Title: The Old Computer Challenge: 10 days later, what changed? | |
Author: Solène | |
Date: 26 July 2021 | |
Tags: openbsd life oldcomputerchallenge | |
Description: | |
# Introduction | |
Ten days ago I finished the Old Computer Challenge I started, it gather | |
a dozen of people over the days and we had a great week of fun | |
restricting ourselves with a 1 CPU / 512 MB old computer and try to | |
manage our daily tasks using it. | |
In my last article about it, I noticed many things about my computer | |
use and reported them. Did it change my habits? | |
# How it changed me | |
Because I noticed using an old computer improved my life because I was | |
using it less made me realize it was all about self discipline. | |
## Checking news once a day is enough | |
I have accounts on some specialized news website (bike, video games) | |
and I used to check them every too often when I was clueless about what | |
to do. I'm trying to reduce the number of time I look for news there, | |
if I miss a news I can still read it the next day. I'm also more | |
looking into RSS feed when available so I can just stop visiting the | |
website entirely. | |
## Forums with low traffic | |
Same as for news, I only look a few time in the day the forums I | |
participate to check for replies or new message, instead of every 10 | |
minutes. | |
## Shutdown instead of suspend | |
I started to shutdown my computer at evening after my news routine | |
check. If nothing had to be done on the computer, I find it better to | |
shutdown it so I'm not tempting to reuse it. I was using | |
suspend/resume before and it was too easy to just resume the computer | |
to look for a new IRC message. I realized IRC messages can wait. | |
## Read NOW | |
A biggest change on the old computer was that when browsing the | |
internet and blogs, I was actually reading the content instead of | |
bookmarking it and never come back or reading the text very fast by | |
looking for some key word to have some vague idea of the text. | |
On my laptop, when reading content in Firefox, I find it very hard to | |
focus on text, maybe because of the font, the size, the spacing, the | |
screen contrast, I don't know. Using the Reader mode in Firefox | |
drastically helps me focusing on the text. When land on a page with | |
some interesting text, I switch to reader me and read it. HUGE WIN for | |
me here. | |
I really don't know why I find text easier to read in w3m, I should try | |
it on my computer but it's quite a pain to reach a page on some | |
websites, maybe I should try to open w3m to read content I want after I | |
find it using Firefox. | |
## Slow is slow | |
Sometimes I found my OpenBSD computer to be slow, using a very old | |
computer helped me put it into perspective. Using my time more | |
efficiently with less task switching doesn't require as much as | |
performance as one would think. | |
## Driving development ideas | |
I recently wrote the software "potcasse" to manage podcasts | |
distribution, I came to it thinking I want to record my podcasts and | |
publish them from the old computer, I needed a simple and fast method | |
to use it on that old system. | |
# Conclusion | |
The challenge was not always easy but it has bring a lot of fun for a | |
week and in the end, it changed the way I use computer now. No regret! |