Old Computer Challenge

August 6 (email, OpenBSD ports)

I've never been able to do an old computer challenge, so I thought I'd try it out this year since I have an old iMac from 2001 sitting unused on my desk. It's running OpenBSD, and I initially wanted to use this thing to host my personal website. But because of the heat and power consumption, I ended up not doing that. So I thought doing the old computer challenge will help me figure out how I can use it for some tasks.

On the first day, I thought I could work on some ports like updating Brandy Basic to a newer version. I set up my email on Alpine (which took a bit to set up because I've never used it before), and I used Vim to edit the Makefile for Brandy. It took a while to compile on the slow iMac, but it worked and it actually runs! Lots of programs that use SDL on the iMac seem to crash so I'm glad it didn't happen to this one.

I successfully sent a patch on the iMac so I'd say that was a win.

I also used Dillo to read up on documentation about setting up my email and double checking if the details that I have in the patch are correct.

August 7 (zines)

Since I read and print out zines a bunch, I thought I could use this computer to do just that. I have a Brother printer at home that works with OpenBSD, but somehow I couldn't get it to work with the iMac. It seems that CUPS is able to detect the printer on the network, but it's not able to add the printer to the system for some reason.

Well, if I can't print on it, maybe I can at least read zines on the iMac? Turns out this was a bit difficult too because PDF readers are crashing. I tried the PDF readers that I know like mupdf and xpdf, but both of them just crashed. I looked around in the ports, and I found GSPdf which hasn't been updated since 2012 it looks like, but it works!

August 8 (information super highway)

I used Dillo browser the most for this day. I picked a lot of figs the other day, and I wanted to learn how to make fig jam. So I consulted the world wide web, and I found an easy-to-follow fig jam recipe online! I would normally print this out, but since the iMac had such a hard time communicating with the printer, I went back-and-forth between the room and the kitchen instead. Thankfully, the recipe is short enough for me to remember.

I also used the iMac to write on this very blog! It can be a bit frustrating though because Dillo would crash out of nowhere sometimes, but it does work. I also used the computer to read articles online.

August 9

[I didn't touch the computer on this day]

August 10 (more blogging, recipes)

I got to write on my wiki about all the things you can do with figs and also read more fig recipes off of it. I'm blown away by how little RAM Dillo uses. I saw 195MB for 6 image-heavy tabs whereas modern browsers would have that much for a single tab.

August 11 and 12 (programming)

I've been attempting to learn BBC BASIC, but I'm struggling a bit. I managed to create a simple app that draws the path of the cursor as you hold the mouse button down, but I'm having trouble doing more than that because the example programs I find online look like gibberish to me.

So I tried to learn a different BASIC instead called BaCon which was a lot easier for me to understand somehow. I think I first read about it on Notes from The Dork Web so I wrote the same thing: a program that tells you your IP address.