This thread is interesting, it is like the abyss of old hardware and took me to abyss of humanity even like Irish Famine, US Civil War, Andersonville Prison, World Wars, Natural disasters etc.,

Now at the bottom of this Abyss I found Crayons !!! I got 152 crayons Ultimate crayola pack yesterday for 23 bucks including tax at local store in Canada. Tried out some abstract art and it come out ok. This set will last me for 5 years atleast. Now if the net is down or I can't afford net anymore, then I can do art with crayons more. There is an organization called from crayons to computers that helps young folks get into computing. Funny that I am going from old computers to crayons. Better for eyes and more peaceful. Keeping old computer related art is also a lot less clutter and cheaper.

These days many are glued to their mobile devices etc., even outdoors. There is one site that does the opposite, encourages folks to go outside and sketch - urbansketchers.org

My old P4 server is starting to freeze when I try to load a site with too many images even with just dillo browser. In a few more months to years, it will be time to retire this thing or go text only on it. Had some really nice times with it for warm memories.

Am I chocking myself ? Have just 500 Mb swap and 600Mb free space on HD, felt I must share this.

It felt a bit strange to try out crayons at my age. However, I am not alone, there are several other adults into crayons:
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...adults/319405/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/30/b...r-crayons.html
http://alisaburke.blogspot.com/2012/...h-crayons.html

Some adults even have crayon related careers.

I did a forest landscape painting with crayons recently, it came out super awful. So have more to learn in this regard.

Few other that I did like flower vase, abstract etc., came out ok. I get images for art from google images for now using my old computer. Eventually have to look at real life and use imagination also.

When I load this image below in full resolution, my limited Dillo browser starts to perform super sketchy and even hangs, I have no other major browser like PaleMoon or other graphic intense programs open, mostly rest are text based programs.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/newpix/20...9852170647.jpg
I need to load such images to help practice use of Crayons. I am slowly getting a hang of doing landscapes with crayons and
this is excellent for this week or month even.

When I use Geany on a long text file in a comfortable larger font, this PC is slow and takes time to go from one
line to next, takes quite a bit of few seconds to go up or down a page even.

No matter what other retro PC users tell me to convince me, I can't ignore the practical aspects of using this PC.
I have four choices:
1. need to be super patient, lookout for future limitations of using this PC, make alternatives to adapt
basically accepting the PC as it is.
2. Use this PC mostly and use a better PC when it is really needed for more complex tasks.
3. Totally abandon this PC and go for a better PC (This option makes me very uncomfortable).
4. Upgrade Ram, Swap, increase HD space, get better video card (Don't feel upto this now.)

Here are a few more art related links:
Crayon artists:
https://www.art-is-fun.com/crayon-art
https://donmarcostudio.myshopify.com/pages/about-us
https://crayonkelly.com/
https://artk12.com/professional-cray...-art-students/
http://www.crayonguy.com/gallery.php

Crayon tips:
Being frugal I was not comfortable with sharpening crayon due to loss of shavings, but it is vital to sharpen them:
http://www.jeffreyrobert.com/2010/05...n-crayola.html
How to use Crayon Shavings:
https://buggyandbuddy.com/crafts-for...ayon-shavings/

Criminals love art and it is a big underground business, interesting that they appreciate art more than the
common man it seems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_and_Crime
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/a...-in-crime.html
https://www.theguardian.com/artandde...-belief-in-art

I researched more about crayons as I continue to use them. I encourage all here to use crayons, no matter how bad the results turn out to be. These are the benefits I see for myself from crayons use:
1. Different motion for fingers is better against RSI, trigger finger etc.,
from long hours of old PC with Linux use
2. Relief for eyes from PC monitor
3. The resulting art can be donated to others
4. If one walks around to do crayon art outdoors, then it is more time in real life,
nice exercise and perhaps even gives chance to make a few real life friends in local community
Edited to add: 5. My parrots also love to watch me do crayon art, they love the colors. Their peace and happiness is very precious, else they are agitated and loud.

distrotest.net is a very nice site, can test distro before using. Too slow on my old PC. Few others may try here and see how it works. There are some Old PC OSes also listed there.

I have used old pcs as nameservers/firewalls/routers.
You can configure it to boot from a cd so nothing to write to and no security risk http://www.devil-linux.org/home/index.php

Rather than keep a picture open in your browser, have you tried grabbing it with wget & using an image viewer?

wget -c URLtoPicture

Thanks for this reminder, folks are starting to forget how useful optical media are.

Yes, I grab images when needed.

Met with doc. recently, he said for trigger finger, the solution is surgery and for few weeks cant use that arm comfortably, will be great restricted. So approx. almost 2 months this way, when eating, changing clothes, showering etc., That is not all tho, the same issue can happen on other fingers in both hands, so this means more surgery and more time to heal and it can all addup to almost half a year or even more. For now he told me that my issue is rather mild. Instead of facing all these issues, I rather do mild exercises, do more art using crayons to manage my trigger finger issue. So far it is working out ok, will see how it goes.

Re old PCs:
For a while (some years back) I was maintaining old pcs (running a paint mixing database app) and things died.

I got into the following habit: I would go into a computer shop and say
"Do you do upgrades?"
They would reply 'yes' enthusiastically.
"Good, do you have any DOWNGRADES?"
I would then clarify that I was maintaining old stuff and would pay them beer money for any working motherboards or hard disks, maybe even graphics cards they had upgraded. I would get them to boot it and haggle a hard bargain. Since I was paying money for their trash, they were happy. I would pay buttons. Some people upgraded what was still usable, so I got value. You needed to pay cash, and not ask for a receipt.

The CPUs were older then, but I quickly set standards for upgrades. People with a really old box buy new, here at least.

There was news that last 2 blockbuster stores in Alaska are closing. Only one blockbuster store open in US now is in Bend, Oregon. Tried to look for related sites and opened a news link in Dillo browser, it froze my PC for very long, forced reboot and checked same site with links browser, that site has 20 images of different blockbuster store related images that this PC couldn't handle. Before, I would have worried about this. These days getting more used to it, I got off PC and did some crayon abstract art, was relaxing. With time this PC is unable to handle a bit extra few images even. Will use it as such for now.

Thanks again for this info. it lead me to look for these sites below:

https://superuser.com/questions/4342...g-the-terminal

https://www.labnol.org/software/wget...xamples/28750/

I haven't had a chance to use crayons yet as an adult, but I did learn how to write (calligraphy) when I was 35 and it was very helpful for that kind of stress.

The internet has changed in ways I don't enjoy. I'm unapologetic about my "old iron". I use the internet responsibly but I also use offline computers with legacy operating systems for the same reasons my grandparents kept their Victrolas and 78s when "everyone" had moved on to electric record players and LPs that played a 33 RPMs.

Lots of good ideas on this thread. I should be kinder to myself and check it more often.

The good news is that I'm in a good position to help a fellow oldster become a new Linux user and the bad news is that my T43 isn't recognizing its hard drive any more. I still have the superbay for a second IDE drive so it's not exactly unusable, I'm just afraid it's the hard drive controller again and remembering when that was the end of the line for my 386.

I won't go newer than T400/X200 for Intel any more. It's just not worth the money.

Depending on why your disk isn't being seen, maybe it has dirty contacts, just remove & reinsert it a couple of times, that should clean them up sufficiently.