151–160 of 196 posts
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In case where the pine64 team is reading: +1 8GB RAM, 128GB MMC, USB-C for up to 300$ and it will be the perfect Microsoft Surface Go's contender I'm waiting for!
> 128GB MMC Why MMC when there is NVMe?
I noticed this has a removable battery, which makes this very interesting to me. What I'd like to know is if it will work with the battery compartment empty on AC power only. I'd like to have "smart" displays wall mounted around the house with dashboards on them. I've read about so many instances where people used wall mounted iPads and Android tablets where the batteries would swell after a period of use.
> I've read about so many instances where people used wall mounted iPads and Android tablets where the batteries would swell after a period of use. Made that mistake myself. I now have a wall mounted iPad with the charger plugged into a timer powerpoint that only switches on for 1hr a day. Been running like that for 5+ years now without issue. (I'd planned for that to just be a proof of concept, and to use a wifi pow…
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That is unusual. I have never had a laptop that would not work without a battery present.
It’s really not, especially for high end models if you are stressing your hardware and it’s not an awfully thermally limited design you’ll drain the battery even when you are connected to the charger. You have 60W chargers usually for systems with max power draw of the CPU+GPU that can reach around 200W peak and in the mid to high 1XXW sustained if you have a DTR/high-performance “mobile” CPU + dGPU. Even if your lap…
Some curious digging found two examples (with pictures):
https://www.gamersnexus.net/news-pc/2612-why-2-power-adapter...
https://hothardware.com/reviews/dell-alienware-area-51m-revi...
How is touch screen on linux these days, I'm probably pick one up but can't imagine running UBports on 2GB ram. I would rather use i3/lighter DE + touch screen support for some GUI apps?
Someone's set up a sort of dwm-based DE on the Pinephone: https://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo/
...well that was... interesting...
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> I've read about so many instances where people used wall mounted iPads and Android tablets where the batteries would swell after a period of use. Made that mistake myself. I now have a wall mounted iPad with the charger plugged into a timer powerpoint that only switches on for 1hr a day. Been running like that for 5+ years now without issue. (I'd planned for that to just be a proof of concept, and to use a wifi pow…
Really cool! Could you give specifics about the typical low and high of the battery cycle, please? (from XX% to XX%).
The timer switch I grabbed to do my proof of concept only has 15min resolution (it's a weird old mechanical one where you move plastic pins in the stop/start time rings). I recall setting it to 45mins because the docs says the iPad gets 80% charge in 1 hour, and it'd occasionally run down and switch off, so I bumped it up to 1hr and haven't touched it since.
I just checked now, it charged for an hour overnight finishing ~10.5 hours ago, and is currently saying 59% charge. I honestly have no idea how low or high the charge level gets, just that I haven't needed to wake it back up from a shutdown in over 4 years...
I've come to doubt the details there are important. Don't leave it on charge 24x7, that'll kill it fairly quickly (~9 months in one data point of mine). Charge it long enough and regularly enough to keep it running, but at the low end of that spectrum. Keep in mind my goal here is less "extend the life of the battery", and more " prevent the battery from swelling up and damaging the device/catching fire", but I suspect there's a fair bit of crossover between those goals, since I've not needed to increase the charge time in response to any battery capacity decrease over 5 years (which in retrospect surprises me somewhat).
If I was aiming to maintain the best possible range in an electric vehicle, I'd probably pay much more attention to max charge and min discharge levels, but "the simplest possible thing" has been working well enough for me to just leave it alone.
If it dies on me tomorrow, I'll be happy enough with the use I got out of it and the tradeoff of time I spent futzing with it.
(Note: I'm also quite familiar with abusing LiPo batteries way past safe limits, I raced FPV quadcopters 5-6 years back, and in my worst excesses, I'd be aiming to completely drain a flight pack in ~2 minutes. They'd end up too hot to touch, and start to decline to the point of not being race competitive within 20 or 25 cycles. They'd also catch into unextinguishable fire in big crashes and occasionally while charging. I have a healthy fear/respect of high capacity and high current LiPo batteries...)
Cortex-A53 is a very slow in-order core. Think Pentium 1 -level IPC. Eg: it can dispatch at most one multiplication, and will stall the entire pipeline for a few cycles if you try another one soon after. I doubt this is going to perform well
Does anyone know if there custom OS has a screen reader? I'm totally blind and this is priced at the point where I'd like to play with it assuming it's usable for me.
That gets me wondering... what would be the ideal here? I don't have much experience with blind-oriented usage but I get the impression blind users only keep screens around for when software/the OS falls apart and orientational cues completely break down... but perhaps sighted assistance is needed less often than I presume, and blind users simply use phones and laptops with screens because that's what dominates the market.
Maybe you could viably get away with having a quick-access mechanism that lets someone use their own device's display whenever assistance is required. I can totally see a device that serves VNC over HTML5 to any web browser via a built-in hotspot, that would be pretty universal.
Which leads me to the question of how useful touchscreen gestures are - since that's all touchscreens are useful for in a blind context - and if there isn't a better input method than that. I get the impression keyboards are pretty much "it". It would be pretty cool if your entire computer was a keyboard with a 3.5mm headphone jack :)
The Pinetab is basically a highish-end ARM system with its own bits of novel hardware added on, so the base question becomes "how usable is the mainline AArch64 Linux experience for blind users?". I suspect it's somewhere between "poor" and "fair"; and bespoke hardware in this device may add a small amount of extra strain on top of that.
Now I'm puzzling over which mechanical keyboards are the thinnest, and if you could cram a power bank and ARM development board into the footprint space underneath.
...2GB RAM is a bit of a disappointment for those of us spoiled by higher end devices (like my Note 10+ w/ Dex), BUT - there is room to expand with some kinda SD and then map a bunch of SWAP space to it, right? Won't a generous allocation of swap compensate?
You'll also rapidly exhaust the SD card's flash lifetime, and all the spare capacity... which will make the SD return read errors, nicely corrupting the contents of RAM.
You can verify the slowdown/lag/pain factor easily enough: boot Linux on any PC with `mem=2G`, attach an SD card you don't mind nuking :), and go nuts.
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>Is there any Windows-based tablet that you can reliably and easily install Linux on? Samsung Series 7 Slate XE700T1A
Are there any tablets that have open drivers for GPU and touchscreen? Problem with blobs is that such tablets are forever stuck with ancient kernels.