Life at 800 MHz
artemis.sh
artemis.sh
Uh, I actually did this, it wasn't so bad honestly it just took about a day to rebuild everything.
Honestly the Sony VAIO that I had was _awesome_ in some regards, the hi resolution display was extremely crisp! It fit comfortably in my inside jacket pocket, the battery didn't suck.
The only issue I had honestly was the proprietary connector to get ethernet (though this was more annoying in 2012 when I was doing this, these days laptops don't seem to have ethernet); the only other issue was that the GPU was extremely slow with Linux.
it was probably extremely slow in Windows too, but vista (which was installed on the thing) was far-far too heavy to understand why it was slow at all.
The nearest best laptop I've found that is in all areas superior than the Sony VAIO P-Series (aside from being a bit taller) is the GPD P2 Max which is basically perfect.... if only it had a passively cooled ARM CPU.
But, I agree, I can compile my entire OS including user-space software and desktop environments in about the same time it takes to compile chrome.
Which is scary.
But then again, people want it to do everything (WebUSB, WebGL etc; etc; etc;). So it stands to reason that it's inherently complicated and difficult to compile.
I wonder if the high iteration time hampers development...
You might be interested in this post from someone on the Edge team at Microsoft:
https://textslashplain.com/2020/02/02/my-new-chromium-build-...
In particular:
> I returned to Microsoft as a Program Manager on the Edge team in mid-2018, unaware that replatforming atop Chromium was even a possibility until the day before I started. Just before I began, a lead sent me a 27 page PDF file containing the Edge-on-Chromium proposal. “What do you think?” he asked. I had a lot of thoughts (most of the form “OMG, yes!“) but one thing I told everyone who would listen is that we would never be able to keep up without having a cloud-compilation system akin to Goma.
Recent jawdrop: 'apt-get install asciidoc' on a pi needs to pull 189 packages, will use 889Mb of additional disk space.
I don't recall exactly what it was, but I remember installing something like a tiny library and it wanted to also install mysql-server or something like that >_<
echo "APT { Install-Recommends \"false\"; }" >/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/90norecommendsthxbyUSE flags in Gentoo also allows for a much more configurable system.
I wouldn't trade it for much...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect
(but also, what I meant was there are few extant devices I would prefer to be using, even if price were no object. It's nearly perfect.)
used to be the norm back in the unix days. finding exact pre-compiled binaries for your exact arch/OS combo was like finding a pot 'o gold ;)
am also amazed at how well gba emulators run on older devices!
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/packages/solaris/sparc/
I’m sure it’s been 15 years since I’ve even thought about it.
You really do start to ask yourself if you need a package if compiling it will take a day or two. Hence OpenOffice never got installed.
Save for the processor being better than any VAIO's, I disagree. I find all of these to be absurdly unreliable (crappy firmware) and very cheap hardware for the price, not comparable at all to the typing experience on the P-Series. And the "trackpoint substitute" is a disaster, resembling a "tiny touchpad" more than a trackpoint.
There’s no trackpoint/nipple and I hadn’t considered that a problem as I’m weird and spent a lot of time getting used to only using the keyboard some years ago- so an oversight on my end and you’re completely right, the touchpad sucks.
The firmware is extremely bare bones, but I wouldn’t say it sucks since I don’t have any reason to believe it’s bad. (Nor good, it just works for me.)
I have the GPD Pocket 2 and while the trackpoint thing is not the most precise you get used to it and I have no complaint to do regarding the hardware. It just works.
So many more things could be easily enjoyable on such hardware if the software ecosystem allowed it. I'm also curious what hardware modularity like Framework is doing could have achieved two decades ago: if you could easily plug in a chip to decode/encode video quickly, this computer could probably play any kind of video.
> We have no idea what crates.io thinks it makes sense to require javascript to look up packages but here we are.
I've had a similar experience with crates.io:
curl https://crates.io/
{"errors":[{"detail":"Not Found"}]}
I'm also very curious about antiX "proudly anti-fascist" distro but that they're two debian releases late (still on stretch) does not exactly attract me.
I'm dating someone who refers to themself in the first person plural; it becomes perfectly natural pretty quick :)
Sorry, but it is too close to contributing to mental health, or personality, disorders for me.
Wait until you find about about languages like Hindi where the plural form can be used for respect even when referring to an individual :)
I hadn't realized that calling an individual in plural was even a point of contention until comments on this thread pointed it out (likely because I'm used to it from Hindi). Don't forget, the author may be bi/multilingual.
