23 ms·

Life at 800 MHz

260 points by blackhole 5y ago

userbinator 5y ago
A 733MHz Pentium III with 512MB of RAM (upgraded a few times; originally 128MB) was my daily driver for a long time, and if I stayed away from the web-based stuff, would probably be quite usable for a lot of day-to-day things today as well, including native software development.
morganvachon 5y ago
Out of curiosity I checked eBay to see the going rate for this particular portable; of the two listed, one has a starting price of $350 and I watched the other go from a $99 bid to $150+ in an hour. Apart from the quirkiness or the need to replace one's recently dead machine, I can't wrap my head around such a high price for such low performance. For a little more than the higher priced unit, one can get a Gemini PDA or similar device with a more modern and faster processor, and come out even more portable and with excellent battery life (though I did note the author's need for a non-touchscreen device due to a handicap, the touchscreen on a modern portable doesn't have to be used if there's another pointing device).
- lproven 5y ago
  I have one. Out of curiosity, mainly. 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.
numlock86 5y ago
I have once clocked my CPU down to 400 MHz for a week or so (i7-7700K I think it was) when the pump of my cooling loop died to keep it below 100°C, although it would have throttled down on its own once at thermal limits. Other than games running terrible (of course, duh) I couldn't really tell much of a difference. Some things were slower like compiling code or things like 7z but it didn't feel like a throwback to the late 90s because what made computers slow those days were HDDs. Oh, and there is GPU acceleration for so many things these days ... like watching 4K videos was no problem at all.
BTCOG 5y ago
I ran these specs or a very close approximation as a daily driver for many years on a couple Gateway Atom netbooks. I consistently ran Debian unstable (Sid) with minimal window managers and desktop environments from 2011-2015 or so with mostly i686-PAE kernels. 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.
zwayhowder 5y ago
I recently spent a fortnight using a 2009ish Asus EeePC with a whopping 2Gb of RAM. It wasn't terrible running Manjaro Linux i3. For all the browsing social media it was basically the same experience as the author. But for a handy note taking and anki machine by my bed it was perfect. I could type out notes on its almost full sized keyboard without distraction. I could review audio and picture cards just as fast as on my phone, but no danger of a notification or "accidently" opening facebook. 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.
Starlevel001 5y ago
> (Shoutout to lib.rs btw for offering a rust crate database that actually works without javascript. We have no idea what crates.io thinks it makes sense to require javascript to look up packages but here we are.) Well, Rust is a language primarily targeted at web developers after all.
yeetaccount4 5y ago
I really wish someone like System76 would take this concept farther, like a HappyHacking style keyboard layout, no fan, no trackpad (clit mouse OK), and a focus on durability and repairability. IP67/68 would be cool. Sell the low specs as a feature for the ADHD-type to not do too many flashy light things, and for hobbyists to see what they can squeeze out of it.
hartator 5y ago
I love small form laptops! I wish Apple restarts soon their slim line like the original MacBook Air (the envelope one!) and 12” Macbook.
eternityforest 5y ago
That's some real dedication. I would have just gotten a tablet and a keyboard case.
lproven 5y ago
I have one of these laptops. 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.
deleted 5y ago
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Scroph 5y ago
Loved this, I found myself nodding along as I was reading the article. I had a similar setup a few years ago when I was still studying and this brought back a lot of memories. In my case it was a Compaq Mini with a 32 bit Slitaz install running on a similarly specced Atom CPU and 1 gig of RAM. Firefox was usable when combined with the noscript extension, but like you I limited myself to lightweight websites and to the mobile alternatives of the heavy ones. I even had the Audacious* Winamp skin that you mentioned in the blog post. 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!
akoster 5y ago
Nice post - Reminds me of my experiences using an IBM Thinkpad T42 (2GB RAM, 1.6 GHz single core CPU) and Raspberry Pi Model B (512MB RAM, 700MHz single core CPU), quite a bit of compilation required these days due to a lack of binaries but still a fun exercise on a weekend
simonblack 5y ago
Life at 800mHz 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.
- tagoregrtst 5y ago
  I saw that! 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
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- masklinn 5y ago
  It’s not even necessarily that low depending on the standards you apply / references you use, lots of chips have base clocks which are quite low especially for low-power CPUs or SoC. 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.
hprotagonist 5y ago
This is now the second or third author i’ve found this year who uses the royal we. Am i missing something? Are we in Cryptonomicon-style Relatively Independent Sub-Totality mode non-ironically now?
- rsynnott 5y ago
  Notoriously, Margaret Thatcher used the royal/singular we once ("we have become a grandmother"), so it's not reserved strictly for monarchs. It's at least less jarring than illeism, where one refers to oneself in the third person, I suppose...
- codetrotter 5y ago
  I figured maybe the author used they/them as their pronouns. But the main page has some testimonials referring to “she”. So idk what’s up with the royal “we”. 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.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    Assuming they're non native it could be a butchered idiom from scientific writing.
  - rob74 5y ago
    I'm not a native speaker, but AFAIK if you use "they" to avoid specifying a gender, it's "singular they" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they), so using the first person plural still doesn't really make sense...
  - djrogers 5y ago
    First person pronouns aren't gendered, so even if this were a they/them using person, the darren.rogers@cybereason.com' doesn't make sense. What it did do was distract form the blog post, to the point that I stopped reading it. I just kept picturing someone creepily talking to their hairless cat while saying 'we'
  - 5y ago
_benj 5y ago
This is more along the lines of my “vintage”. 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 :)
- jerf 5y ago
  "Thanks kind of feel left out when folk here start remembering their c64 and Ataris and whatnot! My first computer was a celeron 500MHz..." 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.
  - actuallyalys 5y ago
    >I used the same basic paradigm on that as I'm using now. Emacs, browser, terminal windows, MP3 player. 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. [0]: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
  - prmoustache 5y ago
dijit 5y ago
> Technically Gentoo is also in the running, but can you imagine trying to compile all your packages from scratch on a system that benchmarks worse than a raspberry pi 3? 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. https://gpd.hk/gpdp2max2022 https://gpd.hk/gpdp2max2022
