After a  couple days  off doing a  no-computer challenge  over the
weekend due  to meatspace  obligations, I'm  starting off  the old
computer challenge using  another trusty mac. This time  it's a G3
iMac (Ruby), so even slower than last year.

Since the rules  are DIY, I'm just settling in  a nice comfortable
environment  without too  much regard  to rules  and whatnot.  Not
really reinventing  the wheel this  time. I probably  should fetch
the mail locally, but I've got mutt  already set up the way I like
and it would just be an exercise in customizing another machine.

On the #oldcomputerchallenge channel, some of the participants are
setting  up  quake and  quake2  to  play.  It  seemed like  a  fun
diversion, so I decided to give it a go. It didn't quite get along
with the G3,  and was quite the slideshow even  after tweaking the
settings  as  best  I  could.  Framerate  was  more  appropriately
expressed in seconds per frame. So I decided to employ a Wyse 3030
instead, since  it's constrained  in various  ways similar  to old
computers. I got  q2 to run with the demo  data pretty nicely, but
it  would segfault  with the  full  game. Puzzling.  trying a  few
things resulted in running out of  disk space. The eMMC on this is
only 4GB and  it was already a challenge getting  AntiX pared down
enough to fit, so maybe my journey might end there.

Back  on the  G3, it's  pleasant and  I like  the CRT.  It's still
sharp. I like that X works on here although most of what I'm doing
is in terminals, but it's nice to browse the OCC forum in dillo. I
did drop  out of X  and live  a bit in  screen for fun  and that's
quite pleasant  too. On  the occasional need  for something  a bit
faster  (work or  bills or  whatever) I  just pop  into a  virtual
desktop I  had set up for  the thin client. Keeps  me from getting
too distracted. The  spice client went kablooie so I  fell back on
VNC over ssh, which is fast and works just fine.

So that's  the challenge  so far.  Nothing too  eventful, probably
since the  workflow is  a lot more  text/terminal based  now. Plus
it's nice to  be outside every now  and then too, like  how I used
computers like this back when they were new.