Make YT great again

 A good way to make YT bearable again (besides the obvious), is to use the Firefox add-on BlockTube and set a filter. 

 

Self-Experiment: Can You Survive with a 2006 Laptop Effectively in 2025?

2006 Let's Note CF-R5KW4AXS in 2025

Surviving a day with a long-haul flight with an almost 20 year old notebook

I will take a long-haul flight from Japan to Germany soon and I thought about things I could do to pass some time on the plane. Usually I'd just watch some movies and listen to podcasts etc, but that is a bit boring. Also, modern notebooks are so big, they don't fit well on the tray-table, especially when the person in front reclines their seat.

So, why not take a tiny old laptop and see how it goes?

The Specs

The laptop is a Panasonic Let's note R5 CF-R5KW4AXS with the following specs:

• CPU: Intel Core Solo ULV U1300 @1Ghz (Centrino)
• Memory: 1GB DDR2 SDRAM PC2-4200 μDIMM
• GPU: Intel Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller
• Storage: TOSHIBA MK6034GA 56GB ATA Hard-Drive
• Audio: Intel NM10/ICH7 Family High Definition Audio Controller
• LAN: RTL-8100/8101L/8139 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter
• USB 2.0 (×2): Intel NM10/ICH7 Family USB UHCI Controller
• TYPEII (×1): Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II
• Screen: XGA TFT screen (1024×768)

Additional I plugged in:

• PCMCIA:
  • WLan: PRO/Wireless 3945ABG
• SD-CARD: 16GB

Other hardware-related things:

• weight: 1kg
• size: 23cm/18cm/24cm
• tiny JP-Keyboard

Broken things:

As one would expect, the battery is long dead. I emptied out the case and kept the controller (in case I ever want to revive it).

• Lithium Ion Battery (CF-VZSU42) 57720mWh voltage=7.4V

In total, a quite powerful machine.

The Software

Originally this thing came with Windows XP SP-2. As much as I enjoy vintage computing, this is nothing I can survive with for daily use. Instead I installed the following

• antiX 22 (Debian Bookworm based)

The Expectations

I expect to be able to use this laptop for a whole day (a bit more actually). During the flight and during the stop-over.

The Productivity

Usage	Software	Working	Comments
encryption	gocryptfs	y es	CPU has no AES encryption, use -xchacha
Terminal	ROXTerm	yes
	tmux	yes
Web	Firefox ESR	somewhat	really slow
	Chromium	somewhat	can almost be usable with custom startup parameters
	NetSurf	yes	not great with modern web-sites
	Dillo	yes	limited with modern web-sites
	links2	yes	my favorite browser
E-Mail	neomutt	Yes	excellent!
messaging	whatsapp	barely	web-client. heavy webapp , very slow
		yes	unofficial libpurple plugin
	line	barely	only via chromium plugin.
	Signal	no	Official Client: No 32-bit Linux client. A whole story for itself.
		no	Java client: No, not even with lot of effort (JVM>=22 vs 32bit )
		yes	unofficial libpurple plugin
	i-message	No	scnr . Of course not!
video	mpv	Yes	if the right codec
music	cmus	Yes	for the terminal (my default)
	xmms	Yes	If I feel like GUI
reading	MComix	Yes	For digital comic books
writing	vim	Yes	with plugins. My default
	AbiWord	Yes	If I need fancy WYSIWYG

The joy

Life is not just work, but also play. So, what is doable?

Usage	Software	Working	Comments
puzzle / strategy	XSkat	YES	Best game since 1995
	Penguin *	YES	Solitaire and all that
	Pioneers	YES	native
shooting / action	Commander Genius	YES	aka Keen
	Open Tyrian	YES	Had to build it from source though
	Epic pinball	YES	dosbox
	Rocks'n'Diamonds	YES	Classic
	Slime Volley	YES	yeah
	Giana Sisters	YES	C64 emu
	Doom	YES	Zandronum
	Wolfenstein 3D	YES	EcWolf
adventure	ScummVM	YES*	For older games OK, but best stick to early 90s games
	BAK	YES	Dosbox
Non-sense	YDKJ	YES	Dosbox with Win 3.11

The Experience

The build

I cannot recommend this, unless you are like me and this kind of thing is your hobby and brings you joy. 32-bit support is more and more a thing of the past, so even if you are willing to compile a lot of software from source, more often than not you will run into limitations.

The Heat

When the CPU load is high (for a long time), this laptop gets really hot. The touch-pad gets uncomfortably hot. Right next to it (above the CPU) it is so hot, that it hurts - not ideal.  However, just watching movies and playing games, especially when clocking the CPU down, was no problem.

The Summary

Ultimately, I will have to write this after my travel, but so far I am quite happy with the result. Let's see how everthing holds up during travel :-)

The Gallery

The whole laptop. I put a piece of Lego to show its size.

The desktop

The official Line Web Client in Chromium

Testing Signal with Pidgin (libpurple)

Watching teli

XSkat on MacOS

Maybe the first game I ever played on Linux is XSkat. The other day I wondered, if it would build on MacOS, and - yes, it does.

