)
totalfill = c - length(s)
fill = totalfill / (wc - 1)
intfill = int(fill)
errdelta = fill - intfill
err = 0.5
printf("%s", a[1])
for (i=2; i<=length(a); i++) {
width = intfill
err += errdelta
if (err >= 1) {
++width
err -= 1
}
printf("%*s%s", width, " ", a[i])
}
printf("\n")
} else print
}
Most Linux, BSD, MacOS machines
come with
/usr/share/dict/words
so a little
awk,
grep,
and other shell utilities
can find some interesting words.
Our daughter wanted to
"freeze dance"
(music plays,
stopping at random intervals,
at which the dancing kids freeze in place
until the music resumes).
So what is a geek dad to do?
Load up a playlist of kids' music in
cmus,
start playing the music,
and let the shell randomly freeze and resume the music
while true ; do sleep $(( $RANDOM % 15 + 5)) ; cmus-remote -u ; sleep 4; cmus-remote -u ; done
This does as
sleep
for some random interval between
5
and
20
seconds, then does as
sleep
for
4
seconds before unpausing the music.
You could do something similar with
mpd/mpc
if you prefer them.