In fact it’s pretty common amongst a lot of languages. Most Latin-derived languages use the plural to show respect. But of course, never to talk about yourself. You’ll use the pluralized form when talking to strangers or to people who are over you hierarchically (but this usage tends to disappear in a lot companies).
As a French, reading someone speaking about itself as "we" is shocking not because it looks like there is multiple people involved (but it also does) but because it looks like the person tries to be "above" you hierarchically. Of course i know it isn’t what’s intended but language interpretation is an automatic mechanism.
That's interesting, culturally. In India, it's very common for example for people from North India to be much more "pride-based" where individual identity is important and people often use the plural for themselves, while in more southern states there's lesser emphasis and singular is much more common. A lot is dependent on culture.
I speak German, which uses uses the plural sie/polite Sie.
It's completely different to "we" being used by an individual to refer to themselves in English.
The fact that a language construct might exist in other languages is irrelevant. Calling a girl "it" in English would similarly be bizarre, although that is the grammar in German.
It affects anyone who reads the article, as it's incorrect english and makes it harder to interpret.
You don't have to read the article if it doesn't meet your muster. Why bother caring?
Thou art fighting a losing battle; the grammatical first person singular will soon be as passé as the second.
Then I read these comments.
800 MHz and a solid state disk is luxurious if you're not wasteful with it. As the article's author points out, this is "not up to you" ("we"/"us") any more, other people get to decide how much JavaScript to shovel on top of web applications.
It seems ambiguous to me, I was honestly trying to figure out if there was more than one person using the author's laptop, or if it was a multi-author article or something.
Not that English isn't chocked full of ambiguity - I just haven't managed to identify a benefit over using the more commonly accepted "I" here.
> The editorial we is a similar phenomenon, in which an editorial columnist in a newspaper or a similar commentator in another medium refers to themselves as we when giving their opinion. Here, the writer casts themselves in the role of spokesperson: either for the media institution who employs them, or on behalf of the party or body of citizens who agree with the commentary. The reference is not explicit, but is generally consistent with first-person plural.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We
It's quite standard usage.
Definitely contributed to me not finishing the article.
I have acquaintances who was lyrical on the topic of LGBTQ+ folks, feeling that somehow, non-LGBTQ+ folk are being "oppressed". I keep asking them, "What are they taking from you? What could you do before that you're not allowed to do now?". They typically don't respond or change the topic. We both know that the types of behaviours that are no longer "acceptable" lie on a spectrum that starts with "being casually disrespectful", to outright *ism. It's sad to me that a lot of people value the rights of some to be jerks, over the rights of others to partake equally in society and to feel equally safe and valued in public spaces.
And yes I do tend to avoid other annoying types of people too, across the spectrum.
Don’t worry, you’re already using singular “they” without even realizing!
https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
Except: all normal human beings trip up on it; those who believe in the they/them BS trip up on it; and almost no one who uses this argument supports other things that were done centuries ago, so it's not really arguing in good faith.
Arranged marriages at very young ages were a thing centuries ago, should we bring those back?
If you want to use custom pronouns, nobody is stopping you. The rest of the world is just annoyed and tired of hearing you desperately announce it every time we see you and we're not going to play along.
I find the fact that some people are massively triggered by this fascinating. Personally I’m happy to use whatever pronouns people desire for themselves if they make it clear to me. I get it wrong occasionally cos I have a lifetime of doing something different, but if someone has explicitly made their desire known to me, I’ll make the tiniest effort of referring to them as they wish. It’s not a chore for me. I think of it as being polite to that person.
If I tell you my name is Mike, and prefer to be called that, would you insist on calling me Michael or Micky or Mickster? Even if I told you I was uncomfortable with that (for my own reasons which I don’t have to share with you)?
> every time we see you and we’re not going to play along
Im guessing “we” is not referring to yourself here.
> I find that sad. Do you also hold that view when interacting with people different in other ways? People that dress differently, hold different political or religious views, people from other places to you?
Yep! Ready to get nihilistic? Their existence is pretty much inconsequential to me. Sexuality, gender identity and appearance has quite literally zero bearing on the way I address other people. Unless someone make a concerted effort to be my acquaintance, I will likely forget about their existence within the hour. That doesn't mean I can't sympathize; but the internet has greatly distorted our idea of how important other people actually are. We conflate identity with politics and alliances, we grok importance by follower count and Google search results, it's a disgusting mess that can only be effectively deterred by not caring.
