The Old Computer Challenge: day 6

Author: Solène

Date: 15 July 2021

Tags: openbsd life oldcomputerchallenge

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This is the 6th day of the challenge! Time went quite fast.

Mood

I got quite bored two days ago because it was very frustrating to not be able to do everything I want. I wanted to contribute to OpenBSD but the computer is way to slow to do anything useful beyond editing files.

Although, it got better yesterday, 5th day of the challenge, when I decided to move away from claws-mail and switch to neomutt for my emails. I updated claws-mail to version 4.0.0 freshly released and starting updating the OpenBSD package, but claws-mail switched to gtk3 and it became too slow for the computer.

I started using a mouse on the laptop and it made some tasks more enjoyable although I don't need it too much because most of my programs are in a console but every time I need the cursor it's more pleasant to use a mouse support 3 clicks + wheel.

Software

The computer is the sum of its software. Here is a list of the software I'm using right now:

fvwm2: window manager, doesn't bug with full screen programs and is light enough and I like it.

neomutt: mail reader, I always hate mutt/neomutt because of the complexity of their config file, fortunately I had some memories of when I used it and I've been able to build a nice simple configuration script and took the opportunity to update my Neomutt cheatsheet article.

w3m: in my opinion it's the best web browser in terminal :) the bookmark feature works very great and using https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite for searches works perfectly fine. I use the flavor with image rendering support, however I have mixed feelings about it because pictures take time to download and render and will always render at their original size which is a pain most of the time.

keepassxc: my usual password manager, it has a cli command line to manage the entries from a shell after unlocking the database.

openttd: a game of legend that is relaxing and also very fun to play, runs fine after a few tweaks.

mastodon: tootstream but it's quite limited sometimes and I also access Mastodon on my phone with Tusky from F-droid, they make a great combination.

rednotebook: I was already using it on this computer when it was known as the "offline computer", this program is a diary where I write my day when I feel bad (anger, depressed, bored), it doesn't have much entries in it but it really helps me to write things down. While the program is very heavy and could be considered bloated for the purpose of writing about your day, I just like it because it works and it looks nice.

I'm often asked how I deal with youtube, I just don't, I don't use youtube so problem is solved :-) I use no streaming services at home.

Breaking the challenge

I had to use my regular computer to order a pizza because the stupid pizza company doesn't want to take orders by phone and they are the only pizza shop around... :( I could have done using my phone but I don't really trust my phone web browser to support all the operations of the process.

I could easily handle using this computer for more time if I hadn't so many requirements on web services, mostly for ordering products I can't find locally (pizza doesn't count here) and I hate using my phone for web access because I hate smartphone most of the time.

If I had used an old i386 / amd64 computer I would have been able to use a webkit browser even if it was slow, but on PowerPC the state of web browser with javascript is complicated and currently none works for me on OpenBSD.