# Old Computer Challenge July 2023

## Day 1

Day one was a bit of a write off due to me not wanting to start
investing time in setting up the software on the machine as I thought
I would have to start from scratch once the CF card arrived. I had
some basic settings that I'd worked out during my preparation[1] for
the challenge that would give me a good starting point.

Toward the end of day one the CF card arrived but sadly the computer
didn't like it and would hang after the point of identifying it as an
ATA device. To cut a long story short I ended up back on the SCSI
subsystem and with an external USB sound card, so at least I had
audio for the week.


## Day 2

Tuesday was mostly filled with configuring software. I had some
annoying display issues with urxvt that I coudln't seem to resolve
and also the plumber[2], which I like so much, wouldn't open any of
my links. I figured this was down to the environment not being
correct. I was a bit disappoited by the end of the day and felt I
hadn't made much progress. 

Highlight of the day was probably discovering I could take
screenshots without installing additional software, after installing
mpv anyway...

    ffmpeg -y -f x11grab -s 1920x1200 -i $DISPLAY -vframes 1 -vf
    scale=1280:-1 screenshot.png


## Day 3

Today was a better day. I finally resolved the display issues with
urxvt and the problems with the plumber. Both issues were down to the
environment not being set correctly. The soultion in the end was
adding '. ~/.kshrc' to .xsession so that the environment variables
etc were properly set before the window manager was started. I think
the display issues were down to no defined locale settings.

.kshrc:

    export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
    export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
    export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
    export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
    HISTFILE=$HOME/.ksh_history
    set -o vi

    alias S='function ddg { lynx "https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite?q=$*";
    }; ddg'
    alias W='function wik { gopher -p lookup -T 7 -i "$*"
    gopherpedia.com; }; wik'

    export EDITOR=vim


.xsession:

    . ~/.kshrc

    # plumber programs
    export XTERM='urxvtc'
    export PLUMB_IMAGE='feh -F --auto-rotate'
    export PLUMB_MEDIA='mpv'
    export PLUMB_GOPHER='gopher'
    export PLUMB_TXTGOPHER='gopher'
    export PLUMB_PDF='xpdf'
    export PLUMB_FILEMANAGER=''
    export PLUMB_WEB='lynx'
    export PLUMB_TXTWEB='lynx'

    xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources
    xsetroot -solid black
    setxkbmap -option caps:escape
    urxvtd -q -f -o 
    ratpoison


I managed to get a bit of work done today too. Several updates to
my phlog, including:

    * Addition of index file for /phlog directory to list all posts
    * Removal of '-' and '.md' from post titles
    * Update to 'grouch occ prep'[1] post to cover final hardware
      changes
    * This post

In addition to this I made some code changes to the plumbing program
and subimitted a patch for those changes. That is the reason for the
PLUMB_\* environment variables above. I pulled several of the hard
coded program names out of the individual opener files and made
environment variables for them to be defined.

Outstanding issues:

    * Problem with mpv/ratpoison stretching the display of small
      format videos
    * Seemingly no hw acceleration in mpv with this nvidia fx5200
    
Both of the above issues make watching video practically impossible.


## Day 4

I spent most of the morning wrestling with mpv and eventually came up
with some settings that worked acceptably with ratpoison; to stop it
from stretching the videos and to completely black out the rest of
the window.

.confif/mpv/mpv.conf:

    --video-unscaled
    --no-keepaspect-window
    --ytdl-format="best*[width=640]"

The last line is just to tell yt-dlp which video format to fetch. 640
wide is about all this thing can manage without hardware acceleration
which I have, so far, been unable fix.

Having checked the Xorg.0.log I can see that the card is using the
'nv' driver for my NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200. But there is a notice that
explains my lack of hardware acceleration: AIGLX: Screen 0 is not
DRI2 capable

Today I considered installing my Usenet and RSS clients, but I
resisted the impulse to do it. There is a certain tranquillity that
exists as a side effect of my current hardware limitations.

I spent some time reading other peoples experiences on gopher,
listened to a podcast and got my K&R C book out of my book case with
the aim of beginning at the beginning, for about the third time, and
progressing my way through the exercises in the book. 

hello.c:

    #include <stdio.h>

    int main()
    {
        printf("Hello, world!\n");
    }


## Day 5

Well, I started out with the intention of continuing with my C
exercises but somehow that was put asside quite quickly. 

Quarry[3] became the focus of the day as I was very aware that I'd
neglected it for some time. I hadn't re-indexed any of the sites I
had already in there for months and I had never gone back and removed
dead links. That was something I had intended to fix some time ago
but hadn't got around to. 

I managed to crash my webserver while running the re-indexing script,
that caused me a bit of a panic as I had to login to the vm host for
the first time and use vmctrl. It was all a bit daunting as I
couldn't email for help as my email is hosted on the server doh! 

This is the first day that I've just used the computer without making
any tweaks to configuration or adding any software.


## Day 6 and 7

Not much to report really. I spent day 6 continuing my work on quarry
and most of day 7 I was out. When I did return home I continued my
work on quarry and read about the experiences of other people taking
the challenge, on gopher of course!


## Conclusion

I didn't get off to the best start in spite of putting about a week
into preparing the system I intended to use for the challenge. 

I was surprised that OpenBSD performs as well as it does on this
system. I fully expected NetBSD to be my only option but OpenBSD was,
for me anyway, a much more polished experience.

Unfortunately I didn't manage to get hardware acceleration working or
I may well have been able to prove youtube to be watchable at low
resolutions.

It was nice to have a fresh setup for the first time in several years
to experiment with. I had used ratpoison for my last challenge
earlier in the year but hadn't put much effort into configuring it
last time. In the end I found myself using tmux as my window manager
and ratpoison windows as virtual desktops; one for local and one for
my vps.

The temptation to install tin (for usenet) and sfeed (for rss/atom
feeds) was resisted so I was better able to stay focused on doing
something useful. The older system has just enough latency to make
you consider more consciously what you are about to do. 

When all is said and done, I have quite enjoyed the challenge on this
occasion. I have proved that I can be productive using this 27 year
old computer and I don't feel that I have been lacking for anything.

    
[1](gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/grouch-occ-prep.md)
[2](gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/Smart-terminal-not-client.md)
[3](gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/Quarry.md)