Is it sad? Hard to say, but I certainly feel like it's a less frustrating way to live your life when compared to bending over backwards for everyone. I operate with my own interests at heart; as much as I despise Ayn Rand's philosophy, she wasn't wrong when she said that the greatest minority is the individual.
> I have acquaintances who was lyrical on the topic of LGBTQ+ folks, feeling that somehow, non-LGBTQ+ folk are being "oppressed".
I don't think it's hard to sympathize with that sentiment, even though I'm a gay man myself. I feel embarrassed by the level of entitlement that the rest of the community seems to push, in public and online. A decade ago, the LGBT movement was pretty cut and dried - queer people wanted to integrate into society as normal individuals, without any pretense or opportunity for judgement. In response, they became a protected class and everything was pretty much solved. There hasn't been a legitimate reason to be mad as a gay person since those bakers refused to make a gay wedding cake, and even that only incensed me because it was against the law. As far as I see it, the modern LGBT movement is far too infatuated with liberties that don't exist, and hunting boogeymen that don't care. It makes me ashamed to be queer and wish that I could live in a world where my only identity didn't boil down to "the gay guy".
No
Someone else recommended it here, but I don't see the advantages over a robust package repository like ubuntu 18 or a minimal ram only distro like puppylinux. https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/antix.html
Funny enough I got puppylinux running from a dos (windows) partition and running out of RAM on just 2gb on a Toshiba Portage m200. I've even got Windows XP Tablet edition running on SSD, but it can't really connect to much online due to the TLS limitations. And newer versions of the linux kernel don't support the wireless chipset. It is also difficult putting an old non-PAE kernel into a newer distro.
TLS really killed the utility of a lot of older computers with regards to using the "modern internet".
I agree antiX was a poor choice. No issue with PAE kernel on Tumbleweed i686. If OpenSUSE ever drops x86 support, there's always Debian or Arch 32 (if I want to stick with a rolling distro).
My original reason for reviving it was for use as a whiteboard in Zoom calls, but there's no 32-bit Zoom app - and I'm sure screen sharing while decoding 15 people's video would've been out of the question anyway. So I run a VNC server on it, and share out a VNC session from my work laptop instead.
I've also hit the issue where I've had to compile software for x86 using modern build toolchains. It takes forever, and more often than not, I run out of RAM (only 1GB). To get myself out of a pinch, I've mounted a 16GB USB 2.0 flash drive as swap space. Sure, it makes compiling even the most basic software a multi-hour process, but where this machine isn't my daily driver, it's still easier (to me, at least) than cross-compiling.
"Anti-fascist" doesn't actually mean that - it's a political dog-whistle.
> they're two debian releases late
That's in line with their use of Palemoon, which lags behind normal Firefox feature (and security) releases due to their decision to support older features (mostly XUL) (not that this is very avoidable, because maintaining an XUL fork is very hard work, and not for the faint of heart).
Frankly they remind me of a line by Nietzsche about staring too long into an abyss.
That's not exactly the point, though. We are not in a democratic process (unless by democracy you mean giving away powers to congress), and our society is very violent towards the most vulnerable segments of it.
Do you think giving back just a tiny portion of that daily violence we face is immoral or wrong? How is it justified for people to threaten us with guns if we don't pay rent to some arbitrary landlord or to detain us if we dare steal food for basic survival, yet attacking bank windows or punching an actual genocidal nazi in the face is seen as violent?!
>I've had a similar experience with crates.io:
They do have an API (ps: I built crates.live on top of it). I think they have a very good reasons to block the crawling of their main website. Otherwise, people might abuse it. Actually, they recommend you identify yourself when crawling their API to not limit you. I didn't do it, and found no problem constantly calling their APIs.
https://antixlinux.com/antix-sid-iso-files-available/
If you feel too irked/offended by antiX there is also https://mxlinux.org/
You assume Artemis identifies as a single person. In all likelihood, they are a plural system. Statements like yours are microaggressive at best.
I don't get the "political considerations" part, but this is the first time I've encountered anyone referring to themselves as "we" online, and I also found it jarring.
I apologize in advance if this sound antagonistic, but putting plural identities on the same levels as queer and trans ones seems... a little premature, if you ask me.
They started using that pronoun only 3-4 months ago, so it still slip in. I'm more puzzled why 'we' but not 'our'?
She got the Dragon Speech software, and I was surprised at how good it was.
You can of course dictate all your notes, documents emails. It also provides means to navigate your OS, start programs, close them, and a lot more.
