Old Computer Challenge 4! Now with 30% more fruit
The Pregame
It's that time of year again! I want to fancy the page up for this year, but I have work soon and I've got to just get something up for now. Since this year's theme is make your own fun I'll be running this year on my blueberry iBook G3 running MacOS 9. This implies a couple of subchallenges: the battery is 100% dead, so the laptop's always going to be tethered to an outlet. That's alright though, because OS9 doesn't support WPA at all. I don't even know if it supports WEP. I think I'll go for the flip phone again, but I've established that I might use my work phone for mumble calls, which as basically just normal calls. No anime night this year since I broke up with my partner, so the only real non-old exception ought to be work c: Aside from interacting with servers, of course. My web server breaks strict OCC rules, and due to storage limitations I've also set up my primary laptop as an Appletalk server. It won't get any direct use, but it overcomes a problem of anachronism.
Specifically, the anachronistic problem is this: this laptop dates from the age of multimedia. Being from 1999 it has a 3gb hard drive because you were expected to load always have one of those neat high capacity CDs around to do a lot of the heavy storage lifting. My iBook isn't equippped with a CD burner and it doesn't recognize USB ones. This leaves me, as a tow truck driver once said, in a dilly of a pickle. So basically I'm using my laptop's hard drive as a disk spindle because CD is the default way of distributing programs for this OS and the hard drive in total can hold maybe 5 CDs on a good day.
I also hit another bizarre snag while performing my setup: raster editors simply don't exist for Classic Mac. If I were running on Windows (like I was last year,) I had access to mtPaint, I think I even coerced paint.net into working. On Amiga I could've used dpaint. Linux of any vintage has all sorts of painting programs. I literally cannot find a program for the Mac which fits these 4 very basic requirements:
- In color
- For MacOS 9
- Allows me to set the canvas size (I didn't know I even had to make this a requirement before looking for programs.)
- Which is not a massive complete suite like Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop which requires hundreds of MBs
Anyway, I had to make this uncanny valley mac logo you're seeing right now on Linux. Boo. See y'all tomorrow!
Day 1
Shall I open with a confession? Day 1 of the OCC, almost without fail, is a soft start. Whether it's technical issues (this morning I discovered that the macbook couldn't access my forum due to tls issues. Oops. Had to edit that sincethe mac can't ssh,) or social ones where new friends don't realize I'm doing OCC or old ones forget, there's pretty much always some modern computer usage for the first day or so before you settle in. Teething troubles aside it's been pleasant enough. The iBook's status as a practically-desktop means that I'm spending more time with my computer off than in previous OCCs. I had my fill of Digimon and while I was there bought DOOM for the PS1, which I spent some time playing. There are rumblings in the IRC room of setting up some Quake 2 matches, so I'll have that to look forward to as well c:
As a previous of the likely first books entry of the challenge, I'm about halfway through A Game Of Thrones on the re-read; it's been about 10 years. I think I'm having an even better time than the first read-through since the foreshadowing is a bit clearer. Even if the tv show sucked and the series will never be finished, at least the first book is going to get a recommendation for sure. We'll see how I feel when(if?) I get back to A Storm of Swords, that's what lost me all those years ago.
One obvious pain point about the g3 mac is that classilla supports nothing beyond TLSv1 and few ciphers besides. I'm not inclined to name and shame but quite a few of the OCC participants this year have their websites available via https only. It's hard to blame then when this has been the norm for quite a while, but it's frustrating on my end. In theory I could use something like Crypto Ancienne to get around this but I like seeing how far I can go on a "real" experience without hacks. Maybe that'll be something to try out later this week (who knows, maybe later this week I'll pull a surprise twist and start running headless OpenBSD on a 25 year old laptop c:)
That quibble aside I have myself relatively comfortable software wise. ShadowIRC is as much of an IRC client as any. Most of the software on the platform looks and behaves relatively well. Despite my generous 512MB of ram I've noticed that enge requires patience, even moreso than Windows 2000. I suspect this is to do with the fact that MacOS is cooperatively multitasked. I think it's getting stuck in I/O without enough waits. I think I'm still largely standing by what I said on the os9 page though; the macina lot of ways feels more tangible than a Windows or a Unix. It's an interesting experience though as with any time you run into 3rd party software the metaphors break some. I find myself wishing that Icould drag disk images into the virtual CD mounter for example. I've also found some cracks in the networked file sharing, though part of me wonders if this is a result of a mismatch between classic mac clients and linux servers. Copying files there can be hit or miss, disk mounting can encounter mysterious errors, etc. Still the extra space is a godsend even if I have to do manual shuffling.
Day 2
An early update because of a disaster! I went to boot my computer this morning and horror be upon me: it wasn't booting right. I tried reboots, I tried messing with the extension list, but no matter what it would only boot in its equivalent of safe mode (no kernel extensions loaded at all.) Unfortunately no kernel extensions at all means no networking, no context menus, no telnet, no 3d graphics, etc. It wouldn't be much of a challenge if I couldn't post about it. So I booted up the T41 and started to download OSX, figuring maybe I'll try that and it'll tell me whether it was MacOS being crusty, the hard drive dying, whatever. I got impatient with that and downloaded OpenBSD. While I was booting OpenBSD I noticed that I had a mouse plugged into the laptop. Huh. Well I don't think I've booted with the mouse in before...Well shit, apparently if you have a mouse plugged in (or at least my mouse,) it breaks MacOS. Disaster averted.
