old technology

I have been in touch a lot with old tech and slow internet recently

it has been refreshing. Using IRC on a Dell Latitude E6400¹ as if it's just my regular daily routine

^1: I WISH it had Libreboot installed, unfortunately it does not, as Libreboot does not work well on the Nvidia model of this laptop.

browsing small websites, and stuff focused on sustainability and such, like https://permacomputing.net or https://lowcarbon.software. I have also been enjoying https://100r.co and other such sites. It's just wonderful

In that vein, I've been experimenting with a forum to talk to people with, and have also been hanging out in other's forums to some extent. Again, really nice.

This thing can't really run a web browser well. With 4 gigabytes of memory, and the old Core 2 Duo P8600 in this thing does not like browsers either. Did I mention the memory is DDR2 (SODIMM)? ZRAM helps here, but it is far from a silver bullet, and generally runs slower than one of the other "crappy" laptops I've had in the past.

Writing on this thing is nice. While it has a membrane keyboard, it's one of the good ones you'd see on old thinkpads or...well, old dell latitudes. Makes it really nice to just pop open nvim or micro and start writing something out, or writing emails or whatever

right, tools! because a web browser is pretty much a no-go, and I must stay as low-bandwidth as possible (to avoid everything being unworkably slow), I have switched to several CLI or TUI tools for my daily work:

• nvim or micro for text editing
  trying to get into nvim...
• tut for mastoAPI/Fedi
  unfortunately unmaintained :sob:
• aerc for email
  another reason I am looking into more vim-like things...

I am usually not huge on modal editing, but it's alright, not terrible or anything. Had to figure out some settings for nvim though (i.e word wrap)

I think that's my little update for now! guess I am living the low-spec laptop life once again. Somehow I keep finding myself here.

If you're looking for me in recent times, check IRC at libera.chat, transirc.chat and oftc.net! I hang out in:

• irc.libera.chat:
  • #halloy
  • #lineageos
  • #lowcarbonsoftware
  • #nixos
  • #nixos-dev
  • #permacomputing
• irc.transirc.chat:
  • #development
  • #lobby
  • #Welcome
  • #queerjunction
• irc.oftc.net:
  • #postmarketos
  • #postmarketos-devel
  • #postmarketos-immutable
  • #postmarketos-offtopic

I am also on potatoe.ca, which only has the #general channel

you may also reach me over XMPP and Signal right now, although slower cuz I only got those on my phone; email too!

is it a good idea to share the channels I am in?... hm.

see you all another time! if you wanna support me, you know where