> 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.
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
I use a GPD Micro PC throttled to 6 watts TDP, which means the fan can stay off permanently. It fits in a jeans back pocket, and has an ethernet port. And a serial port. And a full size HDMI port. And three full size USB ports, and a USB-C port.
I also did this (around ~2008), a friend of mine and I built near identical Atom boxes with first gen (Diamondville) 64bit atoms on Intel motherboards running 865 chipsets IIRC. The GPU/Chipset was louder than the CPU because the CPU was completely passive. I did emerge Xorg on that... it took I think a day and a half(ish) even optimizing the heck out of compile options to use everything march=native... it was slow as heck. But it lasted me for years as a little project box until I replaced it with an 4th gen i5.
You really do start to ask yourself if you need a package if compiling it will take a day or two. Hence OpenOffice never got installed.
Save for the processor being better than any VAIO's, I disagree. I find all of these to be absurdly unreliable (crappy firmware) and very cheap hardware for the price, not comparable at all to the typing experience on the P-Series. And the "trackpoint substitute" is a disaster, resembling a "tiny touchpad" more than a trackpoint.
At one point in college, I was using an old Thinkpad x41 tablet and wanted to mess around with gnuradio. I wanted it on my tablet laptop since I had that on me most hours of the day. Compiling gnuradio took several hours. I was running arch so I want unfamiliar with compile times for things I grabbed from the AUR but it was atrocious. I started it in my first class of the day and would just throw my laptop in my bag while it was still compiling and walk quickly to my next class so I could grab a power outlet before Pentium M sucked up all the battery.
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.
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.
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 (keywords: "plurality," "multiplicity," ...)
I'm dating someone who refers to themself in the first person plural; it becomes perfectly natural pretty quick :)
I have a laptop from 2009 or 2010 running at 800 mhz with a 32 bit CPU. It has to run an older version of Ubuntu (18.04) because nothing supports it nowadays. Even 32 bit packages are hard to get. I see no reason to use antiX or other esoteric distros since ubuntu runs fine on it and supports the hardware. I doubt antiX supports more hardware.
Someone else recommended it here, but I don't see the advantages over a robust package repository like ubuntu 18 or a minimal ram only distro like puppylinux. https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/antix.html
Funny enough I got puppylinux running from a dos (windows) partition and running out of RAM on just 2gb on a Toshiba Portage m200. I've even got Windows XP Tablet edition running on SSD, but it can't really connect to much online due to the TLS limitations. And newer versions of the linux kernel don't support the wireless chipset. It is also difficult putting an old non-PAE kernel into a newer distro.
TLS really killed the utility of a lot of older computers with regards to using the "modern internet".
> I'm also very curious about antiX "proudly anti-fascist" distro
"Anti-fascist" doesn't actually mean that - it's a political dog-whistle.
> they're two debian releases late
That's in line with their use of Palemoon, which lags behind normal Firefox feature (and security) releases due to their decision to support older features (mostly XUL) (not that this is very avoidable, because maintaining an XUL fork is very hard work, and not for the faint of heart).
> > 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:
They do have an API (ps: I built crates.live on top of it). I think they have a very good reasons to block the crawling of their main website. Otherwise, people might abuse it. Actually, they recommend you identify yourself when crawling their API to not limit you. I didn't do it, and found no problem constantly calling their APIs.
> 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.
You assume Artemis identifies as a single person. In all likelihood, they are a plural system. Statements like yours are microaggressive at best.
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.
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) 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.
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.
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.
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?
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].
"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?
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).
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!
I got my first computer in the days of CD-ROM and was amazed that a CD could hold more data than my Win95 (later Red Hat 6 (not RHEL)) Pentium Packard Bell's 512MB HDD could.
"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.
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.
(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!?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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 :)
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?
[+] [-] dijit|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] Mystlix|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dTal|4 years ago|reply
I wouldn't trade it for much...
[+] [-] ArtWomb|4 years ago|reply
used to be the norm back in the unix days. finding exact pre-compiled binaries for your exact arch/OS combo was like finding a pot 'o gold ;)
am also amazed at how well gba emulators run on older devices!
[+] [-] leeter|4 years ago|reply
You really do start to ask yourself if you need a package if compiling it will take a day or two. Hence OpenOffice never got installed.
[+] [-] AshamedCaptain|4 years ago|reply
Save for the processor being better than any VAIO's, I disagree. I find all of these to be absurdly unreliable (crappy firmware) and very cheap hardware for the price, not comparable at all to the typing experience on the P-Series. And the "trackpoint substitute" is a disaster, resembling a "tiny touchpad" more than a trackpoint.
[+] [-] wildzzz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmitryminkovsky|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] southerntofu|4 years ago|reply
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:
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.
[+] [-] gcr|4 years ago|reply
I'm dating someone who refers to themself in the first person plural; it becomes perfectly natural pretty quick :)
[+] [-] guessbest|4 years ago|reply
Someone else recommended it here, but I don't see the advantages over a robust package repository like ubuntu 18 or a minimal ram only distro like puppylinux. https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/antix.html
Funny enough I got puppylinux running from a dos (windows) partition and running out of RAM on just 2gb on a Toshiba Portage m200. I've even got Windows XP Tablet edition running on SSD, but it can't really connect to much online due to the TLS limitations. And newer versions of the linux kernel don't support the wireless chipset. It is also difficult putting an old non-PAE kernel into a newer distro.
