Withered-Tech

Project notes for agk's withered tech project. Goals include - reusing old technology, deploying an offline (not internet, specifically) focused environment, while also creating tools to communicate over novel methods.

Tech involved includes: DOS, LoRa, Reticulum, Bootable USB environments.

Most information will be contained in agk's phlog (gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/agk/wither), but initial documents shared this year will be attached. Relevant photographs will be shared here in the future.

More on withered technology, part I
-----------------------------------

Back in April I wrote about Gunpei Yokoi's philosophy of "Lateral
Thinking with Withered Technology"[1], with prompted Anna (agk)[2]
and The Free Thinker (freet)[3] to write responses of their own.
I have been meaning to write them both responses ever since but got
distracted writing about other things first.  It's taken me much
longer than I wanted to get responses out, and I'm still struggling,
so I'm switching to an instalment plan strategy rather than trying
to find the time to get one giant response that covers everything
into a state I'm happy with.  This post will just be my response to
freet's post.  It's not so much a detailed point-by-point response
as it is my long musings on aspects of this whole permacomputing
thing which have arisen as a consequence of my reading their posts,
and that'll be true for my response to Anna (hopefully next weekend)
as well.

Of the two responses, freet's was the one with the most with
concrete instances of using various particular withered computing
devices in novel ways.	Specifically, video game consoles (a PS2
and the Nintendo DS) were mentioned, as were routers and other home
networking devices which can (or could) run OpenWRT.  I think both of
these categories of withered device warrant serious thinking about.
They have historically been kind of off my radar but now are very
much on it.

All the way back in 2020, I wrote a post about the so-called
"standard salvage computing platform"[4], arguing that we ought to
think of Android smartphones as constituting this.  My reasoning was
simply that these were absolutely ubiquitous, approximately free
(most people, if they really tried, could probably score an old
and somewhat-out-of-shape but functional smartphone off a friend of
family member who has it sitting in a drawer somewhere, for free or
in exchange to buying them a drink or whatever), had integrated I/O
(the touchscreen being built right into the device serving as the
primary channel for both), had lower power requirements and also
very well standardised physical connections for power.

All of these advantages remain true, but in the intervening years I
have come to think I probably down-played some obvious downsides
as well.  Probably the biggest of these is radical hardware
variability.  There's some sense in which "Android smartphones"
is a meaningful device category to talk about, but it's also
undeniably true that at the level of chipsets and bootloaders, we
are actually talking about easily hundreds and probably thousands
of distinct and incompatible devices.  These devices are able to
run a Linux-derived operating system at time of launch only due to
extensive phone-specific porting efforts carried out by engineers
employed by the phone's manufacturers.	Those engineers have full
access to all the details of how the phone are built and they don't
have to worry at all about bootloader security or anything like that.
Volunteer communities trying to revitalise those devices after they
have abandoned by their manufacturers are working in the dark and
against obstacles.  The effort involved in porting later versions
of Android, or alternative operating systems like PostmarketOS,
to those devices is substantial.  The workload is multiplied by
the total number of distinct hardware designs in circulation.
The total is, realistically, impossible for a niche movement.

The video game consoles landscape looks radically different to this.
These devices are manufactured at very large scale (the PS2, Nintendo
Switch and Nintendo  DS each sold over 150 million units worldwide)
but the hardware variation, while non-zero (you don't just have
things like the "fat" vs thin PS2, but there are a few different
generations of fat PS2 hardware, as I found out recently I when I
naively thought I could transplant an optical drive from one to the
other), is negligible.	All 150 million of the devices branded with
the same name are 100% binary compatible - customers would riot if
the expensive discs and cartridges they bought stopped working on
later generations of the same hardware or after a firmware update
was installed.	Figuring out how to repurpose the five most popular
consoles of this century is guaranteed to net you many, many more
repurposed devices than targetting the five most popular makes and
models of Anrdoid phone would, no question.

Not only is the amount of reverse engineering work required to
revitalise all those devices less than that required to revitalise
all the smartphones, the incentives for doing so are very different.
People jailbreak phones for idealistic reasons around freedom and
privacy and environmentalism (as well, of course for the fun of the
technical challenge).  People do the same to video game consoles
to save money or make money by pirating games, which is something
that appeals to many orders of magnitude more people than casting
off corporate shackles does.  When many more people are working on
far fewer devices, the work naturally gets done faster.  In fact, an
awful lot of the work is already done!	Many of these platforms have
had their security systems broken and can now run arbitrary code,
including non-game homebrew software.  Did you know you can even
install the Libreboot Open BIOS on the original Sony Playstation?
It's not necessarily easy, it's a hardware hack[5], but still!

