Title: The Old Computer Challenge: day 1 | |
Author: Solène | |
Date: 10 July 2021 | |
Tags: openbsd life oldcomputerchallenge | |
Description: | |
Report of my first day of the old computer challenge | |
# My setup | |
I'm using an Apple iBook G4 running the operating system development | |
version of OpenBSD macppc. Its specs are: 1 CPU G4 1.3GHz, 512 MB of | |
memory and an old IDE HDD 40 GB. The screen is a 4/3 ratio with a | |
1024x768 resolution. The touchpad has only one tap button doing left | |
click, the touchpad doesn't support multiple fingers gestures (can't | |
scroll, can't click). The battery is still holding a 1h40 capacity | |
which is very surprising. | |
About the software, I was using the ratpoison window manager but I got | |
issue with two GUI applications so I moved to cwm but I have other | |
issues with cwm now. I may switch to window maker maybe or return to | |
ratpoison which worked very well except for 2 programs, and switch to | |
cwm when I need them... I use xterm as my terminal emulator because | |
"it works" and it doesn't draw much memory, usually I'm using Sakura | |
but with 32 MB of memory for each instance vs 4 MB for xterm it's | |
important to save memory now. I usually run only one xterm with a tmux | |
inside. | |
Same for the shell, I've been using fish since the beginning of 2021 | |
but each instance of fish draws 9 MB which is quite a lot because this | |
mean every time I split my tmux and this spawns a new shell then I have | |
an extra 9MB used. ksh draws only 1MB per instance which is 9x less | |
than fish, however for some operations I still switch to fish manually | |
because it's a lot more comfortable for many operations due to its | |
lovely completion. | |
# Tasks | |
Tasks on the day and how I complete them. | |
## Searching on the internet | |
My favorite browser on such old system is w3m with image support in the | |
terminal, it's super fast and the render is very good. I use | |
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ as my search engine. | |
The only false issue with w3m is that the key bindings are absolutely | |
not straightforward but you only need to know a few of them to use it | |
and they are all listed in the help. | |
## Using mastodon | |
I spend a lot of time on Mastodon to communicate with people, I usually | |
use my web browser to access mastodon but I can't here because | |
javascript capable web browser takes all the memory and often crash so | |
I can only use them as a last joker. I'm using the terminal user | |
interface tootstream but it has some limitations and my high traffic | |
account doesn't match well with it. I'm setting up brutaldon which is | |
a local program that gives access to mastodon through an old style | |
website, I already wrote about it on my blog if you want more | |
information. | |
## Listening to music | |
Most of my files are FLAC encoded and are extremely big, although the | |
computer can decode them right but this uses most of the CPU. As | |
OpenBSD doesn't support mounting samba shares and that my music is on | |
my NAS (in addition to locally on my usual computer), I will have to | |
copy the files locally before playing them. | |
One solution is to use musikcube on my NAS and my laptop with the | |
server/client setup which will make my nas transcoding the music I want | |
to play on the laptop on the fly. Unfortunately there is no package | |
for musikcube yet and I started compiling it on my old laptop and I | |
suppose it will take a few hours to complete. | |
## Reading emails | |
My favorite email client at the moment is claws-mail and fortunately it | |
runs perfectly fine on this old computer, although the lack of right | |
click is sometimes a problem but a clever workaround is to run "xdotool | |
click 3" to tell X to do a right click where the cursor is, it's not | |
ideal but I rarely need it so it's ok. The small screen is not ideal | |
to deal with huge piles of mails but it works so far. | |
## IRC | |
My IRC setup is to have a tmux with as many catgirl (irc client) | |
instances as network I'm connected too, and this is running on a remote | |
server so I just connect there with ssh and attach to the local tmux. | |
No problem here. | |
## Writing my blog | |
The process is exactly the same as usual. I open a terminal to start | |
my favorite text editor, I create the file and write in it, then I run | |
aspell to check for typos, then I run "make" to make my blog generator | |
creates the html/gopher/gemini versions and dispatch them on the | |
various server where they belong to. | |
# How I feel | |
It's not that easy! My reliance on web services is hurting here, I | |
found a website providing weather forecast working in w3m. | |
I easily focus on a task because switching to something else is painful | |
(screen redrawing takes some times, HDD is noisy), I found a blog from | |
a reader linking to other blogs, I enjoyed reading them all while I'm | |
pretty sure I would usually just make a bookmark in firefox and switch | |
to a 10-tabs opening to see what's new on some websites. |