10 ThinkPad T60's, all librebooted and working (in pieces lol)

[ChuckFeed]

one piece with lets say a broken keyboard or missing screen (but the rest working and complete) costs 20$ on ebay, you can turn 3 broken thinkpads into 2 working ones and pay 10 bucks more for new CPU (0.99$-2.99$, ebay or aliexpress) and ram (??$, 2x2GiB DDR2 667mhz or 2GiB+1GiB, it wont take more than 3)

a complete T60 (especially with upgrades) goes for over 100 bucks on ebay, plus libreboot im able to sell one for up to 200$

i have a few docks laying around as well so you can turn them into nice little workstations

at some point, all libreboot supporting thinkpads will die and people will pay a fortune for surviving ones, similar to rare model M keyboard variants like the M13.

this is a tl;dr on how to get rich in a few years.

[emosun]

so what would someone use these for?

[ChuckFeed]

1 minute ago, emosun said:

so what would someone use these for?

anything you can use a computer for, except for playing modern games and running modern software that runs inside a sandbox inside a web browser inside a vm inside a container of course

first and foremost, people who care about freedom, security, privacy etc... and actually want to know what runs on their hardware, who also want full control over it want such computers

other reasons include build quality, its pretty much impossible to accidentally break a thinkpad, and very hard even if you really tried to

before you show me a macbook, those things will detect moisture so apple can refuse to repair them for you if you accidentally spilled some water onto them

(a thinkpad on the other hand just has drain holes)

i could go on for hours but youll realize why once you actually use one.

[emosun]

2 minutes ago, ChuckFeed said:

i could go on for hours but youll realize why once you actually use one.

ah ok , i'm just a dumb person who knows nothing about computers or retro hardware collecting so i'm sure I couldn't possibly read an understand someone explaining why vs actually using one.

[ChuckFeed]

Just now, emosun said:

ah ok , i'm just a dumb person who knows nothing about computers or retro hardware collecting so i'm sure I couldn't possibly read an understand someone explaining why vs actually using one.

if you used an old thinkpad before you wouldnt be asking 'why would anyone use this and what for'

[emosun]

5 minutes ago, ChuckFeed said:

'why would anyone use this and what for'

 

17 minutes ago, emosun said:

so what would someone use these for?

how someone reads something in their mind vs how it was actually asked

[Sauron]

21 minutes ago, ChuckFeed said:

at some point, all libreboot supporting thinkpads will die and people will pay a fortune for surviving ones

Suuuuuure

 

by the time this is a thing they will be obsolete to the point of complete unusability. A T60 is already borderline unusable even for basic web browsing. You can maybe still get a little money on ebay for one but I wouldn't count on the price going up significantly.

19 minutes ago, emosun said:

so what would someone use these for?

Deluding yourself that you're free from tracking. Also cool for hobby projects.

[emosun]

3 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Deluding yourself that you're free from tracking. Also cool for hobby projects.

hey i'd argue all my offline retro machines are free from tracking so its definitely possible. they'll never know how much hydro thunder im playing

[Needfuldoer]

1 hour ago, ChuckFeed said:

if you used an old thinkpad before you wouldnt be asking 'why would anyone use this and what for'

I have, and I am. Yes they're well-built and made out of magnesium, but you're still talking about 17 year old laptops with Core 2 CPUs. (Insert the aging sequence from Saving Private Ryan here.) 

 

The Macintosh Portable has the best mobile keyboard I've ever used, but that doesn't mean I'm going to use one of those as a daily. (Though it can still process a word with the best of them, and it doesn't phone home either.)

 

53 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Deluding yourself that you're free from tracking.

Hey, it can browse the web just fine, as long as you turn off JavaScript (which is just there to track you) and cookies (which are just there to track you), and send every web page you want through a relay server that emails you the page contents in plain text (through the email server you wrote yourself because nobody else's code can be trusted).

[ChuckFeed]

3 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

I have, and I am. Yes they're well-built and made out of magnesium, but you're still talking about 17 year old laptops with Core 2 CPUs. (Insert the aging sequence from Saving Private Ryan here.) 

 

The Macintosh Portable has the best mobile keyboard I've ever used, but that doesn't mean I'm going to use one of those as a daily. (Though it can still process a word with the best of them, and it doesn't phone home either.)