It is expensive but she could do most of her work with two hands that didnt work.
A while back I saw a video about a guy who wrote code using such software (not sure what he used in particular). This can be tedious "Open bracket", "new line" etc.
He had spent a long time tuning it so it was fast and efficient. He used a set of custom grunts and noises as "macros" for all the bracket brace, and other symbols that are in heavy use in programming languages.
If you were just listening to him and didn't know what he was doing it sounded a bit distressing.
https://www.nuance.com/dragon/businesbs-solutions/dragon-pro...
Anything that's can be templated is. There's natural language integration with LSP. I use Vim mode "naturally" etc...
It's not like reading what's on your screen word by word. It's less input than typing.
You'd use a custom vocabulary as well. So rather than "curly open" you'd use "heck", and instead of "enter" it would be "bark". I'm just making the actual words up here, but the point is to use a different/more simplified vocabulary that's also easier to understand by the computer.
https://talonvoice.com/ is also worth keeping an eye on.
def tree_size(n: Node) -> int:
if not n:
return 0
return 1 + tree_size(n.left) + tree_size(n.right)
funk tree size takes near type cap node returns int slap
if op not near next return zero slap zing
return op one plus call tree size pass near dot left
op plus call tree size pass near dot right
commands like "funk", "op" and "if" insert snippets
slap = end enter, zing = shift tab, next = move to next snippet placeholder, near = letter n
still a work in progress as I find ways to make it flow better.
I have been looking into pedals before this ever started, and we looked at some different options, but could not find something that seemed worth it.
I really want a set of foot controls to act as my mouse since growing a third arm is currently not practical. I keep looking around and I know there are some solutions out there, but not in my price range that seems solid.
I wonder if the parent comment typed that URL by hand.
>a dishonorable mention to twitter for being slower than Discord, we wish we were making that up
If you're just browsing Twitter, then the Nitter frontend (https://github.com/xnaas/nitter-instances) is way, way faster. Does not have algo-recs either, which could be positive. If you need to post, I assume you've tried spoofing user agent to mobile? This might help with bloated sites in general.
For music, mocp, and links+/dillo make a good combo.
Youtube-dl+ytfzf+mpv with a config setting up the youtube-dl format for 420p = heaven.
In ~/.config/mpv/config:
ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<=?420]+bestaudio/best
On Chromium, it has a --light switch.
Also, somewhat related: Former Debian maintainer Joey Hess famously used a Dell Mini 9 for all his coding [1, 2]. I wonder if the Sony has a better, less cramped keyboard compared to the Mini 9.
Another interesting guy doing valuable work on low-end, underclocked hardware is Nils M. Holm [3].
Myself, I can get most of my stuff done on a Thinkpad T42 (underclocked to 600 Mhz to reincarnate its dying GPU). With the ram-booted Tiny Core Linux, this thing still flies. I'm having a hard time ditching it because of the 4:3 IPS screen and excellent keyboard. I've even used it to produce lengthy radio programs for my country's public broadcasting.
Aside web browsing, there seems to be more than enough software solutions, hacks, workarounds and programming languages for doing valuable work on rather old hardware these days. Really interesting times we're living in.
Then again, might be true that with yesterday's hardware, you're limited to solving yesterday's problems. I guess I'm fine with yesterday's problems in many aspects of life.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4721645
2: https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/xmonad_layouts_for_netbooks/
Most of my university assignments were done on a Acer Aspire One netbook (1.3/1.6 GHz Dual Core Atom, 2 GB DDR2 RAM) and I had no problem. To program in C, C++, and Python in Debian is simple great, and to simulate circuits with SPICE related software on Windows 7 is also good.
I started using it because it was more light and more comfortable than the newer laptop I had (15" 4th gen Intel i5 laptop), and as a small device for reading PDF is great, so i ended up using it more and more, and for more tasks, leaving it for exclusive academic usage and letting the other for games and media.
It was supposed to be a disposable laptop, it outlasted and persisted through everything else.
I did some writing on this machine, and I always felt really concentrated, quite possibly because of the small screen.
Another discovery I made a long time ago was network connections are usually fast enough and small battery friendly CPUs are slow enough that its faster to send a video file to AWS (or have it there to begin with), spawn a linux box on AWS, run handbrake in CLI mode to convert the video to some obscure format on a very CPU beefy machine, and download the converted file, and delete the huge (and expensive) AWS instance, than it is to transcode video locally. Some CPU based transcoding is very slow if you don't have a lot of cores and its brutal thermally and to the battery.
