Skip Navigation
Using vintage laptops in 2024: How do you make it work?
  • The biggest impact would be to max out the memory. That will not help with browsers like Firefox, but will help with other items.

    Plus there is a whole world out there that many people ignore or do not know about, USENET and IRC. Accessing those will work with just about any Thinkpad, no matter how old. Plus there is toot for Mastodon (I need to get that working), but not sure if there is a text utility to access lemmy

    I have a Thinkpad which is a bit newer then yours (R51e) with OpenBSD on it. I get by quite well with dillo, links (need to try links2), mutt, tin (USENET) and irssi (IRC). All I did is maxed out memory to 2G. But, I never do banking on the Internet. All I do is need to do is get my pdf bank statement once a month which I use a newer Thinkpad for.

  • 2024 unethack postmortem
  • I had a hard time getting into it too, but I got to it. So I will paste it in.

    From: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/24552643 via https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/joes

    The number of participants stayed the same. There were 2722 more tournament games than last year, the proportion of all games played went up 6.6%. 9 fewer people ascended 13 fewer games, with a higher ratio of 2.9 asc/player. There was only 1 ascension in Fourk, Dyna and 1.3d. 81% of games were scummed, 58% of all scums that month, basically split 2:1 between 31PwnMoat (again) and hecatonheir (last year it was dedal). Medusa was killed 87 more times, again mostly by Valkyries, but also dwarven Anachrononauts. 3.7 was played even more, dnh gained 7 ranks (+3.9%p), Un lost 4th place to HackEM (-4.9%p), Splice stayed in 3rd place, Spork/Fourk were played least, but 1.3d shot up 4 ranks from last place. On the australian hardfought server 8x more games were played.

    And a comment from https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/joes

    Clan DeepCavernGoobs managed to break all conducts in 19 games. malor ascended 11 variants; Merlek killed Medusa 9 times, only ascended 4, but got a trophy in all 21 variants. Only Umbire ascended 1.3d (uncrowned). jonosmalls and smurphy ascended Unnethack (jono even without Elbereth [also in xnh], killing all Riders and Baalzebub). Splice: finitelycraig got the Bell, stoicjin the Luckstone. Spork: Muad got the Bell, bleeko entered Gehennom. Grunt: Merlek killed Medusa and got the Luckstone, hothraxxa finished Sokoban. hothraxxa ascended NH4 without killing Vlad and the Quest nemesis. Fourk: recuerdo ascended, fitsf killed Croesus. FIQ: oh6 escaped in celestial disgrace, Merlek splatted on the Planes, Umbire killed Rodney. hothraxxa ascended DynaHack, bleeko reached Gehennom. fitsf and malor ascended SLASH’EM, ocnda escaped in disgrace. disperse and malor ascended SlashTHEM. Dictyostelium entered the Quest in HackEM. anselmus and malor ascended AceHack, ais523 and recuerdo splatted on the Planes. Noisytoot killed Demogorgon in nndnh.

  • 2024 unethack postmortem

    For the 2024 junethack postmortem see:

    https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/24552643

    For the curious, this is the junethack site:

    https://junethack.net/

    2
    Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks
  • No, to write to a CD, you need to use specialized software, not just a simple copy.

    Plus what about copying to replaced a files already on the CD ? I believe you need to clear it first then rewrite everything back. CD are about as inconvenient as a media can get.

  • Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks
  • Nothing except for the limited size. I believe even today, nothing exists today for temp storage that have the convenience of diskettes.

    USB Flash Drives comes close, but cheaper versions can in rare cases have firmware "virises". On a diskette, just do a format and all issues gone. Also I never even thought twice about mailing a file on a diskette expecting to never see that diskette again. Flash Drives, I still would like to get it back after mailing it out :)

  • After 48 years, Zilog is killing the classic standalone Z80 microprocessor chip
  • I remember working in a warehouse that stored many ICs when I was very young. IIRC, Zilog packaging was quite good. Some other brands packages would crack or open up if nor handled with "kid gloves". This brings back memories,

  • Sliders - Intro (S01) (1995)
  • One of my favorite shows. The show started out very well, then morphed into a shoot-them-up type show in the later seasons, which I did not like. But I stuck with it.

    Too bad it went the way it did :(

  • Highlander: The Series - The Gathering (S01E01) (1992)
  • I binged it a year ago or so, yes it holds up well and is still entertaining :) I use to watch it when it came out, but I missed most of the first season back then.

    Enjoy,

  • NetBSD 10.0 reached RC1

    NetBSD 10.0 reached RC1. You can get it from here:

    http://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-10/202311070920Z/images/

    0
    OpenBSD 7.4 Released

    I am a bit surprised no one posted this here yet, but OpenBSD 7.4 was released:

    https://www.openbsd.org/74.html

    0
    What are people using to host blogs on SDF?
  • I decided to move to gemini on SDF. Data is far easier to maintain and you can use any editor to add/change files.

    In case you do not know what I am referring to:

    https://wiki.sdf.org/doku.php?id=gemini_site_setup_and_hosting_features

  • NSFW
    An actual road safety ad from Australia in 1991
  • The add seems fine for me, just replace the fight with Cell Phones and you are good to go.

    But in 2023 with all the movies with blood and gore, this being NSFW in 2023 is a bit over kill :) Never mind the fact here is the US we now get see children being shot for real in news casts :( And accidentally showing a certain body part in a sports event, you get banned for life.

  • What are your defining memories of computing in the old days?
  • A couple:

    1. CRC Errors when restoring 9-track tapes (the large reels) on a mini at work.

    2. A manager not knowing a removable 256meg Disk Pack suffered a heard crash. So he mounted it on 4 or 5 production drives, destroying the hardware. He did this to test if the Disk pack was OK. This caused almost a month of agony while we went looking for hardware to replace the drives. This caused manufacturing to slow down since inventory could not be ordered.

    I can almost laugh now :)

  • Star Trek Voyager - Seven of Nine
  • Icheb

    geezes, in today's political environment that "scandal" would not even hit the top ten :)

  • Star Trek Voyager - Seven of Nine
  • I really did not like how Kes (Jennifer Lien) was written out so they could have a Borg Character. Nothing against Jeri Ryan, but the idea of Kes type Alien was intriguing. Then when they brought her back as a god like character even made the concept for Kes worse.

  • [@retrocomputing](https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/retrocomputing)
  • Normally I would say anything over 10 years old. But due to how 10 year old computers are fully useable, I am thinking anything with 1 core. Maybe in a few years it could be ones without a TMP2 :)

  • jmcunx jmcunx @lemmy.sdf.org

    Developer in a large company on AIX and SAP. I use both OpenBSD, NetBSD and Slackware as test systems for my work on AIX (plus for my own personal use)

    Posts 3
    Comments 13