- Mystlix 5y ago
  Compiling your own software is a really humbling experience. When it takes way more time to compile a browser than a full fledged OS or you find out that seemingly simple programs need to pull a mind boggling amount of dependencies you really start to question the state of the software world
  - dijit 5y ago
    I think the main reason browsers are so extremely slow to compile is the heavy templating. 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...
    - mwcampbell 5y ago
      > 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-pc/ 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.
birdman3131 5y ago
"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." 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?
- coldtea 5y ago
  Smartphones are hell for thumbs and index fingers
- drzaiusapelord 5y ago
  "our" is not the royal we here, this person refers to themselves with a plural sounding pronoun for identity reasons. They are not making a statement about ergonomics generally even though of course I can see how that can be confusing. 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.
- alexjplant 5y ago
  I can only speak for myself but I find using a smartphone upright one-handed for longer than a few minutes uncomfortable because of the bizarre positions it forces my fingers and palms into. It's a flat, slate-like object and our hands are designed to grip round things that protrude into our palms. I also need to keep my thumb free to use the touchscreen and my hands are on the smaller side so I end up balancing it on a protruding pinky and contorting the inside back edge of my hand. It's no problem for me to use two hands or hold it in a screen-up orientation but holding it in front of me for more than a minute isn't fun (despite having decent dexterity and grip strength from deadlifting, typing, playing instruments, etc).
  - Pxtl 5y ago
    I do wish landscape typing hadn't gradually gone by the wayside. I used to be a firm landscape-typer and found it much more comfortable for my hands, but I've accepted that phones just aren't designed for it anymore - too often the keyboard fills too much of the screen to see the textbox adequately.
ale42 5y ago
Too bad, reading the title I was hoping for some UHF mystery signals ;-)
traverseda 5y ago
I don't understand what makes the "antiX" linux distro they're using "proudly antifascist".
- BTCOG 5y ago
  The idea behind it is using only free software, and nothing non-free. The guy who runs AntiX goes by the username Anticapitalista and the theme is not supporting corporate computer systems and consumerist cruft.
- malf 5y ago
  They write it on their web page. This makes people who are “not fascist, just anti-anti-fascist” out themselves.
  - Minor49er 5y ago
    I checked out antixlinux.com to see and they don't explain it on the front page, About page, or on their FAQ
  - traverseda 5y ago
    I did poke around a bit to try and see if there was an explanation, or any explicitly anti-fascist features. I guess it is just intended as some kind of in-group identifying thing? I had thought maybe they were implying systemd was facist, as they stress that the distro doesn't use systemd. 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.
    - tandymodel100 5y ago
      I think the subtext is some people associated systemd opposition to right wing politics (not fully unfounded if I understand) so the maintainers wanted to get out ahead of it when releasing another distro without systemd
      - 5y ago
marttt 5y ago
The 1000x480 resolution seems interesting. Maybe this machine would make a good single-purpose device for writing. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4721645 2: https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/xmonad_layouts_for_netbooks/ https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/xmonad_layouts_for_netbooks/ 3: https://usesthis.com/interviews/nils.m.holm/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/nils.m.holm/
- marttt 5y ago
  Some more great musings on actually using low-level hardware (inspired by Nils M. Holm's work and setup): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292613
api 5y ago
When these discussions come up I routinely post this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) 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.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  This comment seems somewhat at odds with one that you posted a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29899933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29899933 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.
  - api 5y ago
    I think both comments are true. Take something as lean as GEOS and upgrade it to support 5K displays, HDR color, unicode, etc., and I still think it would be several orders of magnitude smaller and faster than most of today's software.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
mwcampbell 5y ago
Is it truly necessary to use such an archaic laptop to get the two essential features described at the beginning of the article: ultra-light weight and a trackpoint? I know the Surface Go 3 is light enough, but IIRC the type cover has a touchpad, not a trackpoint. In theory, with the ongoing miniaturization of electronics, there should be a modern option that meets these criteria. But of course, the mass-market nature of hardware means that there won't always be a current-generation device that is optimal for a disabled user like the author of this article.
- awiesenhofer 5y ago
  The Thinkpad X1 Nano would maybe fit the bill, 900g and a TrackPoint - though its quite a bit larger with its 13" screen.
  - boondaburrah 5y ago
    For a brief window of time around 2013 Acer made a really nice little core i5 11" laptop (Aspire V5-171). Mine still works but I'm upset that the mass market seems to think that size is only for refurb and chromebooks now.
- treesknees 5y ago
  This was my thought as well. Even an older MacBook Air can run Linux and is lightweight enough to carry around, if weight is an issue. 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.
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    A Vaio P is not a cheap option. They were expensive new and are kinda collectable so prices are high on eBay and other places compared to other laptops from the same time. It's also considerably smaller than even the 11" MBA, weighs half a pound less too. Remember how Steve Jobs pulled the MacBook Air out of a manilla envelope? The Vaio P was designed to be pulled out of a jacket pocket.
jmrm 5y ago
Some people doesn't know that, aside of media creation and consumption, we don't need so much power to do other things. 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.
- Jerrrry 5y ago
  My Acer Aspire 1 is still kicking with an external monitor. It was supposed to be a disposable laptop, it outlasted and persisted through everything else.
  - FranOntanaya 5y ago
    I still have my Samsung NC10, had it running an IRC bot until recently in power save mode with no fans. Opening a modern version of a browser is pretty revealing about how heavier the web has become though.
    - marttt 5y ago
      The NC10 was/is a great machine. Considering the dimensions, it had a remarkably good keyboard. I also liked the "fanless mode". It felt quite sturdy, and, iirc, you could open the screen all the way down, to 180 degrees. The one I had for some time did suffer from its symptomatic "white screen" issue, though. I did some writing on this machine, and I always felt really concentrated, quite possibly because of the small screen.
