Most public access unix servers offer free email upon registration. The oldest example is SDF.org, some newer servers include tilde.team and envs.net

Photoshop cs2 is free to download and probably works well on wine as its old as hell.

Edit: Correction. You used to o be able to download cs2 from adobe website. This is no longer the case.

GIMP has always been able to do what I needed more or less. Its got a learning curve and sometimes I still dont 100% how something works but for basic photo editing, meme making, and converting photos to different file types (why is .webp not universally supported yet?) Its pretty good.

When theres a problem doing something in GIMP it always felt like the issue was my own understanding of the toolset conbined with not-great documentation being given. I never felt like I encountered the limits of the program itself.

I’m sure if you are a professional graphics person who needs advanced tools theres things only PS can provide and its user interface is probably more friendly. But for me, the average joe schmo, GIMP gets the job done 95% of the time with little to no headache.

Thats good info for low spec laptops. Thanks for the software recommendation. Need to do some more research on the model you suggested. I think you confused me for the other guy though. Im currently working with a six core ryzen 2600 CPU and a RX 580 GPU. edit- no worries we are good it was still great info for the thinkpad users!

Thank you thats useful to know. In your opinion what context size is the sweet spot for llama 3.1 8B and similar models?

Thanks for the suggestions. Updated the post with the list.

Linux Mint cinnamon is gold standard for quality IMO. All my modern systems that can comfortably run it do.

That said it also uses more resources than your old craptop may like depending on just how old we are talking about.

If cinammon is a little slow, try mint xfce. Its a lot lighter on system resources. Last time i tried xfce it was a great performance compromise if a little unpolished in places.

If Mint xfce is also too slow you can give MX Linux a whirl. Its way faster and more minimal that mint out of the box. Yet it feels modern and allows you to install all the same programs as mint from the default software repo including flatpaks. MX fluxbox is probably as minimal as you would want to get. Try their flagship xfce first.

If you are trying to beat new life into a 25 year old dying dinosaur Puppy Linux will do it, but you won’t enjoy using it.

The worms are back again. Gotta dig out out Microsoft’s parasites with a screw driver.

They were there from the beginning, check the template it’s been untouched since first upload. The only edit I made to the image since was better cropping. I intended for those white strips to be coke lines. Its a small detail but if you zoom in you can see some extra white on the nose lol. Why I added it to the character. Definitely smoking a joint still with that bud

“decent speed” depends on your subjective opinion and what you want it to do. I think its fair to say if it can generate text around your slowest tolerable reading speed thats a bare minimum for real time conversational things. If you want a task done and don’t mind stepping away to get a coffee it can be much slower.

I was pleasantly suprised to get anything at all working on an old laptop. When thinking of AI my mind imagines super computers and thousand dollar rigs and data centers. I don’t think mobile computers like my thinkpad. But sure enough the technology is there and your old POS can adopt a powerful new tool if you have realistic expectations on matching model capacity with specs.

Tiny llama will work on a smartphone but its dumb. llama3.1 8B is very good and will work on modest hardware but you may have to be patient with it if especially if your laptop wasn’t top of the line when it was made 10 years ago. Then theres all the models in between.

The i7 6600U duo core 2.6ghz CPU in my laptop trying to run 8B was jusst barely enough to be passing grade for real time talking needs at 1.2-1.7 T/s it could say a short word or half of a complex one per second. When it needed to process something or recalculate context it took a hot minute or two.

That got kind of annoying if you were getting into what its saying. Bumping the PC up to a AMD ryzen 5 2600 6 core CPU was a night and day difference. It spits out a sentence very quick faster than my average reading speed at 5-6 t/s. Im still working on getting the 4GB RX 580 GPU used for offloading so those numbers are just with the CPU bump. RAM also matters DDR6 will beat DDR4 speed wise.

Heres a tip, most software has the models default context size set at 512, 2048, or 4092. Part of what makes llama 3.1 so special is that it was trained with 128k context so bump that up to 131072 in the settings so it isnt recalculating context every few minutes…

Thanks randint glad you liked it!

tinyllama 1.1b would probably run reasonably fast. Dumb as a rock for sure. But hey its a start! My 2015 t460 thinkpad laptop with an i7 6600U 2.6GhZ duo core was able to do llama 3.1 8B at 1.2T-1.7T/s which while definitely slow at about a word per second. Still, was also just fast enough to have fun in real time with conversation.