 

 Here the patch:

diff --git a/Imakefile b/Imakefile
index ab1b892..06fd031 100644
--- a/Imakefile
+++ b/Imakefile
@@ -19,13 +19,28 @@
 */
 
 /*DEFL=-DDEFAULT_LANGUAGE=\"german\"*/
+/* macOS-specific adjustments */
+#ifdef Darwin
+   # Use clang instead of gcc
+   CC = clang
+   # X11 paths for Homebrew
+   X11_BASE = /opt/X11
+   X11_INCLUDES = -I$(X11_BASE)/include
+   X11_LIBDIR = -L$(X11_BASE)/lib
+   # SDK paths
+   SDK_PATH = $(shell xcrun --show-sdk-path)
+   EXTRA_CFLAGS = -isysroot $(SDK_PATH) $(X11_INCLUDES)
+   EXTRA_LDFLAGS = $(X11_LIBDIR)
+#endif
+
+/* Language selection */
 DEFL=-DDEFAULT_LANGUAGE=\"english\"
 
 DEFI=-DDEFAULT_IRC_SERVER=\"irc.fu-berlin.de\"
 
 DEFINES=$(DEFL) $(DEFI)
 
-LOCAL_LIBRARIES=$(XLIBONLY)
+LOCAL_LIBRARIES=$(XLIBONLY) $(EXTRA_LDFLAGS)
 
 OBJS=skat.o ramsch.o null.o bitmaps.o xio.o xdial.o irc.o text.o
 SRCS=skat.c ramsch.c null.c bitmaps.c xio.c xdial.c irc.c text.c

I had to install a few brew packages.

brew install imake xorgproto libx11 libxext libxt

IBM Adoption

 IBM  ThinkPad R50e (1834K3J)

Just randomly picked this thing up at HardOff on the weekend.

 

Says no RAM and no HDD (and has no Alt-Key).

I thought for 1.1k Yen, I'll take it home and see what it does.

The manual is on archive.org - nice.

I found some RAM (1GB) and an old IDE HDD (from a broken G4 iBook) and threw it in.

I use a variable PSU at 16.5V - power on and all is working fine!

Well, the Bios backup battery is of course dead. I'll have to replace it, if I want to keep this thing.

Then I remembered, that somewhere in my parts bin should be a Pentium M CPU that I could screw in for a nice upgrade. It came with a Celeron 1.3GHz and I upgraded it to a Pentium 1.7GHz.

Next I grabbed the Recovery CDs and installed XP. Unfortunately I don't have the original Japanese CDs, but only the German ones - but they did the trick.

XP runs fantastic on this old machine, but there is only so much one can do with XP.

I did the whole shenanigans with legacyupdate and upgrade Windows as much as possible.

Then I removed a bit of bloat-ware (Norton 2004, really not what I want to deal with).

Next I ran a geekbench2 benchmark : 1151 - what a beast :)

About:

 

Keen on M1

Recently I came across Commander Genius, which [..] let's just say is a way to play Commander Keen on modern machines.

Since I am on ARM64 Darwin, a bit of tweaking needs to be done to run this x86_64 solftware. Here my notes:

 

• You need Rosetta installed
• You need to install openssl for x86_64. To not conflict with Homebrew for arm64, install it in a separate directory.

Open a x86_64 shell: 

> arch -x86_64 zsh

Install homebrew in a different directory (I use /Volumes/1TBSSD/opt/homebrew-x86_64, choose what fits your need)

> mkdir /Volumes/1TBSSD/opt/homebrew-x86_64
> curl -L https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C/Volumes/1TBSSD/opt/homebrew-x86_64
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0
100 3812k  100 3812k    0     0  3721k      0  0:00:01  0:00:01 --:--:-- 9451k
> export PATH="/Volumes/1TBSSD/opt/homebrew-x86_64/bin:$PATH"
> which brew
/Volumes/1TBSSD/opt/homebrew-x86_64/bin/brew
> brew install openssl@3

• change line 3 of the install script as below

DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/Volumes/1TBSSD/opt/homebrew-x86_64/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH ./CGeniusExe

That is it.

(S)VCD - I've got no time for this

 (S)VCDs 2025

The other day I found my Internet Backup from around 1999 on CD-R.

Among the disks where "a few" (S)VCDs - a format probably nobody knows by now.

 

I didn't have time to deal with the whole vcdxrip and what-not. The data is not of high value, and given that 99% of CD-Rs read without error (despite their age and non-ideal storage), I figured I just don't care and use cdrdao.

 

cdrdao read-cd ----read-raw --device <Your device>  --datafile disk1.data disk1.toc

 

Then just take that home and extract the data with a little bit of dd.. 

for f in *.toc; do ~/bin/vcd_extract.sh $f; done

Downgrading the G4

I could no longer take the pure performance of my G4 PowerMac, so when I saw this old ATI card in　the Junk section of the local Hard-Off for 100円, I had to pick it up.

Before the down-grade, I was running a hacked Nvidia GeForce, which replaced the original ATI (that I still have). 

Firstly I was surprised that the card actually works. I guess I (or it) was lucky that it was only in the Junk bin without protection for long.

Test-setup:

• MacOS 10.4.11 (Tiger)
• Cinebench 2003
• GeekBench3

Results

Geekbench results where identical, since it doesn't test GPU in that version.

Cinebench, impact was high:

 But hey, I don't keep that thing around for performance computing.

As a bonus, my MacOS 9.2 partition is now usable again. I could not for the love of god get it to work with the Geforce.

So finally I can enjoy errors like this again :-)

"I'll finish you like Macintosh does floppy disks."