With that particular problem solved it became more or less a normal Sunday. I spent much of the day at the game store playing D&D, afterwards I went shopping and picked up a few things I needed. I made dinner, I hung out on IRC. We tried getting a Quake server up and running but nobody seemed to have much luck. I ought to be finishing A Game of Thrones tonight, by my reckoning. I'm not sure whether I'll move on immediately to ACoK or get working on the backlog yet, though.
Day 3
Good thing there are no rules this year. I booted up my T480 today and installed NetBSD on it because I was bored. This is the first workday of the challenge so far so I'm flipping between this Macbook and a miserable, new Dell Precision which while claiming to run Linux as shipped from the factory sure does suck at running Linux. The NetBSD install is for a bit of fun to come later: I've owned a Dreamcast for years, I even have the broadband adapter for it, but I've never actually booted NetBSD on it. I think this week might be the time to try. It'd be cool to IRC from a dreamcast, right? I managed to get into a quake 2 server and got my ass handed to me. Even on the lowest settings Q2 has a lot of stuttering problems on this laptop. Maybe part of it was that I had a CD playing music at the same time.
Earlier on IRC someone, when faced with a user who considered themselves non-technical, said that OCC is more philosophical than technological. It may just be the failed philosopher in me (I have an ex with a bachelors in it, surely that counts for something right? We used to argue (in the fun sense) all the time.) In that vein I think I'd like to think of these posts less as a report. What I've done today, were there cheats, how I staved off the void, and include more tangential thoughts.
Sometimes I wonder if there's a better way to communicate that I'd like to stay in contact with people over the OCC. My usual policy wrt that, since I need to use my smart
phone for work (it's my MFA device and I've been told by others in work chat that we don't properly support other forms anymore,) that when I'm messaged by friends I'll respond that I'm on the OCC and give a list of ways of contacting me that'll work. Seems rude to just ignore them. Near inevitably they don't take me up on the offer. Sometimes they'll make an account on my forum and never post anything. I'm not slighted by it, but I think it has interesting implications with how we interact with our computing power these days. The offered means of communication are almost entirely active rather than passive, if someone wants to talk they have to go to it rather than the means being constantly open and reminding you that there's always more to do. I like to think that's a part of why it's hard to stay engaged in them.
One friend just responded with You do weird things sometimes lol
which, to be honest, is true. Why do we make the strange holiday we do out of systems old enough to drink, systems hobbled for fun, and universally among them systems which are less useful than they were when they were supposedly viable? We're well beyond the days of Have an old computer? Put Linux on it and you'll extend its life
when most web browsers will choke out in anything less than 8GB of RAM. This hunk of plastic in the shape of a bivalve could use ebay, once. It could listen to internet radio, instant message normal people, browse the web in its full glory even. Now it's as powerful as it could ever hope to be and all those are lost to it not through a fault of its own but because now we demand that our public radios be encrypted just in case some attacker intercepts the same audio everyone can hear, because rather than a handful of kilobytes our messaging platforms demand hundreds of megabytes to do the same work, but more onerously to our collective mental health in the name of data profiteering. I think that's some of the philosophy at play, even if it is on the technical side others can see it: we've run headlong down a path that's wasteful and harmful, and to move forwards properly we need to first go back and take inventory of what truly does work. Computers aren't made to make their user happy, and haven't been in a long time.
My mind's also turned to the notion of UX. Obviously we've largely gone backwards on this front with the drive for engagement
but when I previously thought of small systems I thought of spartan, rough ones. Windows 95, old X11 window managers which demanded that you learn a bespoke programming language used only for configuring this program, and a new one for each of them. The Mac is nice. It's friendly. The damn thing runs (or ran,) in less than a meg of RAM! Windows won because it was cheap, and cheap beats everyhthing, but a big lesson has been realizing why those Mac people back then felt so smugly superior: picking the right primitives counts for a hell of a lot. UNIX has beautiful bones in the tty: pipes and FD sharing and redirection but X made a policy point of never knowing what it was or how it should feel. None of the UNIX graphical systems ever did; not even MacOS X. Plan 9 did, but its audience was for researchers in a computer science lab. It's elegant, but I wouldn't sit much of anyone in front of it sight unseen. Here as much as possible is done to physicalize the desktop: I can move around my windows (duh), maximize them, reduce them to a titlebar, but I can't minimize them to my desktop because they don't act like files. To open a file I drag it onto the program. Aliases take care to keep themselves from breaking whenever possible. When I'm done with something, anything, it goes in the trash. That's how I eject a CD. I delete a program by dragging its directory to the trash. Installers are mostly just there to copy the files to the right place, maybe do some decompression. Lots of software is just distributed as a Stuffit archive. Windows almost got this right but software had to copy itself into system32, to embed itself into the registry, and a thousand other tendril that make uninstallers necessary. This is turning into a rehash of my OS9 page, but here's the point: ease of use is in the primitives. There's no theoretical reason every lightweight, small hobby OS needs to be as user-uncaring as Linux if we think our primitives through. It makes me wonder what's possible and drags up old thoughts I had in my delusions of OS dev grandeure. It also got me thinking about phone UX design and many of the problems. They feel more like autonomous spying devices and lack tactility. It'd be nice to have a box in my pocket that invited me to explore it.
After work I went to watch Princess Mononoke in theaters for the first time. There's a reason it's been a favorite for about 25 years now; it's gorgeous in every way.
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Others
As always if you've liked reading about my OCC antics, make sure you go over to Deadnet's OCC Page to see what everyone else is getting up to!
I promised headcrash. Blame him