Tablets, acorns and clicky clacky typing ---------------------------------------- Well, this is my ROOPHLOCH post for 2025. Fully compliant with the challenge conditions and, and posted via a setup I've never used before, but nevertheless falling far short of what I had hoped for. In my head I was going to push my 433 MHz ISM-band setup from a few years back[1] further - build a small Yagi receive antenna out of hardware store aluminium tubing to get some better range, at the very least. Instead I'm using boring old mobile data for the internet side of things. I thought maybe I'd at least try to make the post more than 10km from home which would at least make a new distance record for me, and maaaybe I'll still try for that some evening this coming week, on one of the final possible days, but we'll see. This one is coming from pretty close to home, from a field next to a local park, the same place I wrote about watching somebody fly a model glider in last June[2]. I'm sitting under a very large and I suspect really rather old oak tree. Acorns are falling all around me, every so many minutes. People are walking their dogs, or walking or cycling around. The woman one oak tree over seems to be taking a nap. Someone else, out on the grass in the sun looks like she might be meditating? It's a nice day, not too hot, not too cold, no wind. All my previous phone-submitted ROOPHLOCH posts have been made with my old eeePC[3], but this I'm repurposing an ancient tablet, a Lenovo "Tab3 7 Essential" to be precise. It was purchased new in, hmm, 2015 I think, mostly to be used on a holiday to Japan, in lieu of bringing our phones (one device instead of two, a larger screen for easier joint viewing, less loaded with personal information to worry about if lost or stolen). It served well enough for basic navigation and translation duty, but (predictably) never saw an awful lot of use thereafter. It's no longer supported now, of course, stuck on Android 5 point something, Firefox from the same era, slower than a wet week on just about any website. Somehow the battery is still in really solid condition? I've tried to come up with *some* way to make this device useful in the past. Strictly offline, of course, given the decade's lack of security updates. In airplane mode it can sit around idle for weeks without the battery running down, seems like it ought to be useful for something, right? I installed...oh, the offline Wikipedia reader with a goofy name, Kiwix or whatever it is. Put the top 100 English language articles on it. It was slow, but not unbearable. I bought a larger microSD card so I could fit the entire gosh darn thing on it, figuring that would be kind of cool, channelling the old WikiReader[4]. Yeah, well, Android 5 point whatever only supports FAT32 SD cards, and those have an upper limit on filesize which precludes the one-giant-monolithic .zim file which I had downloaded, and I couldn't find any convenient tooling for splitting those file up. Absurd limitations all round, a nice idea which absolutely *could* and *should* have "just worked", but, well, that's modern computing. I thought about installing Termux on it after that but at the time it didn't seem possible on Android 5. I really tried, but gave up. I revisited the situation earlier this year and to my surprise it had become possible, with lots of disclaimers and washing of hands from the responsible parties about lack of support or updates. No problem for my purposes! So I have SSH and Git and vim and Lua on here, which actually makes a somewhat credible little portable offline-first computing environment. Except, of course for the question of input device. Obviously I'm not entering this post through a touch-screen, I don't hate myself *that* much! To my own shock I'm using one of those really nice retro looking little 65% mechanical keyboards like all the cool kids use. I have admired the aesthetic of these for a long time, I have to admit, but whenever I've actually looked into buying one it's inevitably some combination of completely sold out, only available from outside the EU (hence custom fees), absolutely absurd price tag, strictly wireless operation with an internal non-standard, or festooned with RGB backlights (which are an unconditional aesthetic travesty, if you like them your taste is bad and you should feel bad). Since I don't actually value having a "nice keyboard" very highly at all (I mean, I'm not claiming all keyboards are equal, and nice ones *are* nice, but I've done a tremendous amount of good work of all kinds on unremarkable keyboards and it's been zero hardship), so I inevitably just pass. Well, recently I found a very cheap used one on eBay with nice retro cream and orange keycaps, USB wired, hideous rainbow vomit LEDs of course but reading the manual confirmed these could be turned off easily enough (I honestly feel bad knowing they are still there, though). Together with the tablet and an OTG adaptor it's a very nice portable setup. It's not smaller than the eeePC (the keyboard is wider, which does make if comfier) but I suspect it's lighter (the eeePC has surprisingly heavy batteries, but of course they don't last as long). The biggest frustration by far is the screen's absurd mirror-level of shiny glossiness. I'm under a tree and it's a fairly overcast day but I can still very clearly see my fingers reflected in the screen as I write this (the tablet is propped up in a little wooden stand, some bamboo thing from IKEA, actually). I wonder if I could hack up some little cardboard shade screen? The OTG connector occasionally needs a small wiggle to get it to pick up again. Maybe the port is dusty, or oxidised, or something (yeah, yeah, that wouldn't be a concern with Bluetooth). Oh, and I can't leave the tablet idling with the keyboard plugged in, annoyingly the keyboard draws so much current even when not being used that even in airplane mode the tablet dies in a day or so. This is of course patently absurd, just like a Linux-based OS not supporting filesystems other than FAT32. Trying to bricolage something genuinely useful out of mainstream consumer devices reveals all sort of irritating defects. Anyway, minor pain points aside, I have to admit I kind of like this setup. With Lua installed it is able to run my OFFLFIRSOCH programs without any difficulty and I might try using it to actually develop next year's OFFLFIRSOCH entry. I guess that's about all I have to say. I'll turn airplane mode off just for a second, turn on my phone's WiFi hotspot, and push this to the Zaibatsu before turning airplane mode back on. I've been listening to "Ambient Otaku"[5] on MiniDisc[6] while writing this out. I'll head back home once it's finished. Be well, Gopherspace! EDIT: Updated again from home for spelling (no `aspell` package for ancient Termux, apparently?) and adding links to old posts. [1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/roophloch-2023-explanation-post.txt [2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/a-mostly-offline-may.txt [3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/openbsd-on-an-eeepc-1005ha.txt [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader [5] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/micro-album-reviews-01.txt [6] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/actually-listening-to-music-again-2.txt