TLS really killed the utility of a lot of older computers with regards to using the "modern internet".
[+] [-] throw10920|4 years ago|reply
"Anti-fascist" doesn't actually mean that - it's a political dog-whistle.
> they're two debian releases late
That's in line with their use of Palemoon, which lags behind normal Firefox feature (and security) releases due to their decision to support older features (mostly XUL) (not that this is very avoidable, because maintaining an XUL fork is very hard work, and not for the faint of heart).
[+] [-] csomar|4 years ago|reply
>I've had a similar experience with crates.io:
They do have an API (ps: I built crates.live on top of it). I think they have a very good reasons to block the crawling of their main website. Otherwise, people might abuse it. Actually, they recommend you identify yourself when crawling their API to not limit you. I didn't do it, and found no problem constantly calling their APIs.
[+] [-] LargoLasskhyfv|4 years ago|reply
https://antixlinux.com/antix-sid-iso-files-available/
If you feel too irked/offended by antiX there is also https://mxlinux.org/
[+] [-] BTCOG|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FredPret|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|4 years ago|reply
You assume Artemis identifies as a single person. In all likelihood, they are a plural system. Statements like yours are microaggressive at best.
[+] [-] ThinkBeat|4 years ago|reply
She got the Dragon Speech software, and I was surprised at how good it was.
You can of course dictate all your notes, documents emails. It also provides means to navigate your OS, start programs, close them, and a lot more.
It is expensive but she could do most of her work with two hands that didnt work.
A while back I saw a video about a guy who wrote code using such software (not sure what he used in particular). This can be tedious "Open bracket", "new line" etc.
He had spent a long time tuning it so it was fast and efficient. He used a set of custom grunts and noises as "macros" for all the bracket brace, and other symbols that are in heavy use in programming languages.
If you were just listening to him and didn't know what he was doing it sounded a bit distressing.
https://www.nuance.com/dragon/businesbs-solutions/dragon-pro...
[+] [-] analyte123|4 years ago|reply
>a dishonorable mention to twitter for being slower than Discord, we wish we were making that up
If you're just browsing Twitter, then the Nitter frontend (https://github.com/xnaas/nitter-instances) is way, way faster. Does not have algo-recs either, which could be positive. If you need to post, I assume you've tried spoofing user agent to mobile? This might help with bloated sites in general.
[+] [-] marttt|4 years ago|reply
Also, somewhat related: Former Debian maintainer Joey Hess famously used a Dell Mini 9 for all his coding [1, 2]. I wonder if the Sony has a better, less cramped keyboard compared to the Mini 9.
Another interesting guy doing valuable work on low-end, underclocked hardware is Nils M. Holm [3].
Myself, I can get most of my stuff done on a Thinkpad T42 (underclocked to 600 Mhz to reincarnate its dying GPU). With the ram-booted Tiny Core Linux, this thing still flies. I'm having a hard time ditching it because of the 4:3 IPS screen and excellent keyboard. I've even used it to produce lengthy radio programs for my country's public broadcasting.
Aside web browsing, there seems to be more than enough software solutions, hacks, workarounds and programming languages for doing valuable work on rather old hardware these days. Really interesting times we're living in.
Then again, might be true that with yesterday's hardware, you're limited to solving yesterday's problems. I guess I'm fine with yesterday's problems in many aspects of life.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4721645
2: https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/xmonad_layouts_for_netbooks/
3: https://usesthis.com/interviews/nils.m.holm/
[+] [-] marttt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmrm|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DwnVoteHoneyPot|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] foobarbecue|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Youden|4 years ago|reply
[0]: https://twitter.com/EverfreeArtemis
[1}: https://artemis.sh/
[+] [-] emptybottle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bityard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarbecue|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] birdman3131|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] morganvachon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lproven|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _benj|4 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] Frost1x|4 years ago|reply
XMMS: http://www.xmms.org/
[+] [-] boondaburrah|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JaimeThompson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awiesenhofer|4 years ago|reply
After lots of lusting over them back when they where new (1) I managed to find a used gen 2 one a while back and just adore it. To me the gen 2 series devices are still one of the most beautiful gadgets ever designed, but I am a huge Sony fanboy so ymmv.
I rock a neon green version with a blazingly fast 1.6ghz Atom and crisp 1600x768 screen - its still quite usable like OP describes, runs fine with Lubuntu, though nowadays I only use it to play some DOSbox games once in a while.
An old review with specs details and pictures of gen 2: https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/sony-vaio-p-gen-2
(1) I forgot the name/url, but there was this kinda famous website of some shop in Hongkong that would import all these great - mostly Japan-only - laptops to the us/eu, even in often very rare configurations (umts etc). Maybe someone else on here remembers!?
[+] [-] mwcampbell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awiesenhofer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treesknees|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] simonblack|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] masklinn|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tagoregrtst|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] allenbina|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] settrans|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grimgrin|4 years ago|reply
Hm, that is probably true. Didn't consider. So be it, wish the Ripcord author some luck!
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
[+] [-] kraquepype|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Twirrim|4 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] missed-pos|4 years ago|reply