Elfeed on an old laptop
                     =======================

  Last edited: $Date: 2021/07/11 17:11:46 $

                             Opening
                             -------

  I  am  taking  part  in  the  The  Old Computer Challenge (see
  https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-07-old-computer-
  challenge.html).

  The  point  of the challenge is to replace your daily computer
  by a very old computer.

  I got my old Acer Aspire One ZG5 from  the  attic,  which  now
  runs FreeBSD 13 from a bootable USB stick.

  Below some observations from my experiences on day three.

                              Elfeed
                              ------

  One  of  the  things  I  do daily on my private laptop is read
  through my RSS feeds.  I used to do  this  with  Newsboat  and
  w3m,  but a couple of months ago I started learning Emacs so I
  moved to Elfeed.

  I use Elfeed together with Eww, a webbrowser that is  part  of
  vanilla Emacs.

  In my configuration, Eww uses the default Emacs font, uses the
  default colors and doesn't display images.  This  way,  it  is
  really fast.

  On  my  Acer  Aspire, with its rootfs on an USB-stick, I first
  installed Emacs-nox.  But when I  saw  the  image  quality  at
  1024x600,  I  decided to try the 'normal' Emacs version.  This
  is the graphical version.

  So, I deciced to also on this machine give Elfeed a try.   The
  performance  is not bad at all. The load stays around the 0.09
  ~ 0.14 and memory usage is around 250 MB (the machine has  512
  Mb).

  Although  I  have  not  timed  it,  I have the impression that
  loading  new  feeds  take  more  time.   Also,  this  requires
  resources,  so  I  start  the loading of new feeds and put the
  laptop away for a few minutes.

  Eww has some nice features.

  ### Readabillty-mode:

  Just press 'R' and the browser switches to  readability  mode,
  which  means  it  starts right with the actual content you are
  looking for, without any navigation items and stuff like that.

  ### URL copy to clipboard:

  Just press 'w' and the URL is copied to the clipboard. If  the
  point  (Emacs-speak  for  the cursor) is at a link, the URL of
  the link gets copied, if not, the URL of the current  page  is
  copied.

  Copy  to  the  clipboard  meands copy to  both the killring of
  Emacs as to the X clipboard. This integration is very useful.

  So, I am very happy with this setup.

  The Acer Aspire is very light (around 1 kg, but  I  also  have
  removed  the  battery,  because the laptop only functions with
  the power adapter connected), which makes this a very nice way
  to  read  your  news  feeds  on  your  easy chair.  And Elfeed
  performs better than I had expected :)

  See gopher://box.matto.nl/9/elfeed-aspire.png