If you only have one SaaS app in your life, the old meme was what do you do when the internet is down? Well, the internet is almost never down for me, I'd pick up my laptop and go to a cafe or library if it was, and everything I do is online or SaaS or VPN'd in so I wouldn't crabby about one app being down I'd be crabby about being completely and totally shut down.
That anti-SaaS argument in 2020's is like arguing that people have to drink bottled water because what would they do if tap water stopped working one day? If we're in a situation where the tap water stops working then we got bigger problems than which bottled water company to enrichen.
The linked article seemed surprised that a 2009 device could play video, but I had been using Mythtv for 7 years by that point including occasional HD video on a relatively weak settop box class of computer and doing youtube for awhile so his specs for playback seem very low compared to what I was doing in '09 on small devices, but whatever.
I used a Raspberry Pi 4 (1500 Mhz) as a daily driver for 4 days. Struggled with hidpi scaling, no Signal Messenger, overheating CPU, Youtube at 360p, HTML Gmail.
I went so far to upgrade Pi to SSD, plus heat sink. Considering adding active cooling... but the said nope, back to Macbook Pro. Why do we even try?
Rather than watching YouTube directly, use youtube-dl with VLC. Rather than using HTML Gmail, use IMAP and a native email client. Rather than using Eclipse, use vim.
We all fall into patterns. We grow to find comfort in those. But, we can't expect to maintain those patterns when circumstances change.
Depends on how hard you want to try or compromise on.
[0]: https://twitter.com/EverfreeArtemis
[1}: https://artemis.sh/
I have never heard this before. On the other hand I have heard about keyboards being an issue many times. Anybody else know anything about touchscreens being harder on hands than keyboards?
I occasionally brace my index finger against the top edge of the display; this used to work great on my Note 3 with its giant bezel (particularly at the top), my current Mate 20 Pro's notched edge-to-edge screen doesn't play well with this though :(
"There is limited evidence that MTSD use, and various aspects of its use (i.e. amount of usage, features, tasks and positions), are associated with musculoskeletal symptoms and exposures. This is due to mainly low quality experimental and case-control laboratory studies, with few cross-sectional and no longitudinal studies."
There's nothing really hard on healthy people when we use touchscreens, but this person clarifies they are disabled so this sounds like an edge case for them because if you're disabled in some ways, a nice fat keyboard is just going to be a lot more gentle on your hands and fingers than the tiny thumb keyboards of mobile devices.
I paid just under £100 for mine, about 3Y ago, and another £20 for the VGA/Ethernet dongle -- which doesn't seem to work, FWIW.
It's a fun toy but not much use. Lovely form factor, poor keyboard, poor trackpoint (and I like the things), and sluggish.
I wish they did a modern one with a better keyboard, though.
Thanks kind of feel left out when folk here start remembering their c64 and Ataris and whatnot!
My first computer was a celeron 500MHz with windows 98 (maybe there was a 300MHz with win 3.1 but I never got it working)
So, this blog is nostalgia! Winamp and the Linux clone!? DDR2!? Back in my day we had some other thing that I don’t remember the name (sdram?), we ruled the city because with winrar we could use the T1 of the university to download stuff, then split it in 4 3.5” 1.44Mb floppy disks to install on our computers!
Oh, and CD-R changed the game forever! And usb… it took a while and a few dongles (parallel to usd, serial to usb, ps2 to usb) and hunting down the proper .inf file, but it was glorious!
That’s my kind of nostalgia :)
XMMS: http://www.xmms.org/
In a lot of ways, between the c64 and the celeron 500MHz is an enormous, almost unrecognizable leap, whereas between the celeron 500MHz and the machine in my hand is just a lot of incremental change. I had a machine ~2000 that was de facto a 500MHz Duron (running at its full 1GHz overheated very quickly), and I used the same basic paradigm on that as I'm using now. Emacs, browser, terminal windows, MP3 player. Wifi needed a dongle. The integrated webcam is new since then.
This is actually the reason I started using linux. I remember internet was usable at 100Mhz back in the days, I could play some videos (obviously at a much lower res, I was using a CRT). The funny things is some of the apps mentionned here already existed at the time so it resonnate with my experience, although back in the days I tended to prefer apps running on terminals unless it was absolutely necessary. Emails, music player, I was a terminal for all of that. My computing life was not that different than today bar the videos resolution increase. And the web wasn't less interesting or usable.