      - fogihujy 5y ago
        Seconding this. The NC10 was an amazing little thing for writing a lot when on the go. Too bad the white screen issues have killed most of them off by now.
southerntofu 5y ago
Glad you enjoy your life at 800 MHz! I appreciated your article although the plural form to address a single person (not the editorial "we") makes me uneasy for political considerations. 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"}]} Apparently, without a specific Accept header, crates.io thinks i want a JSON response for a crate lookup, not the homepage. Now i don't even remember why i was requesting this URL to start with (not in a script) but i don't understand the logic of that and the maintainers in the chatrooms seemed to consider it's not a bug. 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.
- FredPret 5y ago
  Sounds like that guy "All" from Zoolander
- BTCOG 5y ago
  AntiX is a wonderful systemd-free debian and now also has Sid. It's fast as fuck in usage. It's best left as a live system.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Uhm? https://antixlinux.com/antix-21-grup-yorum-released/ https://antixlinux.com/antix-21-grup-yorum-released/ https://antixlinux.com/antix-sid-iso-files-available/ https://antixlinux.com/antix-sid-iso-files-available/ If you feel too irked/offended by antiX there is also https://mxlinux.org/ https://mxlinux.org/
- gcr 5y ago
  I don't want to speculate about Artemis specifically, but first-person plural pronouns to refer to oneself typically isn't a "royal we" or anything like that, it's just what helps some folks feel comfortable, especially those who have DiD or who label themselves as plural. See https://www.reddit.com/r/plural/wiki/index https://www.reddit.com/r/plural/wiki/index (keywords: "plurality," "multiplicity," ...) I'm dating someone who refers to themself in the first person plural; it becomes perfectly natural pretty quick :)
marban 5y ago
I've owned almost all generations of these little machines (in addition to a Psion Netbook) and to this date they're among the design & form concepts that I miss the most. With the docking station and optional extended battery, PCMCIA, etc, they would adapt to any work environment, but even in bare-bones mode, you could get some actual work done — Which isn't always the case with an iPad unless you add bulky extras. I wish Apple had the balls that Sony had back then.
- awiesenhofer 5y ago
  What current devices would come closest do you think? Maybe a Surface? Or rather something like the new foldables?
  - marban 5y ago
    I'm not following hardware news really; Just buying whatever Apple cranks out. But I'm considering buying an early 90s Psion MX5 as a mobile typewriter.
  - wvenable 5y ago
    GPD's mini laptops are probably the closest.
danans 5y ago
I used the Vaio PCG-505 for a few years after college. I mostly worked as a freelancer, and it was surprisingly good as a work laptop. 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.
awiesenhofer 5y ago
Oh wow, great to see someone else still enjoying and even using a Vaio P! 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 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!?
- rospaya 5y ago
  I was in love with various tiny computers, had a Sharp Zaurus C760 for some time, it was a full Linux machine in a small clamshell. https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7162 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7162
- Rediscover 5y ago
  I used to go through dynamism.com and conics.net for importing Panasonic Let's Note and Sony laptops. Was it either of those that You were trying to recall?
allenbina 5y ago
Near the beginning of the pandemic I got frustrated with the trackpad and battery life of my lenovo yoga, so I bought a ~$250 asus l204m. 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.
analyte123 5y ago
A cozy laptop sounds nice. I bet IRC is more than fast enough, surprised it didn't get a mention. Also, if you just want to read some text on the web as fast as possible, w3m might be worth a shot. I use it in TTY2 all the time to look stuff up. Browser CDN caches like Decentraleyes or LocalCDN might also be worth trying especially with the mnestic set up: you would only have to load certain JS bundles once per session. >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 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.
- anthk 5y ago
  Check Bitlbee, you'll have IRC proxies for everything. Twitter, Slack, Telegram, anythiing Pidgin supports with the -purple build. 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 For the rest, Fluxbox+rox+lxappeanrance+nm-applet+xpdf. Ted and Gnumeric as a micro office-suite. Or Siag, if you don't need Unicode. On Chromium, it has a --light switch.
tryauuum 5y ago
Ah, to use an ancient device, be genuinely happy you won't waste time with video games only to eventually install some games that do run smoothly on this ancient CPU. I too have this experience
- anthk 5y ago
  Heh, with Mednafen/Slashem and IF Games that wasn't totally true ;). 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.
kraquepype 5y ago
Wow seeing XMMS brings back some memories. Before Pandora and streaming players, I had a machine under the bed that only ran XMMS to play music in the room. It allowed controls via game pad port, so there was a game pad in the room to play/pause/switch songs.
foobarbecue 5y ago
Sorry, I have to ask about the pronouns. Does the use of "we" imply that this laptop is shared by multiple people?
- foobarbecue 5y ago
  I mean, I suppose it's a reasonable pronoun for someone to use if they wish to be referred to as "they" ...
  - kmm 5y ago
    "They" is almost exclusively singular in those circumstances, regardless of its etymology. Similar to how "you" derives from the old English second person plural pronoun, but is in virtually all variants of modern English acceptable for the second person singular.
- Youden 5y ago
  I also found it confusing. I was wondering if it was this person's preferred pronoun but their Twitter [0] lists "she" as of "January 2022" and all the testimonials use "she" too [1]. [0]: https://twitter.com/EverfreeArtemis https://twitter.com/EverfreeArtemis [1}: https://artemis.sh/ https://artemis.sh/
- verytrivial 5y ago
  No, it's just a pronoun flex. Spend as many cycles on that as you think it deserves.
- deleted 5y ago
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- bityard 5y ago
  It's possible the author has multiple personalities, it's a good thing that they are running a multi-user operating system.
- emptybottle 5y ago
  The article is written to be read back in Gollum's voice
dt3ft 5y ago
Who are they and why are they using this old laptop? I wasn’t able to find anything in the article that mentions this.
anthk 5y ago
On Emulation, Mednafen should run fast if you set the right core for SNES, avoid any opengl and shader output, and compile it yourself with "-march=native -O3" and the rest of CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS. 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.
grimgrin 5y ago
> Discord on the other hand has a big problem: using a third party client is bannable Hm, that is probably true. Didn't consider. So be it, wish the Ripcord author some luck! https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ > 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
