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Open Source PC That Fits in Your Pocket

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Re: Open Source PC That Fits in Your Pocket

#21
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was troubleshooting a very irregular network interruption between two industrial controllers (AB PLC and a DCS). For those who do not work in industrial automation communication between assets is essential and some disruptions can be quite costly depending on the industry/product being made. That can be true of even relatively minimal disruptions. I loaded up an RPi with arch, popped a thumb drive on there and crea…

> Edit: in the industrial world equipment like this is not in racks/server rooms. A rack by any other name . . . :-) TBH I was thinking of not just the trad. IT server room racks but also of cramped radio comms "cupboards" by towers and of production circuit | industrial control access panels / locations in both indoor "warehouse" production and outdoor mineral processing circuits .. Always handy to have a small know…

I’ve been meaning to get a flipper zero, but I would love to see that device with a standard gig Ethernet port. The flexibility would be amazing. PoE for bonus points.

However, for ultimate utility I think the next iteration of my packet scraper will be a dual NIC’d SBC so I don’t have to worry about hubs or ‘managed’ switches with port mirroring.

Re: Open Source PC That Fits in Your Pocket

#22

This is cool but phones have fit in my pocket for years. It's all about the form factor if you want a PC. I'm waiting for the PC that's the size of a thumb drive that you just put into any hdmi port. All peripherals connect over bluetooth, and power will have to come from the hdmi port.

... an intel compute stick?

What? This exists? Does it get all power from hdmi?

Re: Open Source PC That Fits in Your Pocket

#23

This is cool but phones have fit in my pocket for years. It's all about the form factor if you want a PC. I'm waiting for the PC that's the size of a thumb drive that you just put into any hdmi port. All peripherals connect over bluetooth, and power will have to come from the hdmi port.

This exists but is a lot of money for a bad computer. By comparison an intel NUC can actually be a decent computer at 4.6 x 4.41 x 2.01 inches. Why would you actually want this?

Did not know this exists. Well I want it to fit in my pocket. A NUC can't.

Re: Open Source PC That Fits in Your Pocket

#25

Can you type with your thumbs while holding the device, or is this the kind of mini-laptop that you have to set down on a table or your lap to type on?

The screen is 7 inch, and it has a chunky bezel.

I would imagine that you could hold this in your hands and type, but those squared edges and thick body might be uncomfortable.

Re: Open Source PC That Fits in Your Pocket

#27
post #3

I love seeing these projects but can't imagine what in the world I'd do with one of these devices. Small computers that don't benefit from the mobile UX tradeoffs and don't quite have keyboards or screens or a hinge to support putting it down and typing on it. They're cute though. If you had one, what would you be doing with it?

What would you consider to be a MVPC (Minimum Viable Pocket Computer)?

Re: Open Source PC That Fits in Your Pocket

#28
post #3

I love seeing these projects but can't imagine what in the world I'd do with one of these devices. Small computers that don't benefit from the mobile UX tradeoffs and don't quite have keyboards or screens or a hinge to support putting it down and typing on it. They're cute though. If you had one, what would you be doing with it?

The picture makes it look like it has a keyboard, a screen, and a hinge to support putting it down and typing on it.

My imagined use of such a device is something like this.

I board the bus and there's, fortunately, a seat. I sit down, but a full-sized laptop wouldn't fit between my lap and the seat in front of me. I pull out the computer and finish up typing my notes about electrostatically-driven hydrogen–boron fusion, perhaps switching back and forth between Emacs and Jupyter as I do some calculations that go slightly beyond the back of the envelope.

Then I switch to an OpenStreetMap viewer to confirm where to transfer to a different bus (though the Pocket Reform evidently doesn't have built-in GPS, I can read a map), and check my address book to make sure I know the address where I'm going. Because the disk is encrypted with a strong passphrase, I know that my address book won't fall into the wrong hands even if the computer gets stolen, unless the thieves have video of me entering the passphrase.

I'm arriving early, so when I get off the bus at the transfer point, I stop at a café, sit down at a table inside (out of reach of motorcycle thieves), buy a cappuccino, and bang out a couple of pages of a story I've been thinking about. Probably a first draft I'll totally rewrite, but I have to get through the first draft before I can write something worth reading. For background information for the story, I refer to the copy of Wikipedia in the computer's local copy, using Kiwix.

Then a cool idea about cellular automata occurs to me, so I try it out in JS using Emacs and Firefox, then commit it to Git. I can't remember how to draw circles on a so I consult a locally stored snapshot of MDN using Zeal. (If that had failed, I'd've used a locally stored snapshot of Stack Overflow using Kiwix.)

I pay for my coffee, stick the computer back in my pocket, and continue on to my landlord's house, where I pay him the rent.

Then I take another bus to the university; on the bus I use the computer to review the textbook chapter the professor will be teaching today. The desks in the classroom are too small for a full-sized laptop, but the computer fits on one of them neatly. I use it to compute eigenvalues for some of the matrices the professor writes on the board in order to test a hunch I have about them.