 

Hey, it can browse the web just fine, as long as you turn off JavaScript (which is just there to track you) and cookies (which are just there to track you), and send every web page you want through a relay server that emails you the page contents in plain text (through the email server you wrote yourself because nobody else's code can be trusted).

yes javascript only exists to track you, 3/4 of the things you see on the internet that are done in JS could be done in HTML faster easier and with better performance for the end user.

i dont host my own email server (anymore) because its a real pain to set one up, i have friends for that.

and yes, cookies are there to track you, go use cookie isolation.

old computers are perfectly fine and can run good software without any issues

be honest, what do most people do on computers?

they write office stuff, edit text and images maybe, browse the web most of the time (which even works fine with js for your interest), and might chat with people on the internet.

all the lag would disappear if people stopped using bloated and incredibly unoptimized software.

yes i DO know that you wont be able to play modern video games on such a machine, and for some people (including myself) this is something to be proud of because proprietary video games with anticheat are literal malware rootkits that refuse to run if you dont give them full control over your computer.

if you want a good keyboard, i can only recommend a model m

i use one as my daily driver all the time when im not undocking my thinkpad, and yes it lacks a super/windows key and doesnt have a trackpoint, but some people (AGAIN) including me see the lack of a microsoft logo on their keyboards as a feature.

name a single mechanical keyboard that can keep up with the model m's quality, other than the model f or something you built at home for 800$

[ChuckFeed]

16 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Suuuuuure

 

by the time this is a thing they will be obsolete to the point of complete unusability. A T60 is already borderline unusable even for basic web browsing. You can maybe still get a little money on ebay for one but I wouldn't count on the price going up significantly.

Deluding yourself that you're free from tracking. Also cool for hobby projects.

we will soon go back to mainframe computers and 'cloud' computing just like in the good old unix days, i see it coming already.

people will use dumb terminals and just connect to the central 'cloud' to do their computing

heck, they already do this today with chromebooks which are basically a little more powerful thin clients.

a T60 is very usable if you don't run non-functional operating systems that are designed to force people to upgrade on them, openBSD eats a few megs of ram and linux eats about a gig in idle.

[emosun]

1 minute ago, ChuckFeed said:

be honest, what do most people do on computers?

they write office stuff, edit text and images maybe, browse the web most of the time (which even works fine with js for your interest), and might chat with people on the internet.

if it was 1999..... sure

[ChuckFeed]

Just now, ChuckFeed said:

we will soon go back to mainframe computers and 'cloud' computing just like in the good old unix days, i see it coming already.

people will use dumb terminals and just connect to the central 'cloud' to do their computing

heck, they already do this today with chromebooks which are basically a little more powerful thin clients.

a T60 is very usable if you don't run non-functional operating systems that are designed to force people to upgrade on them, openBSD eats a few megs of ram and linux eats about a gig in idle.

besides, have you seen any other laptop that can multi boot openBSD, FreeBSD, FreeDOS, ReactOS, GNU+Linux, TempleOS, Busybox+Linux, and any other x86(_x64) OS you can think of with zero or nearly zero incompatibility issues?

i dont think so.

[ChuckFeed]

1 minute ago, emosun said:

if it was 1999..... sure

in 2023 most people still just use operating systems as bootloaders for web browsers and maybe some chat clients, email clients, or programs (aka "apps"), which now all run in web browsers and containers because running everything in a web browser is so much better for controlling peo- i mean, compatibility

[emosun]

Just now, ChuckFeed said:

in 2023 most people still just use operating systems as bootloaders for web browsers and maybe some chat clients, email clients, or programs (aka "apps"), which now all run in web browsers and containers because running everything in a web browser is so much better for controlling peo- i mean, compatibility

well alrighty then , time for me to be hitting the ol dusty trail

[emosun]

8 minutes ago, ChuckFeed said:

TempleOS

i'm just now realizing this may be a shitpost

[ChuckFeed]

Just now, emosun said:

i'm just now realizing this may be a shitpost

this is not a shitpost, im actually dualbooting parabola and TempleOS on one of my T60's.

the only problem i have is that you need to hack around with proprietary VGA option roms because coreboot/seabios hates vga mode switching, which TempleOS relies on

so either hard code everything in the bios to 640x480, or go insert blobs to make it work. (i chose hard coding because i hate blobs)

[Sauron]

4 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

Hey, it can browse the web just fine, as long as you turn off JavaScript (which is just there to track you) and cookies (which are just there to track you), and send every web page you want through a relay server that emails you the page contents in plain text (through the email server you wrote yourself because nobody else's code can be trusted).

