One week with FreeBSD 13 on an Acer Aspire One ZG5 - Part Three
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  Last edited: $Date: 2021/07/12 19:45:26 $

  Another day in the The Old Computer Challenge.

  Firefox  requires  way  too much resources for this old laptop
  which also means that I have to find another way to go through
  the Mastodon postings.

  Yesterday evening I first tried bitlbee.

  In  order  to  use bitlbee with Mastodon, you have to get some
  tokens into the bitlbee config. The way to  this  is  to  open
  your  Mastodon  account  from  within bitlbee, which will open
  another window in irssi, where a very long  generated  URL  is
  shown.  You have to copy this URL, paste in a browser, confirm
  that you want bitlbee to have access to your Mastodon account,
  wait  for  the reply, which is a long token that is shown in a
  smaller window. You have  than  to  copy  this  token-that-is-
  longer-than-the-window back to the bitlbee window in irssi.

  And  you  only have a few seconds for this, because after this
  the bitlbee connection times out and you  have  to  start  all
  over again.

  After  numerous  tries I gave up, the time window is too small
  to get this right.

  Next I installed 'toot', a text mode application  to  interact
  with Mastodon, written in Python.

  After  installing Python 3.8 and pip I could install toot.  To
  get toot authenticate on Mastodon you  have  to  do  the  same
  token-dance, but this time there seems to be no time-out.

  So,  in  a  ever  so  relaxed  tempo  I  was  able to get toot
  cooperating with the Mastodon instance.

                   Going through your time line
                   ----------------------------

  With `toot tui` an curses-like interface opens,  which  splits
  the  screen  vertically.  Left  is  a list of toots, which are
  shown in the format:

  - date and time
  - sender identity
  - boosts (if any) and some other icon like thingy

  Right is the contents of the toot, in text format of course.

  With some keys you can (B) Boost the toot,  (F)  Favorite  it,
  (V)  View  or  (R)  Reply on it, and some other options.  This
  works remarkably well.

  The main difference with the view in a browser like Firefox or
  a  desktop  application  like  Whalebird, is that there are of
  course no images.

  This results in a completely different experience.   Like  any
  new and different experience you have to give it some time, so
  I postpone judgment and just use it [TM].

  Have fun !