Note only are there homebrew development kits out there for a lot
of these platforms, the aftermarket hardware care and support is
surprisingly well-developed, too.  There are a lot of videogamers out
there who like old machines but are not themselves hardware hackers,
and this makes it commercially viable for folks who *are* hardware
savvy to operate online stores selling refurbished devices which have
had e.g. new batteries installed in them.  There are people making
and selling replacement plastic shells for all the handheld devices.
You can buy kits to upgrade the display in original GameBoys to be
brighter and clearer!  I was really surprised when I discovered
all this earlier this year.  This is real permacomputing praxis,
breathing new life into old machines, including machines from last
century, and it's being done for entirely non-ideological reasons,
by people who just wanna play old games and enjoy them on original
hardware.

If it's not already clear, I have become *very* interested in
old game devices as salvage computing platforms.  The real turning
point was being shocked at just how low the barriers to entry are in
some cases.  Specifically, I bought a Nintendo DSi (a device which
has a (stylus) touch screen, WiFi, front and rear-facing cameras,
a microphone, an SD card reader and a Real Time Clock, so not one
million miles away from a rudimentary smartphone) much earlier
this year (before making any of these withered tech posts) after I
learned there there's an open-source C library[6] which easily exposes
just about all the important functionality.  You can compile your
homebrew DS software on a Linux machine using GCC and make, it's the
most conventional development experience imaginable.  You do need a
so-called "flashcart" to be able to get the resulting binary running
on hardware, but still.  The contrast with developing for Android
is tremendous, with the consequence that I've actually *done* some
DS development using libnds, whereas every time I've even thought
about developing for Android I've noped out after doing a little
research and not wanting to go through the hassle of even getting
set up for it.	I'll be writing more about DS homebrew in the future!

It's not all necessarily totally smooth sailing, of course.
The DS and DS-Lite support WiFi but not WPA2 networks.	There's an
off-the-shelf web browser for the DS but it can't do modern HTTPS
due to expired CA certificates (there's an open source browser
which can[7], but it's extremely rough and ready).  These are hardly
insurmountable obstacles, though.  A headless RPi or even an ESP32
device can provide a very low-power short-range WEP or open WiFi
network, possibly locked to MAC addresses, and can use HTTP to serve
crusty old CSS-renderings of RSS feeds, Gopher and Gemini content,
for example.  Old smartphones and tablets, naturally, could take
advantage of such a facility as well, this being much safer than
connecting them directly to the public internet.

Of course, RPis and ESP32s are not exactly in the "withered
tech" category, and indeed I'm encouraging permacomputing folk
to explore lateral thinking with withered technology instead of
building new widgets based around these dirt cheap and abundant
modern devices precisely because all these dirt cheap DIY-friendly
modern devices are powerful vectors for the "hardware grows on
trees and lil' computers are so cheap you can totally buy some
just for fun!" mentality which permacomputing needs to actually
oppose if it's to have any kind of coherence.  There is surely some
"breaking eggs to make omelettes" rationality in using such devices
if you already have them lying around, or can buy them cheaply used
from consumerist makers who have upgraded to a later version, and
apply them to breathing new life into yet older things which would
otherwise be hard to utilise, but the philosophical tension is there.
This bring us nicely to the other category freet mentioned, which
is consumer networking tech.

Things like modems, routers, NASes etc feel to me like they are
probably situated somewhere between game consoles and smart phones in
terms of how much hardware variability there is.  Like smartphones,
many of them are sold running something Linux-derived under the
hood, and as such it is unsurprising that many of these devices
are or were supported by OpenWRT.  I am far from an expert here,
but I *think* it's probably true that the proportion of popular
devices which are or were well-supported by OpenWRT is greater than
the proportion of popular smartphones which are well-supported by
PostmarketOS or LineageOS or anything like that.  Some very quick
research on this front revealed to me that a popular Linksys NAS
device, the NSLU2[8], manufactured between 2004 and 2008, was able to
run mainline or close-to-mainline Linux and *BSD, and seems to at
one point have had a pretty active and dedicated community of folks
doing such, affectionately referring to the device as the "Slug"
and sometimes even bestowing memory upgrades upon it.  Some really
quick poking around on eBay and my local Craigslist equivalent
suggests these Slugs are still not hard to find and dirt cheap.
There are probably plenty of other devices like this, too.  Many of
them probably have wireless hardware in them, meaning they could
also act as gateways for things like DSes, getting them easily into
Gopher- or Geminispace, bridging them to alternative networks like
Yggdrasil, etc.