Twirrim 5y ago
Via TLP on Linux, I've been capping my laptop's CPU (i7-8665U) to 800Mhz whenever I'm on battery. 800Mhz on a relatively modern CPU is quite remarkably fast and sufficient for most things. 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 :)
- anthk 5y ago
  More than nuking, send kill -STOP to the zoom PID. To resume it, kill -CONT.
- Hello71 5y ago
  > Via TLP on Linux, I've been capping my laptop's CPU (i7-8665U) to 800Mhz whenever I'm on battery. 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.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
I used a similar computer as my daily driver for half a year. I lost touch with all the groups I who use Slack for organizing.
aidenn0 5y ago
I notice IceWM gets mentioned here; I'm always looking for a good environment to run for my VNC sessions. Right now I'm using FVWM, can anyone comment on pros/cons of switching to Ice?
hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
I have a PowerBook G4 with upgraded memory. The only caveat is the power cell that gets hot quickly so I have to wire power in everytime. 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.
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smm11 5y ago
I've got an XPS that I never turn on, an S21 phone that I use sparingly, and a USB-C to HDMI adapter at home that lets me turn my phone into my desktop computer (Dex). This is me typing on a work computer, but I don't count that. My computer is a phone.
settrans 5y ago
Despite being (ostensibly) state-of-the-art technology, I feel similarly about my 2021-vintage MediaTek MT8183-powered Chromebook. 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.
- jdmoreira 5y ago
  Interesting. Can you run mainline linux on this machine? I don't want to deal with ChromeOS
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    Maybe? mt8183 seems to be one of the better supported mainline Linux SoCs. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/arch/arm64/boot/dts/mediatek 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. https://github.com/Maccraft123/Cadmium https://github.com/Maccraft123/Cadmium
sokoloff 5y ago
I bought a Chromebook 4 on Black Friday (Celeron N4000, 1.1 GHz, $90 then, $120 now) and similar to the author, I find it pretty useful but sometimes requiring patience. 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.
swiftcoder 5y ago
I do wish that more laptop vendors would consider the really-thin-and-light market. There used to be all sorts of weird pocket/palm PCs available in the sub-2lb range, but I guess that phones and tablets have pretty much canibalised the market.
- jamesgeck0 5y ago
  The Surface Go is nice. Tablet form factor, but it's an actual PC, albeit with one of the slowest modern laptop chipsets available.
- wildzzz 5y ago
  There are plenty of 10in Chromebooks out there, some can be setup to run Linux easily. I think some of the Acer models are below 2lbs. Other than that, there are some little 6 and 7in mini netbooks but they aren't cheap. You might as well just buy a decent phone or tablet for that price. I think the netbook phase was a means to an end where we now have very small, capable PCs in our pockets at all times.
hit8run 5y ago
I like the new 16inch MacBook Pro but for sure prefer my iMac Pro and am looking forward to replace it with something new presented this year. Life is too short for crappy hardware.
aasasd 5y ago
Regarding games: PS1 games may run with PCSX-Reloaded aka PCSXR (the most-current-before-Retroarch fork of PCSX)—if the machine has any 3D acceleration. However, Retroarch's version is probably out, their requirements are higher. 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.
bluedino 5y ago
Wow. Atoms were slow when they were new. 2-4 times slower than a E5300 Core 2 Duo or whatever was common in 2009. 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...
missed-pos 5y ago
The device referred to in the article gave me the idea to buy/make such a lightweight device with which you can surf the Internet, chat via XMPP, use e-mail, but at the same time receive calls and SMS. Also the device needs to run for a long time (ARM?) Sounds like something that can be done on a Raspberry Pi, but I'm not sure. It would be a good replacement for the phone, to be honest. It would be possible, of course, to take a simple phone for calls and SMS, but I recently read an article about the fact that such phones can have backdoors. In general, it would be cool to refuse calls completely, but unfortunately there are people who do not have other options. Besides, I go to places where the Internet does not work. In general, are there such devices in the real world that meet the above requirements?
DwnVoteHoneyPot 5y ago
What is the allure and purpose of going back to 800 Mhz? I mean I did it myself this week, but was frustrated enough to think it's a really dumb idea, waste of time. I can't even articulate why I did it in the first place. 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?
- MisterTea 5y ago
  > Why do we even try? Depends on how hard you want to try or compromise on.
- freebreakfast 5y ago
  Change your workflow. You cannot expect a less powerful system to perform the same as a more powerful system. 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.
  - DwnVoteHoneyPot 5y ago
    Thanks for the good suggestions. I'll try them out if I ever find a reason to try again!
tandav 5y ago
If you live in terminal you can ssh into server from smartphone, I do this often
emptyparadise 5y ago
I love this laptop's form factor.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
A girlfriend of mine had surgery on both wrists. 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-professional-individual.html https://www.nuance.com/dragon/businesbs-solutions/dragon-pro...
- throwanem 5y ago
  You refer to Tavis Rudd's PyCon 2013 demo: https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI
- bduerst 5y ago
  Did your GF or friend ever consider using foot pedals at all? I knew a programmer once who used various foot pedal combinations for different punctuation marks and tabs.
  - ThinkBeat 5y ago
    yes. 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.
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      Have you considered buying a USB gamepad and putting it on the floor?
seqizz 5y ago
> Technically Gentoo is also in the running, but can you imagine trying to compile all your packages from scratch on a system that benchmarks worse than a raspberry pi 3? Hmm I knew at least one person who did it.. Yes, it's exactly how you'd imagine.
- Narishma 5y ago
  I initially started using Gentoo on a Pentium 166 laptop with 64MB of RAM in the early 2000s. It was pretty usable after the couple of days it took to install everything.
agumonkey 5y ago
Oh I've been looking for a similar Sony VAIO but that was packing a Core 2 Duo .. there's just so many Sony laptops I could never find which model it was (college prof used that on trips). Anyway nice to see "old" machines getting by. -- sent next to my thinkpad x61
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jcun4128 5y ago
This computer reminds me of my fondness for the Compaq Presario 615dx a little higher spec, but it was that kind of computer the inch-thick ones. That laptop had a really nice keyboard imo. Was using Linux Mint and Bluefish/Kate text editor.

