Living Retro Every Day: Integrating Retro Computing into Modern Software
I love retro aesthetic and long to integrate it into my life. However, using an Apple//e for my full time job and a brick phone instead of a smart phone can be…Cumbersome. Here are some tweaks I’ve made to help me get my retro fix:
Android Smart Phone Customization
I loved the Windows phone interface and I found it to be very clean and straight forward. When the Windows phone died, I was beyond thrilled to find Launcher 10. After installing that, i used the Pip-Boy 3000 Live Wallpaper. Then i swapped some icons with 1-BIT Icon Theme. Launcher 10 makes it pretty gloriously straight forward and highly customizable. It allows you to colorize your icons - so dont fret when you see white icons using the 1-BIT Icon Theme. The hex code i used is #00D354. Additionally, you can find a retro Smart Launcher Theme and Clock Widget styled like and LCD screen...
Atom Text Editor: A Retro Workspace
If you’re not already familiar with Atom, its a free and open-source text and source code editor with support for plug-ins written in Javascript, and embedded Git Control, developed by GitHub. For my neanderthalic purposes, I just wanted a simple, retro notepad with tabs. To get the look, you can follow these steps:
- Start Atom.
- Change your UI theme to “hacking-the-kernel-ui”.
- Change your Style theme to “hacking-the-kernel-ui”
- Close Atom.
- Download the Pixel Emulator font.
Desktop and Terminal Customization
Windows users can decide if the Green-Screen Theme is either awesome or very annoying. For Linux environments, Cool-Retro-Term is always the very first thing I install on a new Linux distro. The cool retro term does look nice. Scrolling is fast compared to an old terminal, but it looks right and it’s very configurable. It handles utf-8 too (unlike an old terminal…) so it lists my japanese files just fine. It’s very usable for everything.
Retro Handhelds as E-Book Readers
I recently came across this nice howto by James Fossey for using a Psion 3 as an ebook reader. Speaking of Palm Pilots and Psions and e-readers … that’s one of the main things I used my palm pilot for back in the day! In that time frame, Project Gutenberg was one of my only resources, because the source material had to be in plain text (or something like HTML, that I could reasonably render to plain text), and formats like epub didn’t exist yet. It would be fun to have a Palm Pilot theme for my phone. Maybe a later Palm Pilot. One of the color ones.
Software Customization Comparison
| Software / Tool | Platform | Retro Feature |
|---|---|---|
| Launcher 10 | Android | Windows Phone interface & customizable icon colors (#00D354) |
| 1-BIT Icon Theme | Android | Retro 1-bit aesthetics |
| Atom Editor | Windows/Linux/macOS | hacking-the-kernel-ui and Pixel Emulator font |
| Cool-Retro-Term | Linux | Configurable terminal with UTF-8 support |
| Psion 3 | Hardware | Usage as an E-book reader with plain text |