Note: yes, I shamelessly stole the title for this post from Artemis[1].
We're a couple of days in and due to work and illness, I haven't nearly done as much as I initially hoped to do in this week. Yet, the core of the blue machine still hums along, happily but vociferously, waiting to be of service.
Happy you're here to read along.
Talking about hums, one of the first observations after using this 23 year old system is its physicality: interacting with the laptop this way is not something I had given much thought before the challenge but I have now. Because it's noisy: it constantly purrs, with some intermittent hard drive clicks that make you wonder if it's feeling alright. The screen has lost so much of its brightness that often, I have to get really up close to even read the text. The keyboard feels a bit loose but, other than that, allows for a nice typing experience. When I open the CD drive, it seems to momentarily clamp onto the device, as if it doesn't want to let go and open up. The battery is mostly wasted but surprisingly still good enough to last about an hour on some light usage. It suddenly defines my available time to get things done if I don't want to lug around the charger everywhere. Everything about its hardware imposes strict limits, but is that a bad thing?
At face value, these characteristics and boundaries seem perhaps more annoying than anything else, but not to me. I treasure things like this. In a way, it brings with it a more personal way of computing. These physical aspects cannot be emulated on a modern computer: they add to the experience immensely. It feels alive. In the age of VR and AI, I hope that the pleasure of interacting with such physical devices is something that doesn't get lost.
This must almost be like a rite of passage for people participating in the OCC, but as part of this challenge, I've come to face the modern web and felt - naturally - dissapointed. I didn't need the OC challenge to tell me that. In the past, I've often chosen to use web interfaces instead of native applications, mostly due to privacy but also out of comfort and cross-device access. This is now biting me in the ass in a big way. Javascript feels like an unwanted guest, popping up way too often in the corner of town I frequent. Most websites just choose to not participate, insinuating that my old computer is simply incompatible with the modern web. Not only that, but it tries to push the guilt onto you: enable JS or I don't releveal myself to you. Update your browser to see what I have to say.
Of course, the modern web has this logic upside down. It's not the computer that is too old to work with the modern web, it that the modern web is being utterly hostile towards old computers. Things have moved forward, but not in a good way. Reliance on the web is not desired anymore, it's a liability. Let's change that.
🎶 story time with ghost 🎵
I got this iBook G3 for free, and I really need to thank the Fediverse for it :) It all started with a boosted mastodon post (which is unfortunately not available anymore) from someone who had quite a large collection of vintage Apple hardware. For personal reasons, he wanted to part ways with his collection and was looking for someone who could give these beautiful devices a new and loving home[2]. Incredibly, he didn't want any money for it - the only condition was that the new owner would be able to take everything all at once.
I remember thinking how rare it is for someone to have so many well-preserved Macs and I kept on browsing the photos on the mini-website he created for this, until... I saw that his collection was available for pick-up about 15 minutes from where I live! With no time to lose, I sent a text to one of my best friends - who also loves old hardware - and one thing led to another... 2 days later, we were the proud owners of a LOT of Apple hardware and, honestly, we couldn't be happier.
Not everything worked but plenty still did and regardless, it was a goldmine for tinkerers and hackers like us. My friend still has half of his office space filled with this hardware (I don't have the space) and I regularly go over and play with it, but decided to take this iBook G3 with me a few months ago, to see what I could do with it.
For months I didn't do that much with it but finally, it has found its purpose for the Old Computer Challenge.
While the wifi adapter from the iBook is supported out of the box (using the wi driver, see wi.4[3]), it only supports WEP. I could have potentially set up a separate WEP network but instead, chose to use a wireless USB dongle that I knew is supported natively by OpenBSD (for those curious, I have the Edimax EW-7811Un V2, which uses a Realtek chip that is supported by the urtwn[4] driver).
After connecting this (tiny) USB dongle, I could easily set up wireless by configuring my urwtn0 device in the usual way:
doas ifconfig urwtn0 nwidwpakey
This device has a ATI graphics card and while Xorg seemed to work fine initially, it (started?) to struggle on subsequent boots with a mangled login screen in X. I found a few reports that ATI Radeon-based machines sometimes have issues and that disabling hardware acceleration could help. And indeed, it did!
I fixed it by creating /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-device.conf with the following:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "ati"
Option "NoAccel" "true"
EndSectionI also wanted to install my usual gemini/gopher browser, Lagrange, but that ended up being a bit of a challenge. There is a package available in OpenBSD 7.3 but unfortunately, there is an issue where not all of the assets are in the right place so lagrange errors when it's started.
Of course, we also have the net/lagrange port but my first attempt left my poor system compile for a full 2 days, before erroring out on building cmake. Additionally, just unpacking the ports tree already takes my disk usage up to 80% and actually building something with dependencies is really not an option with my available disk space.
I have enabled FETCH_PACKAGES=yes so that improves things a bit but still, installing Lagrange might be a bit too ambitious for this system. I've since looked into gplaces[5], which is a lot more lightweight but does its job nicely.
So far, I've made this into quite a usable laptop:
OpenBSD is treating me fantastically, and I'm enjoying the system more and more every day. Apart from that, the fact that neither go or rust works on OpenBSD/macppc, does influence things:
It does make you take things not for granted. I have to choose my tools carefully, but then again it lines up nicely with how I wanted to approach this in a minimalist way.
You know how they say that one should read books that have been around for a long time, as they have proven their worth and often contain timeless wisdom? "Read the classics" and so on.
What if we apply that to software? Use tools that have been around for a long time, software that has been tested thoroughly, apps that have been built from the ground up with low complexity.
These tools still provide immense value. They work - on new but also on old hardware, and they can generally be trusted. I'm definitely not saying that new software can never be good, but we need to be more selective in what we use to be productive, to be creative or to simply have fun.
It even applies to hardware. Old things are often easier to repair, empowering the end user. They tend to last longer as well, compared to modern hardware, perhaps planned obsolescence wasn't yet that pervasive in the industry. I will take a bulky laptop over a thin one, if it means I can easily replace my own memory, CPU, hard drive or keyboard.
Thank god we stopped writing software in the 90s. Pretty soon we'll have all the bugs out.
source: @matthew_d_green[6]
Alright, that's it for now. Talk soon!
=> [1] Life at 800MHz | [2] Vintage Apple hardware | [3] wi.4 manpage | [4] urtwn.4 manpage | [5] gplaces, a simple terminal based Gemini client | [6] @matthew_d_green on twitter
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