After class, I'm chatting with another student, and they mention they're interested in learning assembly language. I pull out the computer and open up a web server I wrote in assembly a few years ago; it's small enough that I can scroll through the code in Emacs while holding it in one hand, so we don't need to sit down.

On the bus home I use it as a music player, playing through my headphones.

At home I charge it and connect to the Wi-Fi in my house and do an incremental backup of the machine to my home server, which is a Raspberry Pi Zero with a USB disk plugged into it. That way, if the Pocket Reform does get stolen, I can restore the full system state onto a new one.

The next morning I see that my web server has a problem. I suspect that disabling Markdown on comments will solve the problem, but I want to make sure they don't look too broken before I push the config live. So I test the config change in a "staging server" that's really just a QEMU virtual machine running on the Pocket Reform. It turns out that it doesn't fix the problem. Once I figure out what does, and test it in QEMU, I push the config change live. (I'm testing in QEMU instead of Docker because the server is an amd64 box.)

Now I want to go visit a sort of Fab Lab that a friend of mine is setting up in the suburbs. So I consult the bus routes on the computer, stick it in my pocket, and go outside to wait for the bus. Once I'm on the bus, I open up OpenSCAD to put the finishing touches on a mechanical-computing lookup table design I'll try to 3-D print at my destination. It looks wrong, so I run git diff, which shows me that I have a forgotten uncommitted change from six months ago that is fucking it up. git checkout multlut.scad solves the problem, and by the time I get off the bus I have an STL file on my MicroSD card ready for him to slice.

While I'm there, I show him a Xyce simulation of a power supply circuit I've been working on, and he shows me that my circuit is too sensitive to noise in a way I hadn't thought to simulate.

At night I have a date. We end up talking about oral sex technique, and I mention an instructional video I'd seen that showed me some interesting techniques; later at home I show the relevant part of the video.

Throughout all this I never transmitted an IMEI to a cellphone network, and I only ever transmitted a randomized Wi-Fi MAC address, and that only when I was at home. I never sent my data to a data center in the United States, China, or South Korea. I never had to overcome artificial obstacles to installing my own software — or hardware. I was never at risk of not being able to install OpenSCAD because it had been removed from the app store because it hadn't been updated in three years. I never had to deal with any malware, spyware, adware, or antifeatures. None of my files were ever matched against a secret government blacklist of forbidden files. The page numbers I looked at in my textbook were never transmitted to Seattle. I never had to do a CAPTCHA to keep my computations from being aborted. No advertisements interrupted the oral sex video, and because it is stored locally, there's no risk that it will have been deleted from the server because of a DMCA notification.

Still, I think it would be better with a camera (with an obvious hardware power switch which activates a camera app when it's turned on) and GPS.

Re: Open Source PC That Fits in Your Pocket

#29
post #3

I love seeing these projects but can't imagine what in the world I'd do with one of these devices. Small computers that don't benefit from the mobile UX tradeoffs and don't quite have keyboards or screens or a hinge to support putting it down and typing on it. They're cute though. If you had one, what would you be doing with it?

when traveling i want something small and portable that does not get in the way, especially when backpacking. sure, you could argue that i should leave electronic devices at home and unhook from this dependency to be connected, but that would remove the ability to back up my photos, or write a diary too. there is a case for the responsible use of electronic devices outdoors. and for that i like that device to be as small as is practically useful. a phone is to small because a touchscreen is just not good for typing. it would take me longer, so i would actually spend more time on the device than otherwise.

my first was the transmeta based sony picturebook. since then i have had various other devices of similar size. the largest was probably the OLPC XO. the small but sturdy form means that they pack easily. i just toss it in the bag, not worrying much. with any larger laptop the problem is either weight, or it's so thin that i fear it could break if i don't protect it from things that might push against it.

the small form factor helps to reduce the amount of time i like to spend in front of it. so i really just use it for things i need to do when not at home or in the office.

the downside is that these devices are actually rather expensive, but for me they were what enabled me to be a digital nomad for a several years.

Re: Open Source PC That Fits in Your Pocket

#30
post #28
post #3

I love seeing these projects but can't imagine what in the world I'd do with one of these devices. Small computers that don't benefit from the mobile UX tradeoffs and don't quite have keyboards or screens or a hinge to support putting it down and typing on it. They're cute though. If you had one, what would you be doing with it?

The picture makes it look like it has a keyboard, a screen, and a hinge to support putting it down and typing on it. My imagined use of such a device is something like this. I board the bus and there's, fortunately, a seat. I sit down, but a full-sized laptop wouldn't fit between my lap and the seat in front of me. I pull out the computer and finish up typing my notes about electrostatically-driven hydrogen–boron fus…

the issue with using a laptop in public transportation is that sometimes i notice to late when i need to get off. then i have to rush, and in that situation a small device is easier to handle. the OLPC XO was really the best in that case because of its handle. i could just grab it and run.
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