Old Computer Challenge

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.

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.

https://lwn.net/Articles/209301/

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!"

Just write "small" you weirdos.

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?

Eye of the beholder and all…

- 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.

I do like this years challenge, 'hand-make something' as that is always a good thing to do.

Ok I’m out of ideas.

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).

What's the specs and what apps are you running?

I mostly run a web browser, some terminal emulators and a mail reader.

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...

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.