260 points by blackhole 5y ago

A 733MHz Pentium III with 512MB of RAM (upgraded a few times; originally 128MB) was my daily driver for a long time, and if I stayed away from the web-based stuff, would probably be quite usable for a lot of day-to-day things today as well, including native software development.

morganvachon 5y ago

Out of curiosity I checked eBay to see the going rate for this particular portable; of the two listed, one has a starting price of $350 and I watched the other go from a $99 bid to $150+ in an hour. Apart from the quirkiness or the need to replace one's recently dead machine, I can't wrap my head around such a high price for such low performance. For a little more than the higher priced unit, one can get a Gemini PDA or similar device with a more modern and faster processor, and come out even more portable and with excellent battery life (though I did note the author's need for a non-touchscreen device due to a handicap, the touchscreen on a modern portable doesn't have to be used if there's another pointing device).

lproven 5y ago
I have one. Out of curiosity, mainly. 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.

numlock86 5y ago

I have once clocked my CPU down to 400 MHz for a week or so (i7-7700K I think it was) when the pump of my cooling loop died to keep it below 100°C, although it would have throttled down on its own once at thermal limits. Other than games running terrible (of course, duh) I couldn't really tell much of a difference. Some things were slower like compiling code or things like 7z but it didn't feel like a throwback to the late 90s because what made computers slow those days were HDDs. Oh, and there is GPU acceleration for so many things these days ... like watching 4K videos was no problem at all.

BTCOG 5y ago

I ran these specs or a very close approximation as a daily driver for many years on a couple Gateway Atom netbooks. I consistently ran Debian unstable (Sid) with minimal window managers and desktop environments from 2011-2015 or so with mostly i686-PAE kernels. 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.

zwayhowder 5y ago

I recently spent a fortnight using a 2009ish Asus EeePC with a whopping 2Gb of RAM. It wasn't terrible running Manjaro Linux i3. For all the browsing social media it was basically the same experience as the author. But for a handy note taking and anki machine by my bed it was perfect. I could type out notes on its almost full sized keyboard without distraction. I could review audio and picture cards just as fast as on my phone, but no danger of a notification or "accidently" opening facebook. 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.

Starlevel001 5y ago

> (Shoutout to lib.rs btw for offering a rust crate database that actually works without javascript. We have no idea what crates.io thinks it makes sense to require javascript to look up packages but here we are.) Well, Rust is a language primarily targeted at web developers after all.

yeetaccount4 5y ago

I really wish someone like System76 would take this concept farther, like a HappyHacking style keyboard layout, no fan, no trackpad (clit mouse OK), and a focus on durability and repairability. IP67/68 would be cool. Sell the low specs as a feature for the ADHD-type to not do too many flashy light things, and for hobbyists to see what they can squeeze out of it.

hartator 5y ago

I love small form laptops! I wish Apple restarts soon their slim line like the original MacBook Air (the envelope one!) and 12” Macbook.

eternityforest 5y ago

That's some real dedication. I would have just gotten a tablet and a keyboard case.

lproven 5y ago

I have one of these laptops. 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.

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Scroph 5y ago

Loved this, I found myself nodding along as I was reading the article. I had a similar setup a few years ago when I was still studying and this brought back a lot of memories. In my case it was a Compaq Mini with a 32 bit Slitaz install running on a similarly specced Atom CPU and 1 gig of RAM. Firefox was usable when combined with the noscript extension, but like you I limited myself to lightweight websites and to the mobile alternatives of the heavy ones. I even had the Audacious* Winamp skin that you mentioned in the blog post. 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!

akoster 5y ago

Nice post - Reminds me of my experiences using an IBM Thinkpad T42 (2GB RAM, 1.6 GHz single core CPU) and Raspberry Pi Model B (512MB RAM, 700MHz single core CPU), quite a bit of compilation required these days due to a lack of binaries but still a fun exercise on a weekend

simonblack 5y ago

Life at 800mHz 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.

tagoregrtst 5y ago
I saw that! 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
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masklinn 5y ago
It’s not even necessarily that low depending on the standards you apply / references you use, lots of chips have base clocks which are quite low especially for low-power CPUs or SoC. 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.

hprotagonist 5y ago

This is now the second or third author i’ve found this year who uses the royal we. Am i missing something? Are we in Cryptonomicon-style Relatively Independent Sub-Totality mode non-ironically now?

rsynnott 5y ago
Notoriously, Margaret Thatcher used the royal/singular we once ("we have become a grandmother"), so it's not reserved strictly for monarchs. It's at least less jarring than illeism, where one refers to oneself in the third person, I suppose...
codetrotter 5y ago
I figured maybe the author used they/them as their pronouns. But the main page has some testimonials referring to “she”. So idk what’s up with the royal “we”. 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.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Assuming they're non native it could be a butchered idiom from scientific writing.
- rob74 5y ago
  I'm not a native speaker, but AFAIK if you use "they" to avoid specifying a gender, it's "singular they" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they), so using the first person plural still doesn't really make sense...
- djrogers 5y ago
  First person pronouns aren't gendered, so even if this were a they/them using person, the darren.rogers@cybereason.com' doesn't make sense. What it did do was distract form the blog post, to the point that I stopped reading it. I just kept picturing someone creepily talking to their hairless cat while saying 'we'
- 5y ago

_benj 5y ago

This is more along the lines of my “vintage”. 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 :)

jerf 5y ago
"Thanks kind of feel left out when folk here start remembering their c64 and Ataris and whatnot! My first computer was a celeron 500MHz..." 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.
- actuallyalys 5y ago
  >I used the same basic paradigm on that as I'm using now. Emacs, browser, terminal windows, MP3 player. 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. [0]: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
- prmoustache 5y ago

dijit 5y ago

> Technically Gentoo is also in the running, but can you imagine trying to compile all your packages from scratch on a system that benchmarks worse than a raspberry pi 3? 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. https://gpd.hk/gpdp2max2022 https://gpd.hk/gpdp2max2022

