💾 Archived View for socks-in.space › gemlog › 2023 › 20230716.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 15:49:35. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-07-22)
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I failed (kind of)
Friday went mostly like the other days except that i started to feel slightly under the weather (i blame the train journey, not sure if it is from being in a cramped train with half the country of Switzerland, or entering an well air conditioned train while being very sweaty, or maybe my body just sucks). In the evening i decided i had had enough of the eeepc, it's tiny keyboard, and tiny screen, and it's concerning buzzing noises (not the fan) while under continuous load, and it's headphone jack that would ruin my headphones' plug if i gave it the chance. So i got out the L390, and tried to make that conform to the challenge unsuccessfully, and went to sleep.
what the headphone jack does :/ (dw it's just a plug that i use to silence stuff)
I decided that i couldn't be bothered to reconfigure the L390 so i just mostly used it as if it were limited (though i got weak and used Firefox a bit). I set up newsraft on it to replace newsboat, which i had used before that, on both my modern and old machines. Transcribing the feeds file was the first time i used visual/rectangular select in (neo)vim. Newsraft is hella fast, quite nice to use, and does everything i used newsboat for (if i finally set up the keybindings), it is written in pure C99, considering the fact that i could get a compiler that supports C17, even on DOS, I'm not sure who that matters to, but hey, I'm not complaining, otherwise I'm sure the fans of operating systems from the 2000s will be mad at me.
More of the same really, except that I'm writing this
If you're an antisocial nerd like me, this challenge is not too hard, unless you give in to the temptation of modern websites, i had used most of the tools before for extended amounts of time (newsboat+mpv for yt, vi(m) for all kinds of text, neomutt (didn't end up using that during the week)). Modern Browsers are nice because they allow us to visit auction sites and buy more old shit. If we ignore web browsers, the biggest challenge with old hardware is that, contrary to popular belief. It does not actually last forever, but accumulates issues over time. Setting up i3/sway + feed reader + mpv + links/elinks/lynx/dillo + mail, and even passwords, with "pass" is not appreciably harder on a pentium 3, a Celeron m, or a modern(ish) i5, sure, you need to play a bit with yt-dlp format selection on older hardware, and can make it work better with some mpv config, but at the end of the day it can all work. If the conditions are similar next year i might get a olimex A10-OLinuXino-LIME, just to have a known good machine with a power draw that is somewhat representative of what it does as far as computing goes.
Finish setting up newsraft
Play with the old machines without "having" to use them full time
Close IRC more often
Get some strongly limiting hardware, and use it for some task
Chill
