Wrap up after Solene's Challenge
================================
Last edited: $Date: 2021/07/16 09:51:30 $
Wrap up after one week using FreeBSD 13 on an old Acer Aspire
One ZG5.
The world wide web
------------------
Solene's Challenge helped me to realize what has become of our
web browser.
My experience as a user of the world wide web goes a long way.
I remember people complaining massively when the first
"commercial" websites were erected. These were company
websites.
The mailing lists where full of it. People had realized that
the web was a very democratic way to share both information as
opinions. Websites where mostly setup by knowledge
institutions like universities, and personal homepages of the
common people. And now these companies started to have an
appearance on "our" internet ...
I started with Mosaic, than moved the Netscape. After this
came Mozilla and Firefox.
Also, I haved used lynx, elinks and w3m a lot. Lynx used to be
part of the standard installation of Linux. And I still do use
these text mode browsers a lot, mainly because of speed,
readability, less distractions and less annoying ads.
Browsers like Firefox, Chromium, and Chrome have become
immense. From this list, on my Acer Aspire One ZG5 I only
installed Firefox. It turned out to be absolutely not usable.
The 512 Mb RAM on this laptop is not enough.
These browsers are slowly evolving into a platform to deliver
virtual machines on our laptops beyond our control.
Digital restriction management will become more and more part
of our lives, and the web browser will be one way to enforce
that to us.
There is not much we can do to stop this. The parties that
govern the w3c standards are there to make the ultra-rich even
richer, and don't act in the interest of the common people.
So, we have to look at what we is under our control. And that
is only our behavior,
I already only follow RSS-feeds of websites that I can open in
w3m or eww.
I still use lynx.
And now, that as a result of Solene's Challenge, I have come
aware, I will start making less use of Firefox, Chromium, and
so on.
From the challenge I learned that `links -g` still can do a
great job.
Fediverse
---------
I have a Mastodon account and have started playing with a
personal Pleroma server. Through the challenge I came to
realize that these environments rely on modern web
technologies and cannot be used with a text browser without
JavaScript support.
From the Libera.chat channel #old-computer-challenge I learned
about `toot`, a text mode Python Mastodon- and Pleroma-client.
This is a great way to go through your timeline. It is fast.
Of course, this doesn't show any images, but with the can also
be done with `links -g` (through the V (view) option).
Disk-less laptop
----------------
After the initial install of FreeBSD 13 on the old 8 GB SSD,
the SSD completely crashed and the laptop couldn't even boot
from USB anymore, so I had to disconnect that from the
motherboard.
So I did the challenge week with a disk-less laptop, booting
FreeBSD 13 from an USB stick.
This was not a problem at all, it runs all the needed
applications.
Ratpoison window manager
------------------------
Because of the small 8.9 inch screen I choose for the
Ratpoison window manager.
At the time this Aces was my daily driver I also used
Ratpoison on it. In fact, I have used Ratpoison for more than
a decade and only switched to i3 about two years ago.
It turned out my muscle memory was still there.
Emacs
-----
I only started using Emacs seriously a few months ago. One of
the ways to get more acquainted to it, I moved from Newsboat
to Elfeed for reading RSS feeds.
It turned out that Elfeed on Emacs works really fine on this
machine. When updating the feed, htop shows full use of memory
and quite some use of CPU power.
After the feeds are updated, and going through the feeds,
reading them in Elfeed and opening links in eww, I don't see
much performance difference compared to my 'normal' $HOME
laptop.
Maybe this is because I have configured eww to use the
standard font and not to show images, both on my `'normal'
$HOME laptop as on this Acer.
Not much else
--------------
I hardly watch movies, or go to YouTube and so on, only
occasionally to watch some episode from Reiner Koenig or so.
I also don't use Netflix.
So these things I didn't miss.
The normal stuff I do is ssh to my central shell-server (a
FreeBSD jail running tmux with irssi, mcabber and mutt), so
this is no difference for any other laptop (which is the
reason I choose for such a setup many years ago).
8.9 inch laptop
---------------
This laptop has been on the attic, out of my site, for some
time.
But now it is back, I still enjoy the form factor.
It is small, light weight, and has a decent keyboard (which is
a bit small, but you get used to that pretty quick).
Too bad, small 'netbooks' like this are not sold any more.
Enjoyed the Challenge
---------------------
The initial part, with the SSD going crazy, and having to open
up the laptop to disconnect it, was quite adventurous.
The challenge also attracted some nice people to the
Libera.chat channel.
All in all I enjoyed the challenge, and don't want to end this
wrap up without a very big "thank you" to Solene!
