Hello again gophernauts. 'sbeen a while, but I've got a topic to write about so might as well get to it. This entry will cover my participation in the 2022 Old Computer Challenge [1], for the first 4 days. This year's challenge is to limit internet usage to 60 minutes a day, and has proved to be quite a challenge indeed. Without getting too detailed, I'll try to cover where I started, and where I'm at. The first day was on 10 July, and I was under the impression that the time limit was on top of the old computer challenge itself. I had selected the G4 iBook running OpenBSD 7.1 as the workhorse for this endeavor, as it seemed like it would be the most likely to have the tools I needed to achieve this goal. More on that in a second. It was pretty evident from the outset that the key for me to achieve this goal would rely extensively on batch processing. Most of my regular off-work functions already have been automated on local machines, which further blurs the lines, but I also can't just turn everything off as I do live with other people, and that certainly wasn't going to fly. Email is pretty straightforward. fetchmail to grab it and a favorite client to view (mutt works for me). News feeds also was mostly solved through Nextcloud News. I did run into a hurdle getting a suitable client to run on the iBook. Newsboat can connect and is a terminal program so I thought I had it figured out, but once I tried to build in in ports, it errored out because rust isn't available on macppc. Ok. Plan B. I imported the opml file into snownews and taking Nextcloud out of the picture, which seemed to be work. The big problem at this point was snownews doesn't use the full text, just the description, and that was going to burn up internet time doing the slow part (reading). So I fetched them using wallabag-cli by setting the browser in snownews, then I can read via the local wallabag at my leisure. It was inefficient though, so instead I echoed the wallabag command to fetch the article to a file, which I can run as a batch fetch after going over the new items. Similarly, the random youtube videos I wanted to watch could be batched retrieved via yt-dlp. Using the lower quality options saved time and space, and could be run in mpv or vlc on the iBook. Finally, for some fun, I wanted to be able to batch newsgroups from the tilde server. I thrashed around for a solution to that one prior to the event but found that leafnode would work and I can control (and time) the fetchnews operation. Unfortunately, at this time, I haven't had much time to tweak it to make sure it works the way I want, and I'll probably end up using UUCP or maybe NNCP someday because I have other plans for that. Glancing over at the #old-computer-challenge channel, I read that an old computer isn't necessary, so for the following days, I decided to transfer back to my primary machine for the remainder of the week. It would've been fun of course, but I felt bad hammering the poor box for a week. I knew I was going to overrun on the 10th anyways, so while I limited usage I didn't keep track of the time spent since I was going to stream for an hour which would have blown the whole budget and then some. The 11th I went over too. I used Nextcloud News locally because although I was able to use newsboat on this architecture, it would segfault when trying to retrieve my feeds. Everything else was basically the same. Thanks to the speed of modern computers and connections, I'm going to estimate that refreshing my news feed took a minute (when timed on the iBook it was 30-45 seconds). I check it in the morning, at lunch, after work, and in the evening. 4 minutes total. Likewise, videos were blazingly fast and took under a minute to download them all. For argument's sake, I'll add another 4 minutes as an overestimate to be safe. A video took roughly 5 seconds to download, and I don't think I ever watched more than 12 in a day. Email was another 4 minutes, so we're at 12 minutes total. Unfortunately it all went downhill when a sprinkler controller failed so I needed to order a new one. I recently had a tree fall over due to heat stress, but I was going to remove that one anyways because it was leaning over pretty badly even before the roots gave out. Emergency tree removal, yay. And then the recycling wasn't picked up so I needed to submit a pickup request from the waste management company. I went over on the 12th too, with the same amount of time spent batched and 30 muintes of browsing. Entertainment was mainly TV over the air. Then as my friend had a bunch of questions about a water heater and researching those took a too much online time. Today though went well. Same 12 minutes as before, and 20 minutes of internet time, 10 of which were questions from someone else. And another 15 minutes to submit a grocery order. So I have a little more than 10 minutes to log on and submit this entry. Overall this has been very difficult. I've found myself mindlessly trying to thumb around the phone for social media (which I disabled for now). Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who can query a search engine. But the schedule to read up on news quickly instead of notifying me constantly and distracting me is working rather well. I've taken to reading during my off time, which is quite nice. Oh, yeah, there was an additional 10 minutes on the 11th checking out some e-books from the library. Reading about subjects such as off-grid living, biointensive gardening and working on some novels queued up is a habit I definitely want to continue. As is not being as beholden to the notification as I was before. So even if I might not have met the goal each day, I am learning some habits and techniques that I hope will have a positive impact on my well being going forward. I still have some ideas I want to explore, but might not be able to get to them before the week's end. If I do, I'll write about it soon.