Old Computer Challenge, 2024
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It's on! I am participating in this years' Old Computer
Challenge (v4, Olympics Edition).[1]  The rules this time
around say "Choose your rules!", and so I have.  The
challenge I have set myself is rather more behavioural than
technical: my goal for the coming week is to wind back the
clock on how I interact with the Internet. Back, say, a
quarter century or so, before I had any kind of mobile
connectivity, when connecting to the Internet meant sitting
down at my big beige desktop workstation and firing up the
modem.

Well, maybe not quite. The modem is long gone and I'm not
going to set up a dial-up account for the week - although I
guess I could, SDF still does that right?  But limiting
bandwidth is not the intention here.  The point is to make
accessing the Internet more intentional and purposeful, and
not just the default mode for what I do whenever I'm not
doing anything else.

Over the past while I've become increasingly aware of just
how much time I spend going down various Internet rabbit
holes.  What starts as an impulse to see what's going on
with Mastodon or the phlogosphere can so easily, and often,
become an hour or two of following random links to places I
never intended to go.  This is not bad in and of itself -
there's an endless amount of great stuff out there, if you
know where to look.  But ... too much! Enough.

Fortunately, although the modem is gone, I do have a big
beige computer in the office, in the form of a 'sleeper' I
built out of old and new parts a couple or three years
ago. The externals are all from the late 90s or early oughts
(17" Samsung VGA CRT, generic beige case, IBM model M
keyboard, Microsoft optical mouse).  Most of the internals
(motherboard, RAM, power supply, storage) are modern, but
running Debian with FVWM themed to look like late 90s Linux,
for extra period authenticity.  This is the only home
computer I will allow myself to use during the Challenge.

So this week, I return to that time long ago, when I had to
find other ways to distract myself when "away from the
computer": read a book, write and draw in my sketchbook, go
for a walk, think my own thoughts.  No doing Internet stuff
on my phone, nor either of my laptops, nor the family
iPad. No mobile Internet at all.

I'll let you know how that goes.



Reference
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[1] gopher://dataswamp.org:70/1/~solene/article-old-computer-challenge-v4-announce 


Sat Jul 13 10:29:13 PDT 2024