Some of you might be wondering quite what the point of all this
is, when there are also still countless millions of "real" computer
devices out there waiting to be reused for even less effort.  This is
a fair question (one for which "fun" is a perfectly permissible
answer, of course), and one I will try to say something about when I
write my response to Anna, whose post got me thinking more about big
picture "why?"/"what for?" type questions than specific categories
of device type.

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/lateral-thinking-with-withered-technology.txt
[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/agk/2026-04-14-lat.txt
[3] gopher://aussies.space:70/0/~freet/phlog/2026-04-17RE_Lateral_Thinking_with_Withered_Technology.txt
[4] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/the-standard-salvaged-computing-platform.txt
[5] https://libreboot.org/docs/install/playstation.html
[6] https://blocksds.skylyrac.net/libnds/index.html
[7] https://codeberg.org/SkyLyrac/bunjalloo
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2

!More lateral thinking with withered tech
 --- 
agk's diary 
9 June 2026 @ 03:52 UTC
 --- 
on ThinkPad x61, 1024x768 VGA screen, Model M keys
in the garage
 --- 
Peter, a retired electrical engineer, came over
today to look at my cyber scrapheap and decide what
potential projects interest him. 

Solderpunk, two days ago, responded to the Free
Thinker's reflections on lateral thinking with 
(salvaged) withered tech. Solderpunk specifically
noted the community/industry that repairs, hacks,
modifies, and repurposes gaming consoles into PCs,
terminals, or entertainment systems, and potential 
of old routers as smol servers.

INDUSTRIAL/SCIENTIFIC SALVAGE CONSIDERED

Peter used to repair hardware in industrial and 
scientific settings, and threw out a lot of the
durable, embedded, low-power kinds of things I like.
The hardware that controls industrial manufacturing
and test equipment often runs for decades with
minimal maintainence, until one day it breaks, and
someone has to open up that Ship of Theseus and
replace a part so the line can start back up.

I'm sure there are more video game system owners
than factories, particularly when considered, not as
a snapshot, but as a bucket of time from 1985 or
1990 to present. The cast-off console/router combo
may prove a better target for this kind of thinking
than my industrial special interest on any scale
beyond personal/hobbyist. I'm curious to learn more.

DOS ON SALVAGED THINGS FOR KIDS

Talking to Peter for a few hours as we opened up
various boxen of yesteryear (starting with an old
friend's IBM 5155 PC Portable from 1985 with a bad
power supply, ending with a girlfriend's 2010
netbook that just needs a charging cable) helped me
clarify thoughts on lateral thinking with salvaged
tech.

I have cast-off laptops intended for business or
educational use and cast-off routers. When the
laptops are gone, I'd like to start working on cast-
off thin clients or game consoles.

What I'll do to them:
 - Remove wifi/bluetooth module 
 - Remove hard drive
 - Remove or disconnect any camera
 - Potentially remove some RAM
 - Configure to boot from removable media
 - Underclock/undervolt CPU
 - Write FreeDOS, appropriate software collection,
    and menu/launcher batch file to bootable medium
   (SD card, low-profile USB)
 - Test and give to kids

Upgrade path:
 - Parents trade me old removable media for remova-
    ble media with new software collection, or DIY

Security:
 - Airgapped
 - Save files and documents on different removable
    media, system disk is ROM

Use:
 - Put in system card/drive (SD card/USB drive)
 - (Optional) Put in drive for documents/save files
 - Press power button to boot
 - Study, play. write
 - Press power button to turn off

RESEARCH QUESTION: DUMB TTY ON SALVAGE

What's the curresponding way to turn $OLD_LAPTOP
into something like a dumb terminal? Goal: push
power button, help text/menu and user prompt appear
nearly instantly. Ssh and maybe telnet (maybe in a
sandboxed network or overlay network) are possible,
but not much else.

RFC "tty dumb console mode":
 - Plug in ethernet or serial cable, or LORA device
 - Put in system card/drive with stripped-down,
    nearly instantly-booting UNIX livesystem 
    (like OpenWRT, Alpine, or FuguIta). If possible,
    it should be ROM, boot into RAM, single-user,
    tty only, with everything not required for I/O,
    networking, and ssh/telnet/serial terminal
    stripped out or locked down.
 - Press power button. It should autologin to a non-
    root account and display an options menu or
    short help file on how to connect to something.
 - Connect to something. Login if whatever you're
    connecting to requires it. Logout or break the
    connection.
 - Press power button to turn off

I haven't built a livesystem USB drive to do this
with OpenWRT or FuguIta yet, but wasted about five
hours trying to achieve it with Alpine before
pausing this research project for now. I don't have
deep knowledge of Linux/UNIX internals; someone who
does could probably either suggest a path or tell me
to abandon this.