Heres the template if anyone wants it

How to play IPTV using iptv-org playlist and VLC

More directions at iptv-orgs github

1. open up VLC (and most other media players)
2. select the media tab in top left, navigate to ‘open network stream’
3. paste this URL: https://iptv-org.github.io/iptv/index.m3u to import the global playlist of all iptv-org streams
4. Open vlc’s playlist viewer with ctrl+L or right click > view > playlist

You should see a bunch of IPTV streams to choose from. Go to search bar located top right to search playlist for the stream you want. You can look for a more specific iptv-org playlist for your language and stuff. when commercial breaks happen it just shows a still frame. If nothing is playing right away try waiting a few minutes.

I hope all this has helped you out, Lumisal. I updated the formatting on my comments to closer resemble a guide in case you decide to link them in the future. Enjoy your open and energy efficient computing!

have you tried VLC? It works with IPTV if I am remembering right.

When you ‘stream a video’ from firefox it just downloads the video in small chunks at a time instead of the whole thing at once. These chunks of downloaded video are saved to temporary memory called a ‘cache’ and deleted after you are done the video.

Yes yt-dlp is most often used to download the entire video as a digital file onto permanent memory; however it doesn’t have to be used that way. Other applications like smplayer and mpv can work with yt-dlp. Using it as a component to do the heavy lifting of talking to youtubes servers and streaming video in the same exact way firefox does.

Doing a quick search, there are some projects to implement mpv with sponsorblock. Im not the most technical person and prefer not to get my hands dirty with complex hacked together scripts that require compilation or whatever. Thats not to discourage you if you want to follow up on those things know people are working on it but if you aren’t a power user it may be a hard time to get that kind of thing working.

Theres better ways to play YouTube on SBC

The issue is trying to run a video in Firefox. Modern web browsers consume a lot of resources. Also they don’t use your hardware efficiently for video playing. You need to take some time to set up a native video player application to play YouTube videos. This better uses the SBC hardware acceleration without wasting precious resources.

How to play YouTube through SMPlayer

Use your operating systems software installer to Install the latest versions of smplayer, smtube, and mpv. Use smtube to select a YouTube video. This sends the network stream URL to smplayer which detects its a YouTube video and downloads the latest yt-dlp to help stream it. If everything is up to date, it plays great.

Not all OS keep their software up to date. Some prefer older stable packages. So its important to use a OS that keeps this software updated. I know for sure MX Linux works with its default software repos out of the box. Its available for Pis, though I have not personally installed on a PI.

Configure SMTube To Use Invidious

Once you get YouTube videos playing, go into settings of smtube to change the web page from tonvid to a custom invidious instance. Pick one thats ideally from your country and that lets you register an account. That way you can import subscriptions and personalize stuff.

Hiccups when using smtube to load an invidious site: the default language will be some foreign language. Make sure you know how to go to settings in invidious and change to english. To load the video click on small youtube icon bottom right of video.

Old Hardware Given New Life

I have revived lots of old PCs over the years. Giving them a new lease on life with up to date linux operating systems for friends and family. I have a 15 year old laptop that was finally having a hard time running latest linux mint xfce. This week I got to work reviving it.

I gave mx linux a shot as I liked ExplainingComputers review of the OS and thought it good fit for my use case. Installing these programs right from MX’s software repositiories was a breeze. Youtube played effortlessly! MX is pretty minimal and im sure most pis can run it okay, so give it a shot if you want a OS with up to date repos for these packages if youtube is one of your main concerns.

Thanks, havent heard of nobara before but it being made by the dude who maintains protob GE is interesting and I will check it out.

Linux mint is my favorite os been running it many years now no issues with running games. Its a bulletproof OS esecially with timeshift snapshots SteamOS is specifically a gaming os developed by valve for the steam deck but you can installed it on any system . The key is proton which is a windows emulator comparability layer fine tuned by valves Dev team to get most games running on Linux.

If possible get a laptop with a thunderbolt 3 port and a compatable external gpu

Have you taken a look at c/politicalmemes ?If a humorless poorly constructed wall of doomerism text lamenting the flaws of modern capitalist society counts as a meme, just about anything does these days