Old Computer Challenge, Day 4

I think everyone else is finishing today; I've got a few left to go. Was pretty busy with work today, so didn't do *that* much on this computer today.

Honorable Mention

I want to make a shout-out to Jirka¹, who is emphatically *not* participating in the Old Computer Challenge, because their every day computer is an SGI O2, a Unix workstation from ~1997, with 1 core and 256MB of RAM. Salute!

=>Jirka: Not a Retro Challenge (gopher)

Stuff I noticed, stuff I missed

Gomuks² is a TUI Matrix client, which I've been using for some of my group chats, and it is *very good*. I'm really impressed with the depth of features that it offers, very close to feature parity with Element, and I don’t think even any of the graphical desktop clients offer that. I’m still having one problem with it, which is that one person in each of my encrypted chats, not the same person, has messages I can’t decrypt. I'm pretty sure I could export keys from Element to solve this problem, but it’s too much of a hassle fr right now.

Profanity³ is a TUI XMPP client that I’m using for my other group chats. It’s good too, but I didn't get mine built with OMEMO, so I can’t tell how good it is with encryption, and none of my group chats are encrypted.

I tried playing Dungeon Crawl (DCSS). As I expected, tiles mode was playable, but slow enough to be annoying; ASCII (actually, Unicode) mode was fine. Splatted a couple of vampire enchanters in the early dungeon.

I also went ahead and browsed Usenet; it was fine.

Tricky bit – moving some books I downloaded on this machine onto my Kobo. I ended up using Thunar (XFCE file manager) rather than try to figure out whether it was using USB mass storage or MTP and puzzling out devices, FUSE commands, and mount points accordingly. Thunar used about as much memory as Emacs, and I’m sure it's svelte compared to Nautilus.

=>Gomuks (WWW)

=>Profanity (WWW)

Real Nerd Shit

Fiddled around with memory and swap settings a bit. I actually set up a bigger zram device for swap, equal to half of the RAM I had allocated for the device, or 256MB. It’s faster, but it still needs to swap to disk in order to handle my workload without things (like Emacs) falling prey to the userspace OOM-killer. I set the on-disk swap to really low priority, so hopefully it’s used for less-frequently needed things. I do wonder if zswap would be much faster with two cores…

This is what the memory situation looks like...

```

[jmcbray@camilla ~]$ swapon --show

```

NAME       TYPE        SIZE   USED PRIO

```

/dev/zram0 partition   233M 106.2M  100

```

/var/swap  file      511.9M 144.2M  500

```

[jmcbray@camilla ~]$ free -h

```

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available

```

Mem:           466Mi       355Mi        13Mi        25Mi        97Mi        73Mi

```

Swap:          744Mi       256Mi       488Mi

Tentative conclusion

Really, using the Old Computer hasn't affected things very much except for ruling out Web Platform technologies, which I try to avoid as much as I can, anyway. But it's a pain in the butt, given how much uses Web Platform these days, instant messengers being the worst example.