Well, it's that time of year again. Officially the challenge is rather different this year: 1 hour of internet time per day, however I love to make things hard on myself. So! (and I'm doing this a day off because I forgot today was the 10th) I'm going Monday to Monday with the following rules:
An accidental benefit of the challenge this year, if you can call it that, is that I'm on PagerDuty. A I often have downtime at work due to builds and that gets filled with personal laptop use, but when I'm inundated with work the distractions aren't quite as tempting. Basically I just worked all day and listened to music on my flip phone. KaiOS multitasking sucks even worse than Android's though, so it kept losing its place. I'll probably use some of my hour to check on podcasts, we'll see. Used the time so far to check my e-mail, poke my head into IRC, and write this post. Beyond that I pulled a repository to work on (a project with a friend,) which I ought to do some work on tonight. I also had to buy a new fountain pen; that ended up being a quick ebay use since I need one for grocery lists.
As far as non-internet entertainment, Shephy came today! I got a few games of that in around lunch. After that I picked up a friend and we watched DVDs/Blurays for a while. I also got in a bit of manga while work was ending.
After time with my friend (including a nice greek stroganoff-ish dish) I got in some time on Spec Ops: The Line.
Today's cheats: Used my smartphone to order a new fountain pen since I'm not sure ebay works on the D400.
Good news: my screwdriver kit came in yesterday. That means I can get off the old dying 30GB (I only thought it was 60,) one. I popped it in, did some elaborate maneuvers to avoid having to connect to the internet for updates, went to install AntiX, and...it's dead. The hard drive was defective. So still on the 30GB one, had to do a "cheat" to message the ebay seller about a refund/replacement. I highly doubt that a replacement would be here in time for the challenge but it might prove useful in the future.
Got some reading in, one entry's already up on books.html. I suspect I'll also (finally,) finish Conan today.
Finished Conan, that's 2 books down today. Multitasking works surprisingly well despite the 56k limit. My version of oksh seems to not actually understand emacs keys so I need to find a new one, sadly browsing brings this thing to a crawl.
Fetched another version of oksh, but it uses meson (ew) so I needed the internet to build it. After finding that out I went to the farmer's market, then came home and watched season 1 of King of the Hill. I'm honestly surprised how well things are going so far? I feel like I haven't missed out on too much overall. I then realized that I'm dumb and I just hit an openbsd ksh behavior I forgot about: if your $VISUAL is set to vi, then it disables emacs binds (which makes no sense because some of the "emacs" binds are traditional unix keybindings which are older than the BSDs themselves (namely ^A and ^E.) Time was tight today since I decided to fetch lxpanel and try to fit in a couple more games. lxpanel got in but I'm not sure about the games. It'll probably be a big help as far as managing menu items. Usually I'm fine with just dmenu but since I have so many games installed it's nice to be able to browse them; maybe an app for that wouldn't be a terrible idea. since lxpanel still eats into my memory budget quite a bit.
Pretty normal day so far. One thing which is off is that oksh isn't working right? When I open a new terminal the "emacs" keys don't work. Normally these are the default if the editor isn't set to vi, but for some reason in this port I had to explicitly
set emacsin my kshrc.
Got a text from my dad asking me to look around the local coffee roasters (there are 3 or 4 in town,) to see if any of them make blends with chicory in them, so that'll take up some time.
Last night I started playing Majora's Mask 3D. It technically doesn't quite meet the OCC rules in that it has a dual core processor, but when it's clocked all the way down to 300 MHz I'm not particularly bothered by it. I've also been using the PS3, but if I remember right it actually is a single core, just with 8 coprocessors to speed a few things up. Aside from that I have some of the classic Linux games set up on the old laptop: DCSS, Nethack, Frozen Bubble, Battle for Wesnoth, etc.
Aside from those, friend's coming over again. We're gonna drink some sake, play some go, and watch Princess Mononoke I figure.
I also ought to start organizing my Digimon card collection today, if I have time. Get the coffee table cleaned up a bit. I just need to find a suitable spreasheet application, something I can export to a csv probably. Lets me manipulate it more easily. Or maybe keep it in a sqlite db? I'll figure something out.
