Old computer challenge
You may have heard of the old computer challenge. It is an experiment to limit yourself to (severely) restricted computer resources for one week.
Because I don’t have an old computer at my disposal, I decided to limit myself at home to a Raspberry Pi 4 for one week. Normally I use a mid-end gaming PC even for webbrowing or listening to music, which feels like a waste of resources/energy. The raspberry pi is running 24/7 anyway because it does DNS and NFS, therefore it felt like a good opportunity.
After two days, I noticed:
- “Normal” webbrowsing is almost impossible; modern websites are way too heavy.
- The temptation to play Games etc. is much less, because the PC is not turned on (yet).
- The raspberry pi is already there, I just need to turn on the monitor.
- The limited performance “forces” me to do other things, e.g. sorting my book notes.
- It seems more quiet. There is less noise coming from applications like the Signal messenger.
- There is no official Signal build available for ARM.
However, at the end of day 2 I noticed that I could not use my usual Emacs workflow, because the Raspberry was actually still running Debian Buster. After I upgraded it, the graphical desktop stopped working - for whatever reason.
I guess I will spend day 3 figuring out what is going on.
tags: keep-this-tag-format, tags-are-optional, beware-with-underscores-in-markdown, example