Well then, as it turns out it's not a very big challenge to use Windows 2000 as a daily driver, apart from the obvious lackluster web experience, and things like Telegram, which I use a lot on a daily basis. This has caused me to tinker with other things, however. And I am in the middle of moving at the moment, so there are lots of things to do outside the computer. So as weird as it might sound, I have not spent that much time being creative on the computer. Instead it has been something I've lazily fiddled with when I'm relaxing, and mainly been chatting on IRC. For that, it has worked well. But I got slightly annoyed with the feel of the keyboard on the computer, and the now quite ancient WiFi Cardbus adapter I used turned out to be pretty unreliable, causing it to drop the connection frequently. I eventually got completely fed up with that, and last night I got frustrated enough to put the old Dell aside, and installed Debian 12 with xfce on a Thinkpad R400 I've got, which I resource limited in software. It's not as creative, and is even less of a challenge, but it's something to get me by without going completely mental. For the next years challenge I think I need to set some goals for what I want to get done during the week, and plan it out better.
~Headcrash
My first day started really smooth. Well, as smooth as one could expect with somewhat ancient wifi hardware. The Cardbus network adapter I use decided to randomly
disconnect a couple of times, and having quite a hard time to reconnect. But that seemingly fixed itself?* Other than that the keyboard decided to go all wonky
with keys not rersponding to presses. That seemingly got fixed by reseating the keyboard connector inside the laptop. Open heart suergery seen HERE.
Apart from these little setbacks the day has been fairly uneventful. I've spent most of the day on the couch, mostly chatting on IRC, lazily browsing the web, and
listening to music. So far Windows 2000 isn't a big challenge to daily drive, but I'm sure I'll run into some hurdles and strange issues along the way.
* The wifi adapter appears to be overheating! DELL were super clever and put the CardBus slots directly next to the CPU cooler, which is running semi-passive.
As a result that gets quite warm...
~Headcrash
As it's getting closer to the Old Computer Challenge 2023, I have reinstalled my DELL Inspiron 2500 laptop with Windows 2000 Pro, and given it a new replacement battery.
With this battery it manages to run for over four hours on a single charge, while set to the "laptop/power saver" mode in the Intel Speedstep settings.
This causes the CPU to downclock itself from 800MHz to just around 500MHz. Other than that, the system has 512MB of RAM installed, and a 60GB hard drive.
This years old computer challenge is rather simple. The goal is to run a computer with a single CPU core or thread with as low of a clock frequency as possible.
With a maximum of 512MB of RAM. It just so happens that I can't help myself, so I'm currently writing this post on said laptop, in a program called Crimson Editor.
I'm at the moment of writing this sitting on my balcony with a beer, enjoying the somewhat cool summer breeze and watching a thunderstorm in the distance.
It hasn't started raining yet, but I'm sure it'll get here soon. So I'll try to make this fairly quick, haha! For some added amusement I also installed a USB 4G modem
made by Huawei. The model is E392u-12, and installs automatically on Windows 2000.
And wouldn't you know it.. It just started raining now, so I'll wrap this post up now! Here is a picture of my workplace at the moment: Hit me!
Finally work is starting to calm down some.. This friday I stressed to the point of giving myself a nose bleed. I'm fairly certain that's not really healthy.
But stuffs' looking up. The coming week should be heaps better, if still quite busy. I managed to squeeze in some evening sheanigans, even though I probably
shouldn't have.
I got the funny idea of rebuilding my TrueNAS Scale-based NAS into a 90s ATX case, and making it look like a mid-90s custom built network
appliance that tries really hard to look like a fully integrated product, while obviously being something cobbled together from standard components.
So I made up a custom panel with LEDs to show disk activity, network status, and a "READY" light to show when the server has booted. The latter has an Arduino
connected as a serial-port, that listens for a command to be sent by a bash-script that runs on system startup.
In other news, I managed to pair an Apple wireless keyboard (A1016) from 2003 to a modern Linux system. It turned out to be a little fiddly, since it's not
detected by the gui Bluetooth manager. So I used bluetoothctl in the terminal, setting it to search for devices, connect to the right MAC-address, blindly type
a six-digit(important) pin-code on the keyboard, hit return, and then type the same code in bluetoothctl. So far it appears to work fine, since this post was
written on said keyboard!
Oh, I added a couple of new pics in the photo gallery too.
Cheerio ~
/Headcrash
Right then.. A first entry in this so-called blog of mine.. I felt that I needed someplace to rant
about all sorts of shit and just vent my brain a bit.
As some of you might tell, there hasn't been a whole lot of anything updated on this site lately.
Part of that is me not really coming up with new ideas, but also because work has been absolute chaos this whole month.
Basically we're doing 4x the usual work load, and everything has to be done by approx. the same deadline. So the past couple of weeks have been
filled with anxiety, stomach ache due to stress and terrible sleep. As a result, nearly all the time off work has been spent doing as little as possible.
That being said, I haven't been slacking off completely. As far as website work goes, I have stabbed and forked together a self-hosted version of frogfind.com, called occSearch.
You can find a link to it in the Contents menu. I also bought a new camera! The SONY DSC-F505 from 1999. You can find a few images from said camera in the photo gallery.
Speaking of the gallery; I chatted with prahou about modifying the script that generates the gallery structure, since it was sorting the images by name. That resulted in the images
landing in the wrong order. So now it's sorting them by datestamp instead, with the newest one first. It then creates a gallery with the newest image at the top.
Another project I've twiddled with is running a Minecraft server on a custom built liquid cooled dual-socket Xeon server. The hardware is about 15 years old at this point,
so it's no rocketship, but fun regardless! You can find more info about that over at deadnet.se:8080
That'll do for now I think. Also it's foggy AF outside at the moment of typing this. There, now you know.
/Headcrash
