A Bulletin Board from the backside of the internet

headcrash wrote: ↑Wed Jun 19, 2024 2:10 pm Oh that would be easy! Just the solar panel and a buck-boost converter* set to the right voltage

I've always had a thing for portable computing and electronics, so I'm all for it! I'm also going to do the old digital camera thing, and write, edit and upload all the challenge logs on the old computer. There, it will now never work because I jinxed it, with my luck so far. lol.



*A voltage converter that can take either a lower or higher voltage than desired, and output a stable voltage.

The concern is more finding a decent quality cable for a 20 year old laptop to cannibalize for it, in theory OEM ones are hard to come by for these.

It'd certainly be a nice excuse to get some hikes in after work that week.

Ed: Plus "Let me buy a bunch of things to get ready for the OCC" isn't so much in the spirit of things

I'm a bit torn when it comes to mobile devices, as I've still got some resentment against laptops and their ilk – way worse when it comes to planned obsolescence and polluting batteries. And often the ability to work from anywhere quickly turns into the duty to work from anywhere…

On the other hand, it's a lot easier to keep some old Thinkpads or Macbooks than a stack of towers

Geh, I was planning to follow the official rules but if they indeed turn out to be about limiting screen time it is a huge bummer.

As a alternative "challenge" for this year I thought of using an outdated OS 'fulltime' - like RedHat 7.3 or Windows 2000 or an old BSD or even macintosh, because couple of years ago I spent holidays coding on an old iBook G3 and it was hard but super interesting experience. Might even go even decade older - not early 00s but 90s, should be fun too.

You don't have to wonder anymore. The rules are out: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-06-2 ... ounce.html

Hi. I am new to this community, but I have been following the OCC since the start. I have not participated myself, but I have been eagerly following the participants' blog posts in previous years. This time, I am planning to take part myself. Mainly because the rules are so simple this year that it makes it easier for me to participate. I do not have any special hardware laying around, but I have a couple of old Thinkpads (who doesn't?). The oldest one I have is a T60, but I am using that one for something specific so I don't feel like ruining this installation. Instead, I will use my second oldest laptop - T61. Mine dates back to 2008 and the specs are as follows:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 at 2.00GHz

• 2GB RAM

• 120GB old spinning drive

I am not very skilled in terminal use, but I am hoping this challenge will take me further into my quest to become more skilled at this.

I decided to go a "boring" route of installing FreeBSD. Only text. No X. So far, I have just installed tmux, lynx, and links2 browsers.

Phone-wise, this will not be a big challenge. For work, I have to use an iPhone, but I turn it off when logging off, and I privately use an old Nokia 800 Tough. I love this brick of a phone. Not a smartphone, but more than 40 days of standby time. I have two SIM cards with two different mobile service providers to get as much coverage as possible because I spend a lot of my spare time hiking and backpacking in pretty remote areas with limited coverage.

I have been wanting to look into Gopher and Gemini, so maybe this will be the thing that helps me learn more about this as well?

I have no social media presence at all. Does not interest me.

I have not used IRC for many, many years. I prefer asynchronous communication like forums. I tried doing some IRC last winter, but I found it annoying. Maybe I will try again.

Anyways, I will be looking forward to participating this year instead of just reading about it. I hope I will learn a lot in the terminal.

Sounds like a fitting computer and a good theme for the OCC!

durrendal wrote: ↑Tue Jun 18, 2024 2:18 pmHonestly though, if it was "emulate a dialup connection" I would be more interested in the limitation. Just spending an hour a day is a lucky day for me, as I've got a newborn in the house. Once you've been participating in that challenge for 6 months straight it you realize that it's not that much fun..

I did that with ISDN speeds (wondershaper for Linux) with 16 KBPS up/4-8 KBPS down.With Gopher and Gemini everything was perfectly usable, even some OPUS radio stations -with mplayer'sstream caching options- worked well.No video, but I already downloaded most of PD movies in order to be watched offline.

A previous plan with an asus eeepc failed due to a disk failure, so pivoting to a freebsd install on an old acer enterprise laptop from the same time period (2007-ish). The main problem with the challenge is going to be setting up a dev environment and copying some essential files over. Might try using a digital camera from 2008 as to take some photos during the week as well.

Not just me having problems it seems, lol. I suppose it's quite common for laptops to age swiftly and poorly. Around 2007 seems to be a decent time frame to get an old laptop that still functions mostly properly. Older one are more charming of course, but they can rarely be used as true laptops anymore, with dead batteries etc.
Old cameras is a real nice touch I think! Great to see more people going similar routes.

I am doing 1989, it is around the time I got a UNIX system at work. I will set up OpenBSD on an old Laptop to emulate that old system.

With that said, once it starts I will have no access to any GUI applications since I never even knew X existed until a few years later.

Here is my OCC 4 gemini capsule for my plans and logs:

Main, but down right now, mirror is working (July 10, 2024)
gemini://gem.sdf.org/jmccue/occ/occ_4.gmi

Mirror:
gemini://sdf.org/jmccue/occ/occ_4.gmi

(edit: fixed spelling)