Mystlix 5y ago
Compiling your own software is a really humbling experience. When it takes way more time to compile a browser than a full fledged OS or you find out that seemingly simple programs need to pull a mind boggling amount of dependencies you really start to question the state of the software world
- dijit 5y ago
  I think the main reason browsers are so extremely slow to compile is the heavy templating. 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...
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    > 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-pc/ 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.

birdman3131 5y ago

"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." 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?

coldtea 5y ago
Smartphones are hell for thumbs and index fingers
drzaiusapelord 5y ago
"our" is not the royal we here, this person refers to themselves with a plural sounding pronoun for identity reasons. They are not making a statement about ergonomics generally even though of course I can see how that can be confusing. 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.
alexjplant 5y ago
I can only speak for myself but I find using a smartphone upright one-handed for longer than a few minutes uncomfortable because of the bizarre positions it forces my fingers and palms into. It's a flat, slate-like object and our hands are designed to grip round things that protrude into our palms. I also need to keep my thumb free to use the touchscreen and my hands are on the smaller side so I end up balancing it on a protruding pinky and contorting the inside back edge of my hand. It's no problem for me to use two hands or hold it in a screen-up orientation but holding it in front of me for more than a minute isn't fun (despite having decent dexterity and grip strength from deadlifting, typing, playing instruments, etc).
- Pxtl 5y ago
  I do wish landscape typing hadn't gradually gone by the wayside. I used to be a firm landscape-typer and found it much more comfortable for my hands, but I've accepted that phones just aren't designed for it anymore - too often the keyboard fills too much of the screen to see the textbox adequately.

ale42 5y ago

Too bad, reading the title I was hoping for some UHF mystery signals ;-)

traverseda 5y ago

I don't understand what makes the "antiX" linux distro they're using "proudly antifascist".

BTCOG 5y ago
The idea behind it is using only free software, and nothing non-free. The guy who runs AntiX goes by the username Anticapitalista and the theme is not supporting corporate computer systems and consumerist cruft.
malf 5y ago
They write it on their web page. This makes people who are “not fascist, just anti-anti-fascist” out themselves.
- Minor49er 5y ago
  I checked out antixlinux.com to see and they don't explain it on the front page, About page, or on their FAQ
- traverseda 5y ago
  I did poke around a bit to try and see if there was an explanation, or any explicitly anti-fascist features. I guess it is just intended as some kind of in-group identifying thing? I had thought maybe they were implying systemd was facist, as they stress that the distro doesn't use systemd. 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.
  - tandymodel100 5y ago
    I think the subtext is some people associated systemd opposition to right wing politics (not fully unfounded if I understand) so the maintainers wanted to get out ahead of it when releasing another distro without systemd
    - 5y ago

marttt 5y ago

The 1000x480 resolution seems interesting. Maybe this machine would make a good single-purpose device for writing. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4721645 2: https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/xmonad_layouts_for_netbooks/ https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/xmonad_layouts_for_netbooks/ 3: https://usesthis.com/interviews/nils.m.holm/ https://usesthis.com/interviews/nils.m.holm/

marttt 5y ago
Some more great musings on actually using low-level hardware (inspired by Nils M. Holm's work and setup): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292613

api 5y ago

When these discussions come up I routinely post this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) 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.

mwcampbell 5y ago
This comment seems somewhat at odds with one that you posted a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29899933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29899933 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.
- api 5y ago
  I think both comments are true. Take something as lean as GEOS and upgrade it to support 5K displays, HDR color, unicode, etc., and I still think it would be several orders of magnitude smaller and faster than most of today's software.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

mwcampbell 5y ago

Is it truly necessary to use such an archaic laptop to get the two essential features described at the beginning of the article: ultra-light weight and a trackpoint? I know the Surface Go 3 is light enough, but IIRC the type cover has a touchpad, not a trackpoint. In theory, with the ongoing miniaturization of electronics, there should be a modern option that meets these criteria. But of course, the mass-market nature of hardware means that there won't always be a current-generation device that is optimal for a disabled user like the author of this article.

awiesenhofer 5y ago
The Thinkpad X1 Nano would maybe fit the bill, 900g and a TrackPoint - though its quite a bit larger with its 13" screen.
- boondaburrah 5y ago
  For a brief window of time around 2013 Acer made a really nice little core i5 11" laptop (Aspire V5-171). Mine still works but I'm upset that the mass market seems to think that size is only for refurb and chromebooks now.
treesknees 5y ago
This was my thought as well. Even an older MacBook Air can run Linux and is lightweight enough to carry around, if weight is an issue. 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.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  A Vaio P is not a cheap option. They were expensive new and are kinda collectable so prices are high on eBay and other places compared to other laptops from the same time. It's also considerably smaller than even the 11" MBA, weighs half a pound less too. Remember how Steve Jobs pulled the MacBook Air out of a manilla envelope? The Vaio P was designed to be pulled out of a jacket pocket.

jmrm 5y ago

Some people doesn't know that, aside of media creation and consumption, we don't need so much power to do other things. 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.

Jerrrry 5y ago
My Acer Aspire 1 is still kicking with an external monitor. It was supposed to be a disposable laptop, it outlasted and persisted through everything else.
- FranOntanaya 5y ago
  I still have my Samsung NC10, had it running an IRC bot until recently in power save mode with no fans. Opening a modern version of a browser is pretty revealing about how heavier the web has become though.
  - marttt 5y ago
    The NC10 was/is a great machine. Considering the dimensions, it had a remarkably good keyboard. I also liked the "fanless mode". It felt quite sturdy, and, iirc, you could open the screen all the way down, to 180 degrees. The one I had for some time did suffer from its symptomatic "white screen" issue, though. I did some writing on this machine, and I always felt really concentrated, quite possibly because of the small screen.
    - fogihujy 5y ago
      Seconding this. The NC10 was an amazing little thing for writing a lot when on the go. Too bad the white screen issues have killed most of them off by now.

southerntofu 5y ago

Glad you enjoy your life at 800 MHz! I appreciated your article although the plural form to address a single person (not the editorial "we") makes me uneasy for political considerations. 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"}]} Apparently, without a specific Accept header, crates.io thinks i want a JSON response for a crate lookup, not the homepage. Now i don't even remember why i was requesting this URL to start with (not in a script) but i don't understand the logic of that and the maintainers in the chatrooms seemed to consider it's not a bug. 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.

