Hello again gophernauts. 'sbeen a while, but I've got a topic to | |
write about so might as well get to it. | |
This entry will cover my participation in the 2022 Old Computer | |
Challenge [1], for the first 4 days. This year's challenge is to | |
limit internet usage to 60 minutes a day, and has proved to be | |
quite a challenge indeed. Without getting too detailed, I'll try | |
to cover where I started, and where I'm at. | |
The first day was on 10 July, and I was under the impression that | |
the time limit was on top of the old computer challenge itself. I | |
had selected the G4 iBook running OpenBSD 7.1 as the workhorse for | |
this endeavor, as it seemed like it would be the most likely to | |
have the tools I needed to achieve this goal. More on that in a | |
second. | |
It was pretty evident from the outset that the key for me to | |
achieve this goal would rely extensively on batch processing. Most | |
of my regular off-work functions already have been automated on | |
local machines, which further blurs the lines, but I also can't | |
just turn everything off as I do live with other people, and | |
that certainly wasn't going to fly. | |
Email is pretty straightforward. fetchmail to grab it and a | |
favorite client to view (mutt works for me). News feeds also was | |
mostly solved through Nextcloud News. I did run into a hurdle | |
getting a suitable client to run on the iBook. Newsboat can | |
connect and is a terminal program so I thought I had it figured | |
out, but once I tried to build in in ports, it errored out because | |
rust isn't available on macppc. Ok. Plan B. | |
I imported the opml file into snownews and taking Nextcloud out of | |
the picture, which seemed to be work. The big problem at | |
this point was snownews doesn't use the full text, just the | |
description, and that was going to burn up internet time doing the | |
slow part (reading). So I fetched them using wallabag-cli by | |
setting the browser in snownews, then I can read via the local | |
wallabag at my leisure. It was inefficient though, so instead I | |
echoed the wallabag command to fetch the article to a file, which | |
I can run as a batch fetch after going over the new items. | |
Similarly, the random youtube videos I wanted to watch could be | |
batched retrieved via yt-dlp. Using the lower quality options | |
saved time and space, and could be run in mpv or vlc on the iBook. | |
Finally, for some fun, I wanted to be able to batch newsgroups | |
from the tilde server. I thrashed around for a solution to that | |
one prior to the event but found that leafnode would work and I | |
can control (and time) the fetchnews operation. Unfortunately, at | |
this time, I haven't had much time to tweak it to make sure it | |
works the way I want, and I'll probably end up using UUCP or | |
maybe NNCP someday because I have other plans for that. | |
Glancing over at the #old-computer-challenge channel, I read that | |
an old computer isn't necessary, so for the following days, I | |
decided to transfer back to my primary machine for the remainder | |
of the week. It would've been fun of course, but I felt bad | |
hammering the poor box for a week. | |
I knew I was going to overrun on the 10th anyways, so while I | |
limited usage I didn't keep track of the time spent since I was | |
going to stream for an hour which would have blown the whole | |
budget and then some. | |
The 11th I went over too. I used Nextcloud News locally because | |
although I was able to use newsboat on this architecture, it would | |
segfault when trying to retrieve my feeds. Everything else was | |
basically the same. Thanks to the speed of modern computers and | |
connections, I'm going to estimate that refreshing my news feed | |
took a minute (when timed on the iBook it was 30-45 seconds). I | |
check it in the morning, at lunch, after work, and in the evening. | |
4 minutes total. Likewise, videos were blazingly fast and took | |
under a minute to download them all. For argument's sake, I'll add | |
another 4 minutes as an overestimate to be safe. A video took | |
roughly 5 seconds to download, and I don't think I ever watched | |
more than 12 in a day. Email was another 4 minutes, so we're at 12 | |
minutes total. | |
Unfortunately it all went downhill when a sprinkler controller | |
failed so I needed to order a new one. I recently had a tree fall | |
over due to heat stress, but I was going to remove that one | |
anyways because it was leaning over pretty badly even before the | |
roots gave out. Emergency tree removal, yay. And then the | |
recycling wasn't picked up so I needed to submit a pickup request | |
from the waste management company. | |
I went over on the 12th too, with the same amount of time spent | |
batched and 30 muintes of browsing. Entertainment was mainly TV | |
over the air. Then as my friend had a bunch of questions about a | |
water heater and researching those took a too much online time. | |
Today though went well. Same 12 minutes as before, and 20 minutes | |
of internet time, 10 of which were questions from someone else. | |
And another 15 minutes to submit a grocery order. So I have a | |
little more than 10 minutes to log on and submit this entry. | |
Overall this has been very difficult. I've found myself mindlessly | |
trying to thumb around the phone for social media (which I | |
disabled for now). Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who can | |
query a search engine. But the schedule to read up on news quickly | |
instead of notifying me constantly and distracting me is working | |
rather well. I've taken to reading during my off time, which is | |
quite nice. Oh, yeah, there was an additional 10 minutes on the | |
11th checking out some e-books from the library. | |
Reading about subjects such as off-grid living, biointensive | |
gardening and working on some novels queued up is a habit I | |
definitely want to continue. As is not being as beholden to the | |
notification as I was before. So even if I might not have met the | |
goal each day, I am learning some habits and techniques that I | |
hope will have a positive impact on my well being going forward. I | |
still have some ideas I want to explore, but might not be able to | |
get to them before the week's end. If I do, I'll write about it | |
soon. | |
Tags: #oldcomputerchallenge #limitedinternet #library #batch #rss | |
[0] Text-only version | |
[1] gopher:///dataswamp.org/1/~solene/article-oldcomputerchallenge-v2-rtc |