The computer hosting the dumb terminal kiosk could
obviously have its wifi board and antenna reinstall-
ed if desired. It could possibly be locked into an
overlay network like Reticulum. Fun/useful services
to access could include a BBS with unfederated email,
chat, bulletin boards, and door games; or a multi-
user unix system.

FUN

At least I think these things are fun. All the kids
I've allowed to play on the family computer think a
DOS system with an appropriate software library is
super fun. My only experience with kids on a tty
console was in a small poor community in the South
Carolina lowcountry after a catastrophic flood more
than ten years ago.

My friends had a stack of retired thin clients. A
small business owner donated a c.2004 laptop from
her storage unit. Friends had yagi antennas. We
built an 8-machine computer lab in the community
center/youth center/distribution hub, originally for
FEMA benefits registration, then for kids who were
out of their destroyed schools.

The storage-unit laptop was the server in a LTSP
(Linux terminal-server project) system, and the thin
clients and even older laptops were the terminals.
They ran edubuntu educational software (most of it
not as good as the DOS stuff I've since discovered)
in an X GUI. Each kid had their own login, and of
course it worked on any computer they sat at.
Updates only needed to be run on the server.

Internet access was over a wireless broadband link
through those yagi antennas to the home internet
connection of a willing neighbor a half-mile away.
Filtered through a cacheing squid proxy, the
computer lab caused her no trouble, and her rural
telephone cooperative ISP said it was fine.

One of the boys got really into a computer programm-
ing game that was like LOGO or Scratch, learning C
while commanding a critter to run around the screen.
One of the girls wanted to learn to write a resume
in LibreOffice to help her mom get a job. But hands-
down the most popular thing was when the kids
learned to ctrl-alt-F2 into a tty and use ancient
social unix tools like wall(1), talk(1), and
write(1) (all available on sdf, if you're using it)
after checking to see who(1) was online.

If they had more previous computer/tablet experience,
maybe the web access would have appealed to them
more. But instead, all these "computer-illiterate"
8-year-olds were sitting in the same lab as each
other, snickering as they switched back and forth
from GUI to tty to chat with each other about who
stank etc., on machines that were previously e-waste.

Over the years, when I put little Linuxes on old
laptops for not particularly computer-literate
friends, they generally only used the web browser.
That's specifically what I'm trying to avoid now.

CHALLENGES OTHER THAN THE RESEARCH QUESTION

Obviously, on older computers, substitute a boot CD,
DVD, or floppy, and on gaming consoles substitute a
CD, DVD, or ROM cartridge.

One challenge I've had with using older laptops this
way is that they're damaged (particularly screen or
keyboard) or unergonomic. I don't like laptops much.
When I use them, I like to plug in an external key-
board, monitor, and sometimes mouse or joystick.

Junkyard computing the way I do it generally doesn't
involve sourcing, buying, shipping, and installing
expensive device-specific components, potentially
damaging other aging stuff along the way. I like to
turn a laptop into a desktop or a server. It stays
plugged in to mains power and has peripherals.

I want the machine to recognize the peripherals. I
want it render at the resolution of the external
display, not the laptop screen, and I want it to
turn off the laptop screen. 

On the 2006ish ThinkPad I'm using that way now, in
X, I turned off the laptop screen with arandr(1),
but when I switch to the tty like those kids did,
it comes back on. I hope to fix that before this
laptop's hard drive is decommissioned and it
starts only booting (DOS or dumb terminal) from 
low-profile thumb drives, like the rest of the fleet
on the shelf behind me, silently awaiting their
children.

I also wish I could find low-profile thumb drives
with less than 16GB of memory. FUZOMA's less than
2MB. My DOS system with the biggest pile of office
software, utilities, REPLs, documentation, text and
spreadsheet files, and games saved in its director-
ies for me to test is less than 100MB. Where are the
500MB low-profile USB drives and SD cards?

MY LEARNING

Next week Peter comes back over. I should have my
first bench-top power supply, I'll finally learn how
to use the variable-temperature soldering iron I
inherited, some torx screws will be removed from
something that doesn't currently power up, and more
will be revealed.