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.