Gemini Articles of Interest
A Gemini client* is needed for the following links.
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Technology and Free Software
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3 Day Weekend - Day 2
I said yesterday I was going to try installing NetBSD on an RPi4, and I did try but I failed miserably. Oops. Well, I said I /consider/ myself a NetBSD user, but I didn't say I was a competent one. On a whim I thought I'd try OpenBSD; on RPi4 I run FreeBSD normally (it's VERY easy to install) but Firefox is very slow and heavy and crashy. On OpenBSD Firefox runs quite well, and fvwm is so nice and old school.
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Old Computer Challenge 2023 - Day Seven
We have reached the final day of the Old Computer Challenge.
Below follows a wrap up of my experiences.
OpenBSD 7.3 on a twenty year old IBM ThinkPad R31
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Old Computer Challenge
NOTE: The occ lab will be offline and unavailable on Sunday, July 16th,
which is the last day of the Old Computer Challenge.
Participation will conclude on Saturday, July 15th.
IRC: Tekk visited their friend's game store and bought old video games.
Reminded me of buying pirated software in the mall in the
Philippines. I still have them around here. I thought it was
so crazy that they could sell pirated software like that, complete
with printed labels and serial numbers. Nobody bought the boxed
software since it was so expensive. They gathered dust on the
shelf.
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OLD COMPUTER CHALLENGE: DAY VI
NOTE: Not much old computing today at all. Much meatspace goings on
today. I write m0ar l8r.
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Old Computer Challenge: Wrap Up
As I am starting the last day of the 2023 Old Computer Challenge, I wanted to jot down a few finishing notes. Of course written on my iBook G3.
I'd call the week a success in that I was able to do about 80% of the things I usually do. This includes much of my programming and scripting activities, staying up to date on gopherholes/gemlogs/blogs, reading my email, running a VPN client, connecting to servers and doing some basic surfing. For much of my day-to-day tasks, there was little to no difference in using this computer.
Keep in mind that this was done on a machine that is 23 years old and has 200 times less RAM than my work laptop. This is hardware that has long been considered useless and obsolete, yet it runs on a modern OS - OpenBSD 7.3 - and runs like a champ. That, in itself, is nothing short of incredible.
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Internet/Gemini
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And in the end
In my Gemini experience, what you're calling polite / actively considerate on Gemini seems disinterest in engagement. Sure, there'll be the occasional post about "community". But for the most part the environment seems much closer to isolationism than united nations.
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Day 7
I will need to extend my Mastodon scripts if I was to continue this challenge further as I haven't spent as much time on the Fediverse this week as normal, just because it's difficult to do so. I feel that I'm not keeping up with things though.
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Cool Capsule Of The Week: Alexandra’s Cafe
Alexandra’s Cafe is a personal capsule that’s so well-crafted and textually-themed that the capsule itself feels like art. There isn’t a whole directory structure to explore; instead, everything is linked to from the home page, which reminds me of a text adventure set in a coffee shop.
It begins with a welcome and introduction from the barista (Alexandra). They then ask you for your order, and you are presented with a long list of different drinks which each link to a different article. Each page features properly-captioned ASCII art, and every article ends with a link back to the homepage which asks you whether you’d like to order another drink. After a while, you really start to get the impression of being in a cafe and listening to people’s stories (at least I did).
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* Gemini links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.