One week with FreeBSD 13 on an Acer Aspire One ZG5 - Part Three
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Last edited: $Date: 2021/07/12 19:45:26 $
Another day in the The Old Computer Challenge.
Firefox requires way too much resources for this old laptop
which also means that I have to find another way to go through
the Mastodon postings.
Yesterday evening I first tried bitlbee.
In order to use bitlbee with Mastodon, you have to get some
tokens into the bitlbee config. The way to this is to open
your Mastodon account from within bitlbee, which will open
another window in irssi, where a very long generated URL is
shown. You have to copy this URL, paste in a browser, confirm
that you want bitlbee to have access to your Mastodon account,
wait for the reply, which is a long token that is shown in a
smaller window. You have than to copy this token-that-is-
longer-than-the-window back to the bitlbee window in irssi.
And you only have a few seconds for this, because after this
the bitlbee connection times out and you have to start all
over again.
After numerous tries I gave up, the time window is too small
to get this right.
Next I installed 'toot', a text mode application to interact
with Mastodon, written in Python.
After installing Python 3.8 and pip I could install toot. To
get toot authenticate on Mastodon you have to do the same
token-dance, but this time there seems to be no time-out.
So, in a ever so relaxed tempo I was able to get toot
cooperating with the Mastodon instance.
Going through your time line
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With `toot tui` an curses-like interface opens, which splits
the screen vertically. Left is a list of toots, which are
shown in the format:
- date and time
- sender identity
- boosts (if any) and some other icon like thingy
Right is the contents of the toot, in text format of course.
With some keys you can (B) Boost the toot, (F) Favorite it,
(V) View or (R) Reply on it, and some other options. This
works remarkably well.
The main difference with the view in a browser like Firefox or
a desktop application like Whalebird, is that there are of
course no images.
This results in a completely different experience. Like any
new and different experience you have to give it some time, so
I postpone judgment and just use it [TM].
