TIL how to use piston

My laptop is a Fujitsu Lifebook, which I guess is quite a high end model.but we bought secondhand in China four years ago, and now the fan on the CPU rattles. Running Firefox is sometimes just too much ...

So this morning I thought I'd read a few posts in lynx, and it was a refreshing experience, away from the memes and the gifs. I like text.

But of course I couldn't log in to reply, so I thought I'd try piston, which I've heard about a time or two.

https://steemit.com/piston/@xeroc/piston

First, on my Debian, I had to:

apt install python3-pip

Then I could run

pip3 install --user steem-piston

This returned errors, and I had to:

apt install libpython3.5-dev python3-setuptools

There was one remaining error message

invalid command 'bdist_wheel'

But after

pip3 install --user wheel

piston installed successfully.

The next steps, from @xerco's post, followed successfully, and I sent a test comment to my own latest post.

This gave me such a feeling of elation, because really I love the commandline.

So now

piston post

brings me to this, /tmp/steem-30m33x67.md , opened in my nvim, with all my shortcuts, buffers that I can open to copy lines from ... a kind of heaven for this old wannabe geek.

Next steps

• Use this more often, although during the week, at work, I only have Android.
• Read more posts in lynx, and then upvote and reply with piston.

This last, reading posts in a text-only browser is important to me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, both with this old laptop, and with a small 7" tablet, posts with lots of images are just too slow. On the tablet, I'll start reading and then the images will start arriving and I'm bounced to the top of the page again. The second is that signal to noise is way to low. I understand why some users include lots of footers at the end of each post, but really I just want to read what you've got to say.

Thank you @xeroc!!!

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And thank you for reading @richardjuckes