FredPret 5y ago
Sounds like that guy "All" from Zoolander
BTCOG 5y ago
AntiX is a wonderful systemd-free debian and now also has Sid. It's fast as fuck in usage. It's best left as a live system.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Uhm? https://antixlinux.com/antix-21-grup-yorum-released/ https://antixlinux.com/antix-21-grup-yorum-released/ https://antixlinux.com/antix-sid-iso-files-available/ https://antixlinux.com/antix-sid-iso-files-available/ If you feel too irked/offended by antiX there is also https://mxlinux.org/ https://mxlinux.org/
gcr 5y ago
I don't want to speculate about Artemis specifically, but first-person plural pronouns to refer to oneself typically isn't a "royal we" or anything like that, it's just what helps some folks feel comfortable, especially those who have DiD or who label themselves as plural. See https://www.reddit.com/r/plural/wiki/index https://www.reddit.com/r/plural/wiki/index (keywords: "plurality," "multiplicity," ...) I'm dating someone who refers to themself in the first person plural; it becomes perfectly natural pretty quick :)

marban 5y ago

I've owned almost all generations of these little machines (in addition to a Psion Netbook) and to this date they're among the design & form concepts that I miss the most. With the docking station and optional extended battery, PCMCIA, etc, they would adapt to any work environment, but even in bare-bones mode, you could get some actual work done — Which isn't always the case with an iPad unless you add bulky extras. I wish Apple had the balls that Sony had back then.

awiesenhofer 5y ago
What current devices would come closest do you think? Maybe a Surface? Or rather something like the new foldables?
- marban 5y ago
  I'm not following hardware news really; Just buying whatever Apple cranks out. But I'm considering buying an early 90s Psion MX5 as a mobile typewriter.
- wvenable 5y ago
  GPD's mini laptops are probably the closest.

danans 5y ago

I used the Vaio PCG-505 for a few years after college. I mostly worked as a freelancer, and it was surprisingly good as a work laptop. 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.

awiesenhofer 5y ago

Oh wow, great to see someone else still enjoying and even using a Vaio P! 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 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!?

rospaya 5y ago
I was in love with various tiny computers, had a Sharp Zaurus C760 for some time, it was a full Linux machine in a small clamshell. https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7162 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7162
Rediscover 5y ago
I used to go through dynamism.com and conics.net for importing Panasonic Let's Note and Sony laptops. Was it either of those that You were trying to recall?

allenbina 5y ago

Near the beginning of the pandemic I got frustrated with the trackpad and battery life of my lenovo yoga, so I bought a ~$250 asus l204m. 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.

analyte123 5y ago

A cozy laptop sounds nice. I bet IRC is more than fast enough, surprised it didn't get a mention. Also, if you just want to read some text on the web as fast as possible, w3m might be worth a shot. I use it in TTY2 all the time to look stuff up. Browser CDN caches like Decentraleyes or LocalCDN might also be worth trying especially with the mnestic set up: you would only have to load certain JS bundles once per session. >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 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.

anthk 5y ago
Check Bitlbee, you'll have IRC proxies for everything. Twitter, Slack, Telegram, anythiing Pidgin supports with the -purple build. 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 For the rest, Fluxbox+rox+lxappeanrance+nm-applet+xpdf. Ted and Gnumeric as a micro office-suite. Or Siag, if you don't need Unicode. On Chromium, it has a --light switch.

tryauuum 5y ago

Ah, to use an ancient device, be genuinely happy you won't waste time with video games only to eventually install some games that do run smoothly on this ancient CPU. I too have this experience

anthk 5y ago
Heh, with Mednafen/Slashem and IF Games that wasn't totally true ;). 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.

kraquepype 5y ago

Wow seeing XMMS brings back some memories. Before Pandora and streaming players, I had a machine under the bed that only ran XMMS to play music in the room. It allowed controls via game pad port, so there was a game pad in the room to play/pause/switch songs.

foobarbecue 5y ago

Sorry, I have to ask about the pronouns. Does the use of "we" imply that this laptop is shared by multiple people?

foobarbecue 5y ago
I mean, I suppose it's a reasonable pronoun for someone to use if they wish to be referred to as "they" ...
- kmm 5y ago
  "They" is almost exclusively singular in those circumstances, regardless of its etymology. Similar to how "you" derives from the old English second person plural pronoun, but is in virtually all variants of modern English acceptable for the second person singular.
Youden 5y ago
I also found it confusing. I was wondering if it was this person's preferred pronoun but their Twitter [0] lists "she" as of "January 2022" and all the testimonials use "she" too [1]. [0]: https://twitter.com/EverfreeArtemis https://twitter.com/EverfreeArtemis [1}: https://artemis.sh/ https://artemis.sh/
verytrivial 5y ago
No, it's just a pronoun flex. Spend as many cycles on that as you think it deserves.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bityard 5y ago
It's possible the author has multiple personalities, it's a good thing that they are running a multi-user operating system.
emptybottle 5y ago
The article is written to be read back in Gollum's voice

dt3ft 5y ago

Who are they and why are they using this old laptop? I wasn’t able to find anything in the article that mentions this.

anthk 5y ago

On Emulation, Mednafen should run fast if you set the right core for SNES, avoid any opengl and shader output, and compile it yourself with "-march=native -O3" and the rest of CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS. 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.

grimgrin 5y ago

> Discord on the other hand has a big problem: using a third party client is bannable Hm, that is probably true. Didn't consider. So be it, wish the Ripcord author some luck! https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ > 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

