A lot of the group was great, but some friends I invited to the challenge had a bad time in the irc with transphobes and we all dropped out.
I hope this year people moderate the chat a bit better, but I understand its not their day job to police random folk that enter the hobby challenge community.
That sucks, and the channel or network should do something about it.
IRC is how I was friends with many trans people, before we knew the word trans.
It makes sense: it was much easier to pass online. So you could just hang out and talk about programming or whatever, and no one cared what plumbing you were born with.
Of course, there were always some people being antisocial on IRC, and that's why there were channel ops, war scripts, and IRCops.
I think I recall one or two occasions when someone attacked a channel I was on, and then later came back and reconciled. There should be more of the learning to play nice with others, but less toxic to start with.
Things are much better off at IRL gatherings I've noticed. Vintage Computer Festival events have been very open and welcoming to all peoples without issue in my experience.
My anecdotal impression is that early Internet overall was, on average, more enlightened and amiable than Internet today.
Our earlier experience: Nobody knows you're a dog, people are excited about the possibilities, people are open to meeting others around the world, people see others sharing just to share, people haven't been conditioned to intolerant extremism by a couple decades of propaganda, etc.
Today we'll meet intolerance and meanness in many places, and we might want to call that "old beliefs" in that they are outmoded, and want to think that the latest generation will be smarter and OK. But it's certainly not just older people being hostile. And some groups of older people (e.g., much of early Internet) already did it better in many ways, before society backslided. When kids are trying to repair society, they can find allies in older people too.
It's been fully upgraded with an SSD, the fastest core2duo I could find, and more memory. With a fresh battery it still manages to be a great machine all these years later.
This seems moderately contradictory, because as the time that you use something increases the chance of some physical damage increases, especially for a portable device where dropping, an imperfect bag holding, or someone else bumping it, and the like, are all more likely than a stationary device (like a desktop).
This is a huge reason that I don't use many Apple devices, so if they somehow effectively addressed this without reparability, I'd be interested to know. However, I suspect that that's impossible because just making it durable only delays the need to repair, so you end up up shit creek maybe 2 years after buying it instead of 1 year (made up numbers).
how often have you had to repair your current device? non-rhetorical question
What's the specs and what apps are you running?
I mostly run a web browser, some terminal emulators and a mail reader. Oh, and Emacs.
I'm from a developing country and I had a 2010 dual core Celeron notebook with 4GB DDR3 and I found it unusable in 2016-2018. Can't imagine still having to use that today. Especially for browsing the web today.
YT-DLP config:
#at ~/.config/yt-dp/config
--format "best[height<=480]"
#~/.config/mpv/config
ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<=?480][fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best
vo=xv
audio-pitch-correction=no
quiet=yes
pause=no
vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=all
On the rest, get MuPDF, nsxiv for images, maybe xfe for files, mutt/sylpheed for email...
Tons of people under HN might know yt-dlp, but not streamlink.
About GUI's and the like, mpv has both SDL and KMS output, and both can render to the framebuffer. Ditto with mplayer and fbdev2.
Specifically, the project is to create VFS similar to the one in Linux 1.00 in xv6-riscv. I completed the MIT xv6 labs and read the VFS code in Linux 1.00 a while ago, and I don't think it is a particularly difficult task -- but xv6-fs touches a lot of places, so I'd imagine some re-architecture is needed.
The scope of the project is NOT to create more FS for xv6, but to add one abstraction layer on top of the FS, i.e. the VFS. The kernel is supposed to know which FS is picked manually (in this case it is the original xv6 FS) by the programmer in the makefile, and it should load the correct superblock and go from there.
The whole work, once kicked into gear -- that is, once one has gotten familiar with the xv6 kernel and written some code for the labs, should take more or less 2 weeks for an ordinary people who has no experience with system programming to complete. The good part is that there is no need to write tests for this project -- you just keep running xv6 and see if it passes all of the existing tests -- once that's passed the VFS should work fine.
I recently spent like $170 giving a new lease on life to a 15-year-old Lenovo S10-3 Ideapad with a 1-core Intel Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM, a WiFi card, and a 250GB SSD running AntiX Linux in TTY/Command Line mode.