It is incredible how crap internet has become that we can't reasonnably think we can browse it comfortably on what would have looked like a supercomputer at the time of my 100Mhz Pentium.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but two parts of that paradigm, Emacs and the terminal emulator, do date back to the C64 era. Here's Richard Stallman on developing GNU Emacs: "There were people in those days, in 1985, who had one-megabyte machines without virtual memory. They wanted to be able to use GNU Emacs. This meant I had to keep the program as small as possible." [0] Emacs may never have run on Commodore computers, but my impression is that it ran on very similar computers.
My closes reference is a PIC16F that I used to program in 8bit assembly, but the thing was 8MHz, and I only blinked an LED! :)
That's basically the CPU running at 1.024 Mhz. The video hardware is dumb, runs independent of the CPU, and just scans a region of memory to send pixels to the display. All software pushing pixels otherwise.
You are not wrong with the NES, C64 and other machines using a graphics chip with sprites and other hardware features to assist in various ways. But, quite a lot happened on the CPU.
BTW, this game is done on a 1Mhz 6809, all software pushing pixels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAKxa5C9jHY
(I would skip out to the middle somewhere in that video to get a sense of what is being done)
On that game specifically, it's a single frame buffer. Screen divided into two halves, each drawn while the display is delivering the other to the player.
I won't bother, because I've got a good retro hobby going and under control, but I want one of those. :D
After lots of lusting over them back when they where new (1) I managed to find a used gen 2 one a while back and just adore it. To me the gen 2 series devices are still one of the most beautiful gadgets ever designed, but I am a huge Sony fanboy so ymmv.
I rock a neon green version with a blazingly fast 1.6ghz Atom and crisp 1600x768 screen - its still quite usable like OP describes, runs fine with Lubuntu, though nowadays I only use it to play some DOSbox games once in a while.
An old review with specs details and pictures of gen 2: https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/sony-vaio-p-gen-2
(1) I forgot the name/url, but there was this kinda famous website of some shop in Hongkong that would import all these great - mostly Japan-only - laptops to the us/eu, even in often very rare configurations (umts etc). Maybe someone else on here remembers!?
It sounds like this person is just cheap (it's fine to be thrifty), but I'd rather spend a little more on hardware that doesn't get in my way of accessing medical information or communicating with others if that's my only method due to illness or medical conditions.
800 MILLI Hertz (0.8 Hz)! Now that is slow. <grin>
Actually 800 MHz is slow by today's standards, but it's a lot faster than the 4 MHz Z80 that my first computer used.
For instance the Atom x6200FE has a 1GHz base clock. According to its spec sheet it can’t even burst (while the higher-rated X6211E has a 1.2GHz base clock and can burst to 3).
Your problem’s more likely to be that it’s an Atom from 2008 (which implies lots of performance-related concerns, like being pre bay-trail and thus in-order), than it being 800 base / 1.3 burst.
I believe 0.8 Hz would be about par with the earliest electronic relay machines. So (assuming it doesn't take 10MW), just about useful to compute admiralty tables.
Like you, I was a bit disappointed when I realized that I wasn't about to read some half practical computing at 800mHz
Aside from my 2011 15 inch MacBook Pro which also had its issues, this has become my favorite laptop. I don't mind the small keyboard surprisingly, and I find myself getting light work and practice problems done while my wife and I watch TV.
The cons: video playback, the screen resolution, something about how the screen refreshes is also odd. 4gb max memory. I carry a dongle to use a generic usb-c charger.
The pros: Actual 10 hour battery life (mint xfce), and I can get 12 if I drop the screen brightness. Full size HDMI port. Great linux compatibility (from what I can tell). MicroSD expansion sits flush. Light and small, and I actually prefer 11-12 inch laptops now. Only costs $250 so I throw it in a bag if I'm going somewhere.
I get the fun around these devices and cyberdecks, and I have a couple raspberry pi projects, but at $250 for x64 processor and 4gb memory with a keyboard, screen and battery, it's not even a close call for me.
Despite costing sub-$300, its CPU is comparably powerful (according to Passmark) to the Vaio VGN-P588E's contemporary desktop CPU, the Intel Q6600. Of course few PCs in 2009 had 4GB of RAM at the time (to say nothing about the GPUs of the time).
The MT8183-based machine offers a surprisingly capable computing experience, allowing for simultaneous Meet presentation + JavaScript-heavy web application usage, all at that retro computing price point.
