Old Computer Challenge 3 (2023)

This year Iā€™m following Solenes shenanigans and friends at https://occ.deadnet.se with the idea of using low specs computer or setup for a whole week of July 10th to 16th.

Here I will try to log that week to the best of my abilities.

Operating system

Debian 12 ā€˜Bookwormā€™ was released not long ago and I decided to try it out with that challenge - constrained environment should expose some cons of the OS if there are any. Also Iā€™m curious overall because all of my other machines run OpenBSD, Fedora or Manjaro (steamdeck <3).

Hardware

As for the hardware to use during that time - it is a worn out, but combat-tested Thinkpad T60; I think it is one of the last thinkpads with an IBM branding, so thatā€™s fairly cool too I think. It was supercharged to the best of my abilities with 4 gigs of RAM (only 3 can be used at most, chipset limitation) and 240Gb SATA SSD.

I really wanted to upgrade the CPU to Core2Duo and have a x86_64 machine with that, but alas my revision motherboard doesnā€™t support that processor. So T2500 it is.

Software

Truth be told most of my personal everyday tasks do not look overly demanding regardless of challenges: for email I use mutt, for chatting in IRC - irssi, and my main editor for everything is literally nano (my descend into that madness is a whole another story). So it is safe to say I donā€™t have to sacrifice much for the majority of everyday tasks, notable exceptions being watching anime/movies (mpv but I need x265 or x264 10bit and up to 4K) and qbittorrent.

For the window manager and desktop environment Iā€™ve been exploring something new (semi-default debian lxde) and came back to my 10+ years old roots with WindowMaker. But for the limited resources and general productivity on my side I just canā€™t escape using dwm - was very happy with it on OpenBSD and it helps me to focus on whatā€™s important without overly fiddling with settings because there are none :D

I still have to figure out which audio player to use (deadbeef is not in i386 bookworm repos for some reason), but just to be safe movies-wise I downloaded all the ā€œComputer Chroniclesā€ from archive.org and it fits nicely into T60 4x3 display.

Even though my first choice was ā€œThe Legend of Galactic Heroesā€ T2500 can only handle 10bit video at its full power (without disabling multi-core and setting it to lowest frequency).

My homemade projects are usually made with relatively modest software and libraries: gcc and gdb for c99, golang, sdl2 and stuff like that. The main thing I will honestly miss during that week is the gorgeous Godot - Iā€™m trying to dive deeper into hobby gamemaking after years of doing that professionally.

Since my pastime is mostly that and videogames (on consoles; I should probably make a proper post about that since some of them are mighty cool) I think I shouldnā€™t feel any major urge to fall back to my main rig.

The Journey

Iā€™ll try to do a small writeups about quirks and hiccups and happy moments I encounter right here every day for the next week. Should be fun and maybe even insightful!

My good friends at http://occ.deadnet.se have a list of blogs of people doing this challenge so if anyone read this far - be sure to check them out! Lots of awesome skilled people there.

Day 1

Feels like this year quite a lot of people started this challenge and popped in the IRC channel - #oldcomputerchallenge at Libera (irc.libera.chat), really exciting and nice to see what people use and experience with their setups and workflows.

First thing I had to approach is the missing music player - Iā€™ve used mpd+ncmpc a while back but decided to try something new this time and folks at the irc channel suggested mocp. So far it fits the bill of a lightweight terminal player quite well.

I still have to use a work laptop for my $dayjob since it mostly involves bloatware like zoom, slack, web browser with jira/miro and google suite. Programming tasks often include Unity and JetBrains Rider (canā€™t escape that) but at least whatever backend stuff I make is made with off-the-shelf terminal emulator, nano and golang.

I had a plan to continue developing a tool that wraps an animated webp into spritesheets (the core is there but I still havenā€™t decided what GUI toolkit to use) but procrastination is not an easy foe to fight off even with neat challenges like OCC :) Hopefully this week will be somewhat productive in that regard.

Day 2-3

Unfortunately this week brought me not just this joy of a retrocomputing immersion but a paintrain of a work restructurization at $dayjob, and that sucked all my ā€˜action pointsā€™ so I only was able to use the T60 for an hour or so before falling dead asleep.

But to my surprise the journey already was quite fruitful - mindless scrolling of tech news/articles got replaced with a brief browsing of my fediverse feed and insightful interactions on IRC. And most importantly I essentially was able to route my scarce ā€˜brain aliveā€™ time to fixing some code that Iā€™ve spent weeks just staring onto previously :D

So I finally managed to complete to a point my tiny util that Iā€™ve mentioned on day 1 - it might not be overly complicated but I had a great deal of fun making the CLI version of it. The full proper version of it that Iā€™ve initially planned and slowly working towards should have a proper cross-platform GUI.

Day 4

Nothing interesting happens today sadly, I could only muster up strength to make a small writeup about previous days. The laptop works properly without interruptions - Iā€™ve replaced its battery to a supposedly new but it turns off abruptly at about 50% charge so I guess it is not as good as advertised. It still works as an impromptu UPS so Iā€™m not complaining.

Good people at the #oldcomputerchallenge IRC channel were talking about using WiFi with problematic hardware and/or outdated operating systems and I realized that I donā€™t actually rely on wireless tech on any of the computers I do stuff on - even this ā€˜06 laptop has a 1Gbit ethernet connection after all (which I use instead of innate wifi). I even got couple of decent USB Ethernet adapters that help me every so often.

Another curious thing that Iā€™ve pointed out for myself is that dwm feels more comfortable than ever. My main rig has KDE5 as DE/WM but for now I canā€™t think of a reason why I needed such a big window manager in a first place.

Day 7 and conclusions

It was a hectic week in more than one way. The challenge was the most consistent and satisfying thing to do during that time. There is a lot of uncertainties in my life but as many other techies software and hardware are the smallest ones despite being major parts overall.

During that week I did most of the things I do at my free time with a computer - irc, reading, writing bits of code and whatnot, web-browsing. Apart from web-browsing being a pain in the arse and not having access to the magic of the Godot I had quite a normal time.

Pure positive things that Iā€™ll bring along:

Tiny bit of sad thoughts:

General thoughts that I find curious:

Overall it was a ton of fun, helped to clear up my head and to figure out some priorities even. I donā€™t know what will next year bring it but sure as heck it will be cool as cucumbers(c). Maybe Iā€™ll do 9front run as some smart lads did this time, or even pick something more obscure just for the sake of it.

Old doesnā€™t mean unusable. I wish we shook off any negative connotation of that word regarding hardware and software.

If a thing was made a while ago and still works as intended imho it is one heck of an incredible thing.

2023-07-16 23:00 fin.