So far, I've turned it into a picture/frame + vision board running Tailscale so I could SSH in and/or rsync stuff.
I am also attempting to run a no-AI version of Pwnagotchi to pwn WiFi networks.
I am also using it as an always-on appliance that does stuff like rsync/backup my entire server, run lightweight Python scripts to check the uptime and days until domain expiration, etc., on a set of websites I own and would like to own, etc.
I have all of this stuff connected to a Telegram bot that reports to me.
It's an interesting set of constraints, and you can surprisingly do a lot of cool stuff.
It never occured to me to consider it might qualify as a "challenge" since it is 14 years old. It just works fantanstically and was my daily driver until 3-4 years ago.
I got it off ebay for approximately $100, cleaned it, and put in a new battery.
What a weird coincidence, I've just found one of these while clearing out a box of equipment I'm getting rid of and thought "I should stick NetBSD on this!"
Make a toy OS that boots into a Lisp shell.
Another to appreciate how fast computers that we call old effectively are: write a game for the shell. Depending on your level of skill, you can try pong, snake, lunar lander, or a 3D software renderer.
I've been wanting to build some kind of project for it that uses the old school nature of the machine with modern conveniences. As an example, it's way easier to create graphics now, but the machine has really limited methods to recreate those.
I do like this years challenge, 'hand-make something' as that is always a good thing to do.
Sorry if this sounds crazy.
Going back another decade I also have a Pentium MMX system, and that'd be more interesting to work with but also a lot more tedious.
Ok I’m out of ideas.
Time to pull out my Acer Aspire from 2006, and make something with it :)
Also: what a blast from the past to see Kyodai mahjongg on Andrei's desktop in last year's challenge <3
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-E350N-USB3-rev-10
https://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/motherboards/gigabyte-...
Early SATA 3 and USB3 and the mainboard footprint is not much bigger than a miniPC. The enclosure it's in is about twice the size of a miniPC, 191 x 286mm, and the discrete little power supply probably has less than the recommended 200W. Enclosure only fits 2.5 inch drives, holds two of them but can't always power up both if they are HDDs when 4GB memory is installed. Never would handle a video card and there's no way one would fit inside the case anyway. Not really taking advantage of the SATA 3 yet, using an appropriate vintage HDD from a 2011 Macbook that's 160GB at SATA 2 which is half the speed.
But it has 3 video connectors from which you can choose any two, and decent sound.
This one has two full processor cores but it's not much faster to boot than my old Dell which does run at about twice the speed. The Gigabyte has a nice BIOS geared toward overclockers but it runs hot enough with default settings so that's enough.
Windows 11 in a MBR/BIOS layout, can only handle up to W11 23H2 but it's fully updated by manually installing the patch each month. Edge updates as expected. LAN drivers also less than a year old. OS takes up over 20GB of a 32GB partition. As drive space dwindles the manual patch installation using DISM will require a /scratchdir on a different partition than you are booted to, or on a storage drive having plenty of space.
This next one is 20 years old, still just sits there running:
https://dl.dell.com/Manuals/all-products/esuprt_desktop/esup...
32-bit only so it's Windows 10 x86. Used to play internet videos fine just a couple years ago, PC never changed but the internet got more encumbered. When it had XP it was snappier than a new Windows 11 PC at least.
I do use a PS2 mouse with each of these but only one with any balls at all :)
Good, I think the kind of people who would feel the use of "smol" impacts their enjoyment of this kind of project are not really the target audience anyway.
Seems like a perfectly cromulent (apposite) word use.
> Smol (often paired with lorge or bean), is an Internet slang term used to describe any animal, character, or object that is considered very tiny and cute
So how's that different?
- Greek, but that's the default among Latin on borrowing technical/scientifc words since forever and today.
- Basque (tons of them to put there)
- Iberian (Perro?)
- Gothic (casa, sofá, banco, guardia...)
- French (Carnet, garage...)
- Italian (Most Enlightenment related artsy words)
- Arabic (Most al- starting words)
- English (Modern stuff)
So, we all should switch to a pure language, maybe Icelandic and Indoeuropean. And Basque/Iberian in my case. Altough Basque and Iberian share the same numerals... so who knows.