On the friend side, go wasn't played. We watched DVDs, then there were some youtube videos (does it count if it's a friend thing? I already carved out an exception for date night and this isn't too far off. Wasn't exactly my computing.) Loads of pages, plenty of drinking. I think I might even end up with excess time today.
I also made a mailing list since the challenge is so hostile to synchronous communication sometimes. It's (tilde)tekk/old-computer-challenge(at]lists.sr.ht.
I tried to fix a 'bug' in dcwm but it's refusing to compile, saying that an XWindowAttributes isn't a struct. This caused a reminder of one of the reasons I dislike Debian: packages are all stretched out into normal, -dev, and -doc. I've kicked myself several times over this vs a distro like Slackware where they all come at once. Turns out gcc has bad error messages and the problem was a different variable: I wanted event.width not event.window.width.
It also occurs to me that my tracking methodology hasn't been obvious. It's actually pretty easy: I closed Telegram and Discord on my smart phone. I still get email notifications but I can just ignore those. The phone has to be on because I'm on-call. I use its stopwatch to keep track of my internet use, and I use wondershaper on the laptop to limit to 56k down/up. I tried using my flip phone's stopwatch but it's not persistent and KaiOS basically has no multitasking so it'd get wiped out through the day; this is the best compromise I could come up with.
Is it weird to say that the challenge is almost mundane at this point? I'd expected myself to handle this way worse but I'm not having too much trouble aside from doing some specific things. More King of the Hill. Date night tonight, so there'll be a break from the challenge for that. Starting to think about my catalog app.
All the missing sleep from being on-call really caught up to me on Thursday. I fell asleep super early and just crashed for ages; aside from the prearranged 'cheat' of date night I didn't use the internet at all. I guess that means I have a floating hour left for the challenge?
Well I've dropped the 56k requirement. I wasn't able to use any IM reliably due to timeouts, it took several minutes to sync my website, and e-mails were even timing out due to bloat from some inevitable html emails. This means I ought to be able to better take advantage of the time I do have.
Dropping the speed requirement made life so much better. Watched mor KotH, played some games. I tried looking into the catalog thing but there are very few gui options for perl or lua, and what's more it's impossible to install gtk3 development libraries on AntiX as far as I can tell (GTK, for no good reason, depends on systemd in Debian.) Which means I'm right out as far as options go.
I discovered that lua has functional fltk bindings last night and also grabbed lsqlite3, though in some experimenting today I figured that I probably don't even need a gui for what I'm doing. The database schema is also way simpler than I thought once I acknowledged that without a machine-readable document for every card I'm best off leaving that stuff to Digimon Card Dev and just focusing on the library management portion.
Spent most of the day with a friend. Slept like shit because of pages but after waking up at 11 or so I got ready and went to the local game store from 1 to 5 or so playing Digimon. While I was there I picked up some new DVDs (a big collection of Slayers,) as well as some manga to read (a Love Hina omnibus.) After that we went to the municipal library only to find that it closes at 5 on Saturdays. Made a cheese platter for dinner and hung out afterwards. About 15 minutes of internet used total.
Started thinking about an "interests" page. Something a bit more general though also referring to things in software.
Stayed up late watching a movie, didn't get to sleep until about 5 am or so. Woke up around noon, made up the leftovers of the cheese platter, watched some Slayers and some King of the Hill.
That was about all there was. I feel like working on a project but I'm not quite sure what, something in C....maybe another shot at writing a language or something? We'll see how I feel later tonight.
Well, this was the year that finally broke 56k I think. If I recall correctly I'd experimented with it last year but when I had unlimited internet time it was a lot more acceptable to be constantly retrying. The challenge of using the laptop was just as easy as before (easier when I consider the fact that it has a battery now,) and between dcwm and lxpanel I didn't have any problems with the environment set up. I think I mentioned before that most of my actual time using the internet is wasted filler, so being able to replace that with DVDs and music wasn't a problem at all. Mostly it was a nice little break, an excuse to spend time with my local friend, and a chance to get some reading in earlier in the week.
Want to read other OCCs from this year?