Where it ceases to feel like my X61, however, is in battery life. Where the X61 only lasts a few hours of heavy usage with a fresh battery, the MT8183 chugs along for 12+ hours.
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
The "Cadmium" distro (Debian based) seems to have some support for a "Duet" device, which I assume is the mt8183 based Lenovo Chromebook Duet. They say that the cameras, hw accelerated video decoding, and external video output do not work.
Hm, that is probably true. Didn't consider. So be it, wish the Ripcord author some luck!
> Ripcord is a desktop chat client for group-centric services like Slack and Discord. It provides a traditional compact desktop interface designed for power users. It's not built on top of web browser technology: it has a small resource footprint, responds quickly to input, and gets out of your way. Shareware is coming back, baby.
Some years of using this and I'm quite a fan. Voice works, but not streaming video, last I checked
Out of curiosity I've got CPU Frequency being polled periodically and updated in my taskbar, and the CPU spends a remarkable amount of time bouncing between ~600Mhz and ~800Mhz, because even when actively working, it's quite quiescent. Obviously compiling, running test suite, browsing etc. etc. will cause it to jump up to full speed (4.1Ghz with turbo, or there abouts).
One of the things I've found myself doing is paying a bit more attention to _what_ is consuming CPU resources when that frequency goes up. For example, I noticed that Zoom will randomly consume a couple of % of a CPU for about 20-30 seconds periodically. I know it also maintains some kind of notification hook to Zoom infrastructure. I don't need that persistent feature, so now I have a lightweight bash script that looks to see if I'm in a Webinar or Meeting, and if not, nukes zoom. The advantages are probably minimal, at best, but it took my fancy for whatever reason :)
in most cases, on modern hardware, limiting the frequency significantly below its nominal maximum will reduce battery life. for a fixed amount of work (e.g. parsing an HTML document), it is more efficient to complete the task as quickly as possible then return to a low-power state. the picture gets somewhat murkier when considering increased voltage requirements at higher clock speeds and certain fixed-wakeup workloads, but the majority of scheduler tuning for battery-powered devices over the past decade has been towards going to sleep as quickly as possible, even if that requires a high peak frequency.
One other thing I remember being especially problematic was those websites that had large footers and navbars. Medium was one of the main culprits. The navbar and footer covered a large portion of the small screen, leaving me unable to read more than a few lines at a time. Back then I had "fixed" it by making an extension that removed them from the DOM, but now I realize that uBlock origin supports a similar feature. I'm pleasantly surprised to see that there are others out there with a similar setup!
I recall running Eclipse and recompiling the Linux kernel on that device.
The magnesium body had no match at the time. I didn't even mind the purple color.
This is me typing on a work computer, but I don't count that. My computer is a phone.
Maybe a Surface? Or rather something like the new foldables?
It should emulate any 8 and 16 bit systems wells, even the GBA (which is 32 bit).
Also, on low end systems, solene@ from openbsd wrote a challenge on her personal site (gopher and gemini too) on keeping yourself on a single core device (grub/lilo option available just in case) and 512 mb of RAM at most.
N64 emulation may also be possible, however afaik it's a gamble whether accuracy is ok and games don't glitch all over.
Of course, mashing the gamepad—or the keyboard—is not good for hands. OpenTTD is indeed much more relaxing on the fingers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
Yes it was pretty limited and not quite useful yet for real work, but it shows what could be achieved on an 8-bit 2mhz CPU with less than 64K of useful memory.
Modern software is VERY bloated.
Personally, I would use the iPhone 3GS as the baseline minimal hardware that can support all of the must-have features of real-world software, because the 3GS was the first model capable of running the VoiceOver screen reader (in addition, of course, to all the other things it could do). But then, I'm sure I'm over-emphasizing the must-have feature that matters to me.
The form-factor is great; Sony's implementation isn't. The keyboard is poor, the trackpoint not very responsive or accurate. (And I like Trackpoints!)
Mine is maxed out with 2GB of RAM and a dual-core Atom, and Intel Poulsbo GPU (GMA500). The author of this piece is running the screen at way below its true res of 1600x768. Not a typo: it's a high-DPI letterbox ultra-widescreen.
It came with Win10. It was unusable; 10-15min to boot and log in.
I tried Xubuntu $CURRENT then – maybe 18.04. Very poor; ~8min to boot and login.
It just about manages to run Windows 7 ThinPC, the "thin client" version of Win7. It works but it's not responsive. I am considering downgrading to TinyXP.