Twirrim 5y ago

Via TLP on Linux, I've been capping my laptop's CPU (i7-8665U) to 800Mhz whenever I'm on battery. 800Mhz on a relatively modern CPU is quite remarkably fast and sufficient for most things. 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 :)

anthk 5y ago
More than nuking, send kill -STOP to the zoom PID. To resume it, kill -CONT.
Hello71 5y ago
> Via TLP on Linux, I've been capping my laptop's CPU (i7-8665U) to 800Mhz whenever I'm on battery. 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.

forgotmypw17 5y ago

I used a similar computer as my daily driver for half a year. I lost touch with all the groups I who use Slack for organizing.

aidenn0 5y ago

I notice IceWM gets mentioned here; I'm always looking for a good environment to run for my VNC sessions. Right now I'm using FVWM, can anyone comment on pros/cons of switching to Ice?

hnthrowaway0315 5y ago

I have a PowerBook G4 with upgraded memory. The only caveat is the power cell that gets hot quickly so I have to wire power in everytime. 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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

smm11 5y ago

I've got an XPS that I never turn on, an S21 phone that I use sparingly, and a USB-C to HDMI adapter at home that lets me turn my phone into my desktop computer (Dex). This is me typing on a work computer, but I don't count that. My computer is a phone.

settrans 5y ago

Despite being (ostensibly) state-of-the-art technology, I feel similarly about my 2021-vintage MediaTek MT8183-powered Chromebook. 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.

jdmoreira 5y ago
Interesting. Can you run mainline linux on this machine? I don't want to deal with ChromeOS
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  Maybe? mt8183 seems to be one of the better supported mainline Linux SoCs. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/arch/arm64/boot/dts/mediatek 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. https://github.com/Maccraft123/Cadmium https://github.com/Maccraft123/Cadmium

sokoloff 5y ago

I bought a Chromebook 4 on Black Friday (Celeron N4000, 1.1 GHz, $90 then, $120 now) and similar to the author, I find it pretty useful but sometimes requiring patience. 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.

swiftcoder 5y ago

I do wish that more laptop vendors would consider the really-thin-and-light market. There used to be all sorts of weird pocket/palm PCs available in the sub-2lb range, but I guess that phones and tablets have pretty much canibalised the market.

jamesgeck0 5y ago
The Surface Go is nice. Tablet form factor, but it's an actual PC, albeit with one of the slowest modern laptop chipsets available.
wildzzz 5y ago
There are plenty of 10in Chromebooks out there, some can be setup to run Linux easily. I think some of the Acer models are below 2lbs. Other than that, there are some little 6 and 7in mini netbooks but they aren't cheap. You might as well just buy a decent phone or tablet for that price. I think the netbook phase was a means to an end where we now have very small, capable PCs in our pockets at all times.

hit8run 5y ago

I like the new 16inch MacBook Pro but for sure prefer my iMac Pro and am looking forward to replace it with something new presented this year. Life is too short for crappy hardware.

aasasd 5y ago

Regarding games: PS1 games may run with PCSX-Reloaded aka PCSXR (the most-current-before-Retroarch fork of PCSX)—if the machine has any 3D acceleration. However, Retroarch's version is probably out, their requirements are higher. 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.

bluedino 5y ago

Wow. Atoms were slow when they were new. 2-4 times slower than a E5300 Core 2 Duo or whatever was common in 2009. 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...

missed-pos 5y ago

The device referred to in the article gave me the idea to buy/make such a lightweight device with which you can surf the Internet, chat via XMPP, use e-mail, but at the same time receive calls and SMS. Also the device needs to run for a long time (ARM?) Sounds like something that can be done on a Raspberry Pi, but I'm not sure. It would be a good replacement for the phone, to be honest. It would be possible, of course, to take a simple phone for calls and SMS, but I recently read an article about the fact that such phones can have backdoors. In general, it would be cool to refuse calls completely, but unfortunately there are people who do not have other options. Besides, I go to places where the Internet does not work. In general, are there such devices in the real world that meet the above requirements?

DwnVoteHoneyPot 5y ago

What is the allure and purpose of going back to 800 Mhz? I mean I did it myself this week, but was frustrated enough to think it's a really dumb idea, waste of time. I can't even articulate why I did it in the first place. 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?

MisterTea 5y ago
> Why do we even try? Depends on how hard you want to try or compromise on.
freebreakfast 5y ago
Change your workflow. You cannot expect a less powerful system to perform the same as a more powerful system. 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.
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 5y ago
  Thanks for the good suggestions. I'll try them out if I ever find a reason to try again!

tandav 5y ago

If you live in terminal you can ssh into server from smartphone, I do this often

emptyparadise 5y ago

I love this laptop's form factor.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

A girlfriend of mine had surgery on both wrists. 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-professional-individual.html https://www.nuance.com/dragon/businesbs-solutions/dragon-pro...

throwanem 5y ago
You refer to Tavis Rudd's PyCon 2013 demo: https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI
bduerst 5y ago
Did your GF or friend ever consider using foot pedals at all? I knew a programmer once who used various foot pedal combinations for different punctuation marks and tabs.
- ThinkBeat 5y ago
  yes. 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.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    Have you considered buying a USB gamepad and putting it on the floor?

seqizz 5y ago

> Technically Gentoo is also in the running, but can you imagine trying to compile all your packages from scratch on a system that benchmarks worse than a raspberry pi 3? Hmm I knew at least one person who did it.. Yes, it's exactly how you'd imagine.

Narishma 5y ago
I initially started using Gentoo on a Pentium 166 laptop with 64MB of RAM in the early 2000s. It was pretty usable after the couple of days it took to install everything.

agumonkey 5y ago

Oh I've been looking for a similar Sony VAIO but that was packing a Core 2 Duo .. there's just so many Sony laptops I could never find which model it was (college prof used that on trips). Anyway nice to see "old" machines getting by. -- sent next to my thinkpad x61

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jcun4128 5y ago

This computer reminds me of my fondness for the Compaq Presario 615dx a little higher spec, but it was that kind of computer the inch-thick ones. That laptop had a really nice keyboard imo. Was using Linux Mint and Bluefish/Kate text editor.