The rest of the week went off without much incident, although I
did try some additional things. toot still wasn't working for me.
After this closes, I will spend some time determining if it's the
particular build, memory or bandwidth constraints that was causing
it. I remembered after the previous entry that I was going to try
newsraft instead of snownews, since newsboat needs rust to
function. Similar issues as with toot.
Since the challenge is in some ways similar to last year, the
workflow was pretty comfortable, save for fancy webpages that
netsurf or lynx can't deal with. The additional limitation of
bandwidth is what caused me to shy away from the internet for
general web entertainment. No javascript and modern features is
one thing, but time to establish a TLS session and load a typical
webpage on 38 kilobaud is an exercise in patience, one that made
me seek other forms of entertainment once I had my fill of irc,
netnews and email.
I ended up finishing a library book, On Tyranny by Snyder, and
started a new library book Burning Chrome by Gibson. By the
weekend I was looking at my thinkpad for a refresh. I did indulge
in modern computers and network to download and write the images
to USB. It turned out that yes, it was a partitioning issue that I
was having starting with OpenBSD 7.2 upgrade, and that a mild
repartitioning seems to have solved that problem. Gentoo got wiped
out as well but I needed to refresh that anyways. I did use the
slow computer to set up the desktop for distcc duties so I didn't
completely abandon OCC.
Anyways, it was a fun challenge. I'm quite happy to see all the
activity on IRC and it's been a nice place to hang out during the
challenge. Some of the lessons I learned, especially with the slow
link, should be useful for this year's ROOPHLOCH.