Also you'd better insert random noise in your browser canvas and never use the same public IP twice while connecting to a randomized TOR node for each individual request. Also each connection should use a new and separate SIM card lest your ISP know which IP you have and which TOR nodes you've been contacting. Oh, and after every session you should write 0s to your drive 5000 times to make sure no local trace of your activity is left.

4 hours ago, ChuckFeed said:

we will soon go back to mainframe computers and 'cloud' computing just like in the good old unix days, i see it coming already.

people will use dumb terminals and just connect to the central 'cloud' to do their computing

People have been saying this for like a decade but it makes no sense, personal computing devices are plenty fast for most tasks. The way forward is a healthy mix of both.

4 hours ago, ChuckFeed said:

a T60 is very usable if you don't run non-functional operating systems that are designed to force people to upgrade on them, openBSD eats a few megs of ram and linux eats about a gig in idle.

It doesn't matter what the operating system uses, modern programs and web services are too demanding for a T60. If you do any development work the compilation times will cost you dozens of hours. I have an x220 which is much faster than a T60 but is also starting to show its age.

4 hours ago, emosun said:

hey i'd argue all my offline retro machines are free from tracking so its definitely possible. they'll never know how much hydro thunder im playing

Did you know that you can reliably read keystrokes hundreds of metres away just from changes in the electromagnetic radiation emitted by your keyboard?

[ChuckFeed]

18 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Also you'd better insert random noise in your browser canvas and never use the same public IP twice while connecting to a randomized TOR node for each individual request. Also each connection should use a new and separate SIM card lest your ISP know which IP you have and which TOR nodes you've been contacting. Oh, and after every session you should write 0s to your drive 5000 times to make sure no local trace of your activity is left.

People have been saying this for like a decade but it makes no sense, personal computing devices are plenty fast for most tasks. The way forward is a healthy mix of both.

It doesn't matter what the operating system uses, modern programs and web services are too demanding for a T60. If you do any development work the compilation times will cost you dozens of hours. I have an x220 which is much faster than a T60 but is also starting to show its age.

Did you know that you can reliably read keystrokes hundreds of metres away just from changes in the electromagnetic radiation emitted by your keyboard?

potato hardware is a good thing, especially for developers.

it forces devs to actually optimize their code because they don't have the privilege to work on a workstation monster that has x5 as much performance as any normal computer the software is actually targeted at.

if you actually optimized your code it will be fast, it just takes some time and know-how.

check out minetest, it runs on potato thinkpads just fine

why? because it has been more or less optimized.

check out electron and all the bloatware made in it, lets say element, a JS matrix client that uses electron for the 'desktop' version https://element.io/

now check out another matrix client that eats a tiny fractional amount of the cpu power and ram element uses, https://git.dec05eba.com/QuickMedia

hell even the element.io front page hangs my web browser and puts 50% CPU load on my machine, while quickmedia eats barely 10% while being actively used (9% of that being openGL trash thats planned to be scooped out soon, to be replaced with xrender to get ram usage down from 100 to 1-2 MiB as well)

why doesnt everyone use quickmedia you ask?

its not a web page, its a native program that works on GNU+Linux (and should work on any POSIX compliant OS, but theyre not tested), but not on chromeOS, phones, and windows.

also for your interest, i built devices specifically designed to emit random electromagnetic waves to prevent people from doing things like reading my keyboard input, CPU cycles, or CRT output.

have fun listening to electromagnetic nyan cat melodies through my walls!

and yes it DOES matter which operating system you use. there are operating systems designed to work and get work done, and operating systems designed to force you to buy "better" hardware every 3 years.

jokes on you, i actually aliased rm to shred && rm, on a fully encrypted boot drive with fully encrypted boot partition

[emosun]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

 

Did you know that you can reliably read keystrokes hundreds of metres away just from changes in the electromagnetic radiation emitted by your keyboard?

