About me: My name is Solène Rapenne, pronouns she/her. I like learning and
sharing knowledge. Hobbies: '(BSD OpenBSD Qubes OS Lisp cmdline gaming security QubesOS internet-stuff). I
love percent and lambda characters. OpenBSD developer solene@. No AI is involved in this blog.
Contact me: solene at dataswamp dot org or
@solene@bsd.network (mastodon).
Here are the *rules* of the challenge, there are no prize to win but I'm convinced we will have feelings to share along the week and that it will change the way we interact with computers.
1 CPU maximum, whatever the model. This mean only 1 CPU|Core|Thread. Some bios allow to disable multi core.
512 MB of memory (if you have more it's not a big deal, if you want to reduce your ram create a tmpfs and put a big file in it)
using USB dongles is allowed (storage, wifi, Bluetooth whatever)
only for your personal computer, during work time use your usual stuff
relying on services hosted remotely is allowed (VNC, file sharing, whatever help you)
using a smartphone to replace your computer may work, please share if you move habits to your smartphone during the challenge
if you absolutely need your regular computer for something really important please use it. The goal is to have fun but not make your week a nightmare.
If you don't have an old computer, don't worry! You can still use your regularly computer and create a virtual machine with low specs, you would still be more comfortable with a good screen, disk access and a not too old CPU but you can participate.
Because I want this event to be a nice moment to share with others, you can contact me so I can add your blog (including gopher/gemini space) to the future list below.
You can also join #oldcomputerchallenge on libera.chat IRC server.
I use an old iBook G4 laptop (the one I already use "offline"), it has a single PowerPC G4 1.3 GHz CPU and 512 MB of ram and a slow 40GB HDD. The wifi is broken so I have to use a Wifi dongle but I will certainly rely on ethernet. The screen has a 1024x768 resolution but the colors are pretty bad.
In regards to software it runs OpenBSD 6.9 with /home/ encrypted which makes performance worse. I use ratpoison as the window manager because it saves screen space and requires little memory and CPU to run and is entirely keyboard driven, that laptop has only a left click touchpad button :).
I love that laptop and initially I wanted to see how far I could use for my daily driver!
