Old Computer Challenge Wrapup

Okay, it’s been 6 days, never mind my reduced weekend computing. Here’s how it went.

What I used

• Emacs, obviously. For practically everything.

• i3wm – minimally; I could just have easily used ratpoison; I never used a window other than full-screen.

• xfce4-terminal – for CLI and TUI stuff other than Emacs.

• Profanity – For XMPP chats

• Gomuks – For Matrix chats

• NetSurf – Mainly for web comics, the only type of site that NetSurf could handle well that eww or Lynx couldn’t.

In Emacs, I used:

• mu4e – For email.

• Gnus – For actual, NNTP-based Usenet

• org-mode – For scheduling, planning, and note-taking.

• org-roam – For additional note-taking.

• elpher – For Gopher and Gemini

• eww – For most of my web browsing.

Pain points

Nothing involving the modern web worked. That’s not unexpected, but it’s easy to forget how deep the rabbit hole goes. I had been syncing my org-mode files with my phone using Nextcloud, because it’s pretty transparent given the clients on both desktop and Android. But the Nextcloud client was a no-go on this computer, because the desktop client makes you log in with OAUTH through your browser, and NetSurf does not cut it. There’s a command-line client, but its exclude lists are configured through the desktop client… In the end, I ended up moving my sync to git, and finding a decent git client for Android (MGit, on F-Droid) to use.

Upsides

I didn’t get the clarity or calmness other people got; maybe I already have those, because I didn’t change my computing habits very much. I did get back in touch with the kind of desktop sysadmin stuff I had to do with this kind of machine back in the day, and it gave me some things to think about for permacomputing purposes.