Last day of the Old Computer Challenge 2024
===========================================
Today is the last day of the 2024 edition of the Old Computer
Challenge.
This year I used an Acer Aspire 522 POVE6 for the challenge. This is a
laptop from about 2011. It has an AMD C-60 CPU, 760 Mb RAM, a 10.1
inch display with a resolution of 1280x720. It comes with an old
fashioned spinning disk.
To make it a bit more interesting, I decided to go without X, so no
X11, or Xorg. No graphics, only text-based terminals.
The goal was to get some distance, focus more on the smol web and
leave the enshittification at bay.
Display
-------
With the kind help of prahou, I installed the right display driver,
which resulted in a display with a good readable font, and 45 lines of
159 chars.
Without X, I could run a few terminals simultaneously, and select a
terminal with the Alt-Ctrl-F1, Alt-Ctrl-F2, and so on.
A screen width of 159 chars is enough to run two panels in Tmux
side-by-side, or two windows side-by-side in Emacs. The effect is
the same, it is just the terminology that is different.
Performance
-----------
Previous, this laptop was used with Linux Mint on it, with
a graphical desktop. It was so slow that it was barely usable.
Also, in the background ran a program switching the background
image every so many seconds. I didn't investigate this, because
I wanted to do the challenge with OpenBSD.
I had to change my plan, because the Wifi chip of the laptop is not
supported by OpenBSD, Fortunately, FreeBSD comes out of the box with a
driver for it, so I installed FreeBSD 14.1 on the laptop.
The FreeBSD installer only installs a basic system, without Xorg and
co, so it was close to the setup I wanted. I only added a few
applications, like Tmux, Emacs, RCS and some other stuff.
Working on the terminal, the lack of performance doesn't show most of
the time and the laptop turned out to be perfectly workable.
Emacs
-----
My idea was to do as much as possible with Emacs.
* IRC: rcirc
* Jabber: Jabber mode
* Email: Gnus
* RSS-feeds:
- Gnus, with the great service of gwene.org
- Elfeed to follow some other feeds
* Following mailing lists: Gnus, with the help of gmane.io
* Gopher: Elpher, a wonderful Gopher and Gemini client for Emacs
* Gemini: Elpher
* Developing in Common Lisp: CCL with Emacs SLIME
I hadn't used Elfeed for quite some time, so I added it to this setup,
to get some feel of the difference with using gwene.org.
During the first day of the challenge, I discovered that mastodon mode
won't work on Emacs in a text only environment. The second day I
installed `toot', a TUI mastodon client build with Python.
Experiences
-----------
The lack of video playback didn't hurt me much, I seldom watch videos.
It is sad to see that the art of writing good old fashioned HowTo's is
almost disappeared, and people tend to make videos in stead.
Not being able to see images was a bit more a pain, certainly when
people on IRC shared links to screenshots and other interesting stuff.
Using Emacs on the console (terminal) is a bit PITA, because several
key bindings collide with the terminal. It requires searching for
alternative key bindings, testing and installing those, and add them
to your muscle memory. This is an investment that only is sane when
one intends to use Emacs on the console for a long time.
Mastodon
--------
Mastodon without images is something else, this is quite a showstopper
for me. I haven't done any statistics, counting or other kind of
research, but it seems that 75% of the toots come with an image or
video. Going through the timeline without being able to view those, is
not a great experience. I couldn't get myself engaged this way.
Developing
----------
I installed CCL, Clozure Common Lisp, (which is not Clojure, that is a
different beast) and ran my static site builder with it, just to see
how it would perform.
In a FreeBSD jail, running on my little jail-server, it takes 12
seconds to build the complete web site. On this laptop it takes 103
seconds.
This lack of performance becomes noticeable when running a application
with a real payload. Developing code is not a problem, though. I have
started a small project, using CCL, Quicklisp and the `hunchentoot'
Common Lisp web server, and writing and testing functions went fine.
Laptop
------
I enjoyed working on the Acer Aspire, although it is not a fast
machine. On the console, it is reponsive enough.
What I like the most in this laptop is the form factor. It is a
bit bigger compared to my old Acer Aspire ZG5, and also somewhat
heavier, but it is still a nice small laptop.
The keyboard is not as good as the keyboard on the Thinkpad X201, but
this a very high standard. Most laptop keyboards don't come close to
the X201 keyboard.
The key travel on the Acer is good enough, Touch typing is fine,
and I can get quite some speed on it, only the layout is a bit
cramped and needs a bit to get used to.
Perhaps I can replace the spinning disk with a cheap SSD. It doesn't
require that much storage space, even 100 Gb is of course way too
much. The biggest problem I guess, apart from the processor, is the
small amount of RAM. I haven't investigated yet, what the maximum
amount of RAM for this laptop is. Something to dive into after the
challenge.
Final verdict
-------------
The lack of a browser with capabilities to process JavaScript,
and display images and videos, added a layer of tranquility.
Although in everyday life I try to keep away from enshittificated
sources, and try to keep away from sensational news and stuff like
that, there was still a difference.
This was a bit surprising, I have been using text mode browsers like
eww, lynx and links for many years. But, for example, in eww, it is
easy to change the view of the current page by hitting '&' (shift-7 on
my keyboard). This command lets eww open the current page in Firefox.
My conclusion is, that I still let myself to be lured too much into
opening pages in Firefox, and have to look into that.
Reading the phlogs, gemtexts and blogs was an important part of the
OCC experience, which I enjoy a lot. This year I was somewhat less
active on IRC as I would have liked. Still, I enjoyed to be part of it
and enjoyed the general mood.
A second conclusion is, that in the months before the challenge, I
have focused too much on only Gopher and must visit the Gemini sphere
more. I already added Antenna to my jump list. I have to search for
more aggregators and add these to my jump list too.
Finally, it was not enough of a culture shock, working on the console.
For at least two decades I have been trying to use the mouse as little
as possible, and adjusted my tools and workflow accordingly. Regarding
from this view, I have to come up with something completely different
for future challenges.
I enjoyed being part of the challenge, being part of the community and
thankful for everybody involved.