I have tried multiple Linuxes:
• Xubuntu (too heavy: used lots of RAM at idle, very slow)
• Devuan + Xfce (usable, took 250-300MB RAM, a bit sluggish)
• Crunchbang++ (worked, responsive, but surprising memory footprint of over 200MB)
• MX Linux (worked fairly well, looked weird, felt clunky; adjusted screen DPI & it broke the desktop cosmetically: text didn't fit inside buttons, etc.)
Currently it runs Raspberry Pi Desktop, x86 edition. This is surprisingly good. It idles at a bit under 200MB of RAM, LXDE (now PIXEL) works well and supports a vertical taskbar that works well. Screen DPI can be scaled. Quite snappy.
I tried installing Xfce and it substantially increased RAM usage, to circa 350MB — nearly double. This was an unpleasant surprise: the RasPi folks have cut Debian down hard and I am impressed.
I am playing with antiX in VBox as I type this (no, not on the Vaio P) and it's weird but it does work well, and it's idling, after a full update, at an amazing 106MB of RAM. I may try this on the Vaio.
I wish I could get the Vaio's GPU working but no modern Linux can run the ancient Pouslbo drivers.
Its a rather interesting and extreme solution to endless bike shedding arguments. Should "our" editor be vim or emacs? Well anyone who disagrees with me is literally Hitler so we're going to use XYZ and you'll like it or go away. That's an interesting strategy to save time on eternal discussions.
I guess I assumed it would be a stronger connection, given that the distro is called "anti"-X and it's "anti"-facist, that it would have some explicit tor integration or something.
>>antiX is not anti politics, it is anti fascist politics. Politics is everywhere whether you like it or not. Put simply, we do not tolerate politics or people spreading hate/prejudice/violence against people because of their skin colour, race, religion (or none), gender, sexuality.
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=92729#c56 (relevant discussion is collapsed)
threat: comment 56; "IT-fascism": 58,60,61
On a small screen a tiling window manager is a must IMHO. No space wasted by bars or widgets, and any app can be full screen at the touch of a button.
The only reason I stopped was it developed a whine in the CPU fan that was particularly annoying.
I was confused by the constant use of "we" in the writing here and at first assumed this person was sharing the netbook with multiple other people. By the end I came to realize it was something more like a split personality usage? I found it odd.
That said, with maxed out RAM and a cheap SSD they were 'enough' and they came in some neat formfactors. I had the Lenovo S10 netbook, but the 1024x600 was very hard to live with. They didn't offer anything special in the way of power savings or battery life, either.
For the price, a 2-3 year old Dell or HP laptop was a better choice, and then the iPad came out...
I installed a few applications including a web browser but then got bored. There is nothing a modern computer cannot do what it does, and miles better. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it TBH. I made the purchase based on an impulse and now I'm paying for it. Fortunately it didn't cost too much.
Best part is it doesn’t have any work stuff on it, so I can do my own light tasks on it without any temptation (due to inability) to have work leak into that time. That’s worth a multiple of the purchase price by itself.
Well, Rust is a language primarily targeted at web developers after all.
Anyway nice to see "old" machines getting by.
-- sent next to my thinkpad x61
Hmm I knew at least one person who did it.. Yes, it's exactly how you'd imagine.
Was using Linux Mint and Bluefish/Kate text editor.
Once you got hacktranslated Japanese ROMs for old 8 and 16 bit systems (even the weird ones), you woudn't need modern gaming at all.
I wish Apple restarts soon their slim line like the original MacBook Air (the envelope one!) and 12” Macbook.
I lost touch with all the groups I who use Slack for organizing.
Am i missing something? Are we in Cryptonomicon-style Relatively Independent Sub-Totality mode non-ironically now?
I will say it's use in that article is rather jarring however.
edit: Looking it up, it appear this has a fancy name, encompassing the royal we, the editorial we, and more: Nosism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosism
But diagnosing over the Internet, while a fun pass time for the diagnoser (diagnostician?), is very unreliable.
Sometimes in science, people use the collective “we” in their writing. But like you say, the OP is using royal “we”, so I don’t think scientific writing is the reason either.
It's Hacker News. This kind of stuff is pretty normal here.
I just kept picturing someone creepily talking to their hairless cat while saying 'we'
It's at least less jarring than illeism, where one refers to oneself in the third person, I suppose...
> So this thing’s main job is to help us stay off our phone, since touch screens are the hardest on the health of our hands.
So lets heal this small children hands with this small keyboard :-)