Yeah well thats not going to tell them how much hydro thunder im playing

[NF-A12x25]

5 hours ago, ChuckFeed said:

name a single mechanical keyboard that can keep up with the model m's quality, other than the model f or something you built at home for 800$

There are a lot of modern boards that keep up with the quality of the Model M for $100 or less. Custom boards aren’t always expensive. One example would be a Keychron V series board barebones, grab your own choice of switches- I’m partial to a nice tactile like a silent Boba U4 or a U4T, and cop some PBT doubleshot clones off keychron’s website. Once you get into the $200 range almost every popular board outstrips the Model M in quality by FAR

 

And potato machines =/= classic mechanical keyboards that’re actually good

[da na]

I've got a collection of Core 2 Duo Dell Latitudes that I use daily in class. Great machines, but I use them for basic web browsing and taking notes, and use my 36 core Xeon workstation for anything serious. Got the whole shelf for under $250 on eBay, that's 7 machines. Mass produced laptops will never be a 'rare' thing except in some, well, rare cases. Yes, Thinkpads are desirable machines but I don't forsee anyone paying thousands of dollars for a regular ol t60 in several years 

[Sauron]

46 minutes ago, ChuckFeed said:

potato hardware is a good thing, especially for developers.

Hard disagree

46 minutes ago, ChuckFeed said:

it forces devs to actually optimize their code because they don't have the privilege to work on a workstation monster that has x5 as much performance as any normal computer the software is actually targeted at.

You can just have test targets, plus running the code isn't the same as running the development environment.

59 minutes ago, ChuckFeed said:

if you actually optimized your code it will be fast, it just takes some time and know-how.

Using fewer resources is not the same as being faster, in fact it's often the opposite. Unused ram is wasted ram, if you have ram you should use it to make your code faster. Using slow hardware doesn't make your program better or faster, it just limits the features you can have.

1 hour ago, ChuckFeed said:

check out electron and all the bloatware made in it, lets say element, a JS matrix client that uses electron for the 'desktop' version https://element.io/

now check out another matrix client that eats a tiny fractional amount of the cpu power and ram element uses, https://git.dec05eba.com/QuickMedia

hell even the element.io front page hangs my web browser and puts 50% CPU load on my machine, while quickmedia eats barely 10% while being actively used (9% of that being openGL trash thats planned to be scooped out soon, to be replaced with xrender to get ram usage down from 100 to 1-2 MiB as well)

Electron allows you to write and maintain powerful gui software that works on any platform with no styling issues and pretty good performance on even fairly old (but not archaic) machines. Quickmedia runs on what, linux only? I'm sure it's perfectly fine software but you're comparing apples and oranges and not understanding why frameworks like electron are used. Developers have limited time that can either be used to improve software functionality OR maintain 50 different versions of the same basic program because you're using ultraspecific, hyperoptimized native toolkits when you really don't need to.

1 hour ago, ChuckFeed said:

should work on any POSIX compliant OS, but theyre not tested

Oh really? I wonder why it wasn't tested on every possible combination of software and hardware... is it maybe because that would take more time and work than is reasonable?

1 hour ago, ChuckFeed said:

also for your interest, i built devices specifically designed to emit random electromagnetic waves to prevent people from doing things like reading my keyboard input, CPU cycles, or CRT output.

Amazing. You go to these lengths and then you... log in to a forum? Keyboard signals are the least of your concerns my friend.

1 hour ago, ChuckFeed said:

and yes it DOES matter which operating system you use. there are operating systems designed to work and get work done, and operating systems designed to force you to buy "better" hardware every 3 years.

You can use Linux on a system that wasn't obsolete 10 years ago. If you have a T60 and it still works fine for your needs that's great and I'm not saying you have to toss it out, but buying one for a price that could get you something that's over 10 times faster doesn't make sense.

1 hour ago, ChuckFeed said:

jokes on you, i actually aliased rm to shred && rm, on a fully encrypted boot drive with fully encrypted boot partition

I'm sure that won't hurt your drive's longevity

[da na]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

Hard disagree

You can just have test targets, plus running the code isn't the same as running the development environment.

Using fewer resources is not the same as being faster, in fact it's often the opposite. Unused ram is wasted ram, if you have ram you should use it to make your code faster. Using slow hardware doesn't make your program better or faster, it just limits the features you can have.

Very true, using a terrible slow system for programming, game development, CAD, anything you can imagine will make the end product worse. If you as a developer are limited by your dev hardware, there is less you can do in terms of optimization. I don't disagree that optimization is a good thing, and perhaps some devs should test their end product on a lower end system... but using a crappy CPU in your development system will get you nowhere.

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, Mel0n. said:

and perhaps some devs should test their end product on a lower end system...

While obviously this is never a bad thing, scaling up well is often harder. When you run your code on the bare minimum hardware then running is considered enough and at worst it's going to be a little sluggish; when you run it on a system that's potentially 100 times faster and are only getting 50% more performance then you have a real problem.