Comment by Scrounger
13 hours ago
Interesting site/challenge; however, I had trouble browsing and finding "what to do" in a reasonable time.
I recently spent like $170 giving a new lease on life to a 15-year-old Lenovo S10-3 Ideapad with a 1-core Intel Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM, a WiFi card, and a 250GB SSD running AntiX Linux in TTY/Command Line mode.
So far, I've turned it into a picture/frame + vision board running Tailscale so I could SSH in and/or rsync stuff.
I am also attempting to run a no-AI version of Pwnagotchi to pwn WiFi networks.
I am also using it as an always-on appliance that does stuff like rsync/backup my entire server, run lightweight Python scripts to check the uptime and days until domain expiration, etc., on a set of websites I own and would like to own, etc.
I have all of this stuff connected to a Telegram bot that reports to me.
It's an interesting set of constraints, and you can surprisingly do a lot of cool stuff.
I gave my wife a 2012 macbook pro running ubuntu. It was a huge upgrade over her ~2014 macbook air running stock, which couldn't even update itself anymore.
It never occured to me to consider it might qualify as a "challenge" since it is 14 years old. It just works fantanstically and was my daily driver until 3-4 years ago.
I got it off ebay for approximately $100, cleaned it, and put in a new battery.
The 2012 macbook pro (non retina, at least. I never owned a retina one) is the last truly great macbook apple ever made. God I loved that thing, I used it to death and was truly saddened by its loss. It lasted a good 12 years
I had an 11” 2011 air. An incredible machine, one of the best I’ve ever owned. I stupidly replaced it with the 2016 retina touchbar MacBook Pro - which is hands down the worst Mac I’ve ever owned bar none. My modern M1 is fine. But that little air was somehow more fun.
Here’s an idea that’s been following me for a while, if you like low-level stuff:
Make a toy OS that boots into a Lisp shell.
Another to appreciate how fast computers that we call old effectively are: write a game for the shell. Depending on your level of skill, you can try pong, snake, lunar lander, or a 3D software renderer.
OLPC (one laptop per child) had Open Firmware, a Forth bootloader/firmware
https://lwn.net/Articles/209301/
Open Firmware was originally a Sun thing, then Apple adopted it at some point as well
Make something that makes music.
Trying to use a 15-year-old Atom netbook as a modern laptop is mostly pain. But treating it as a small always-on appliance is a much better fit
> 15-year-old Lenovo S10-3 Ideapad with a 1-core Intel Atom CPU, 2GB of RAM, a WiFi card, and a 250GB SSD
What a weird coincidence, I've just found one of these while clearing out a box of equipment I'm getting rid of and thought "I should stick NetBSD on this!"