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2024-07-21
Previously:
Old Computer Challenge 2024 Goals
This is the third time I've participated in the Old Computer Challenge and this year my constraint was trying to do most of my work in Alpine Linux in a virtualized container on iOS on my iPad. My other goals: mostly use the command line, keep working on my forth-based language. Stretch goals: make a simple zine, and make zine-making software.
I did largely stick to these things for the week. I was camping the first few days of the challenge at a music festival, then headed for a few days vacation at a friend's house in the mountains. I did bring the ipad to read on and browse the web so that really provided the constraint that led me to decide to do the challenge for the week with the command line in the ipad.
Alpine linux is fine. I don't love it as much as Void linux, but it's simple enough. Where I got frustrated was in the limited repository. I should possibly have switched to testing/edge repositories. I did attempt to upgrade alpine from 3.14 to a more recent version of Alpine. I backed up first, and it's good that I did since attempts at upgrading bricked the system and I had to reinstall. I did this by backing up my system to the iOS files app. Then deleting and reinstalling iSH, then choosing filesystems > and the saved tar file of my previous Alpine system to rebuild from. It was so fast, maybe 20 seconds to restore!
So that meant I was stuck compiling programs myself that weren't in the Alpine 3.14 repo. I tried things like downloading gcc and such, and alternate package managers like pip3 but found them wanting. I did try to download Go and compile amfora for example, but it was taking so long I gave up. In the end, I deleted those and relied on what was in the old repos. So that meant I found I was happiest running links browser in the command line, and offpunk for Gemini since it only required python3 for the minimum dependencies.
In any case, Lua was an easy download. I symlinked lua5.3 to just lua and was able to run my own 3th (a forth-based programming language that runs in Lua). So I was spending part of each day hacking on my language in the command line. It was a slow process and I found that I enjoyed working in my paper notebook, figuring out potential solutions to a coding problem, then entering it in vim in the ipad and saving and running and then debugging on paper again. It's not that different (in some ways) from how I help students debug on the whiteboard during class.
I worked on my programming language, built bindings that output code in Love2d graphics/game library (in Lua), and added new "words" for drawing a few graphics primitives.
I ended up making a minimal "zine" with some text and graphics. I did the text as comments since I didn't fully implement the print command to write arbitrary string input yet. Currently the print command pulls a random word from the dictionary and writes it to the screen at the specified x y location.
From my text written as comments and with screen drawing working I screenshotted and compiled some of these into a pdf. You can check it out below.
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