Good evening gopherinos
Once again it's time for the Old Computer Challenge [1]. This
year, we're back on slow hardware, to the best of our abilities.
The aim is to use one core at the lowest possible frequency and
512MB RAM.
For this year, the trusty iBook G4 returns, partially out of
laziness, but also because I ended up shaking things up anyways so
it's like starting anew anyways. First off, setup of the machine:
using apm -L it's now running at 599MHz and unfortunately, the
suggestion to set machine mem=512M isn't an argument for the
macppc kernel. Instead, I limited the datasize-max to 512M and did
a quick yank of the 1GB stick for the factory 512MB for a new
total of 768MB. A quick peek at top shows I'm only using 114MB so
I should be good anyways.
I'm in the process of transitioning to a new mail system so right
now everything is in disarray. Eventually it will be better but
it's a bit of a mess. mutt is my friend here, and with some
fetchmail it should be fine for the next week. snownews makes its
return as my feed reader, and this year I'm playing with
newsgroups / usenet via slrn and slrnpull thanks to the helpful
entry from f6k [2].
Of course, since I can't leave well enough alone, I decided to
take on the additional challenge of running network through a
38400 bps null modem connection. This basically means I'm text
only, unless I'm willing to batch or wait.
This is no big deal for the most part. mutt is happily text,
although the rest of the world insists on gigantic messages. news
fits in with text primarily as does irc. There are a few
things graphical that I'd like to still check out, and they
work but maybe not optimally. First off, watching ADS-B is a
fun distraction using my local tar1090 offering. My text only
alternative is readsb --interactive. Not nearly as nice as the
map, but I can figure distance with RSSI and lat/lon, and
direction with heading. The other thing I'd like to see is get a
quick read on the local temperature and humidity monitors.
Originally I was hoping on setting up something like grafterm, but
I ran out of time to figure it out. So running rtl_433 will give
me realtime environment data pretty quick and will work for now.
Anyways it's getting late and I'm hoping additional entries are
less about the tech and more about workflow solutions. Also, I've
somewhat kept up on reading from last year so reading is a great
way to spend the evening. The computers are usually off during
peak energy usage hours due to electricity cost and heat, so
curling up with a book or portable is already part of the routine.
Sadly, my e-ink device is very much not OCC with it's multi-GB
memory and 8 processor cores, but since I'm just using it as an
e-reader or sometimes a notepad or sketchpad, I'll give it a pass.
Anyways, it's late. Goodnight.
Tags: #oldcomputerchallenge #limitedinternet #batch #rss #sdr #adsb
(TXT) [0] Text-only version
(DIR) [1] gopher://occ.deadnet.se/1/users
(TXT) [2] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/f6k/2022/0812.txt