rambling about my laptop(s)
Here-in I’m just rambling about the various systems I’ve been using. They’re mostly sloppily thrown-together custom built things. Though I also have my super expensive Macbook Pro that I use when I’m not using my custom one.
a brief history of my custom laptops
Over the years I have worked towards making a low power laptop that can go days without a charge. I started with the tinkerboard and a very large display, around 12 inches or so. I didn’t do a terribly good job making the housing for it, it looked awesome, but the screen wasn’t well protected. This was it’s downfall. I could have replaced the screen, but it was expensive at the time. I ran Xorg and a few console emulators on it, and did lots of tinkering.
For quite a while I had preferred the tinkerboard over the raspberry pi. Briefly, I had used a pine board of some sort. I forget which one. It had a built in charging circuit and a real time clock. The pi had neither, so that was still an upgrade over the pi at the time. When the zero came along, I had a really tiny SPI screen hooked to that, but it was too small to be very usable. I ended up not really using it very much. But the battery life was amazing.
Thinking back on it, I had an original pi with a keyboard and head phones, but no display attached. I used that for a while with a screen reader but it severely lacked customization or configuration for the screen reader. I thought it would make a good writing desk, and while it was fun to play with ed, I was never really very comfortable with it, and fighting with the screen reader, it was really slow to read content and having to wait for it to finish reading before I could do anything was a pain. I may revisit this, as it would be a nice low power option for writing.
Somewhat recently, I discovered a vendor calling themselves ElecLab. They have some really nice low power, small displays, that all talk straight HDMI. While I had wanted to get something working using PaperTTY with an E-ink display, I have yet to get that to work. So these small displays, many of which have custom hookup kit for the raspberry pi, make for a fairly compact setup. Spend a while fighting and trying to get USB, HDMI, and other wires all fitting into various randomly sized enclosures and you’ll develop odd appreciations like this. That is, not having to hook everything up with wires. I don’t have access to a 3D printer, nor the knowledge to make the models, so I occasionally pick up a case, toolbox, art kit, clipboard case, or other odds and ends that I tear down and rebuild to be the enclosure for my various custom laptop builds.
Right now, my dedicated writing system is in a Vaultz locking clipboard case, with an Anker 30 AH battery bank, a 7 inch display, a usb OTG adapter to a 4 port hub, all hooked up to a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. It’s basically just another incarnation of a GUI-less general purpose system. Except the battery keeps it running for a really long time. It lasts so long that it’s impractical for me to actively use it to wear down the battery and get even a ballpark of how long it goes under moderate use.
I have no X11 or Wayland, but it boots up to KMScon, where I log in and launch tmux. I can view images with FBI and browse gemini with various console based browsers, as well as ssh to other systems to make use of messengers and email and the like, so it’s definitely not distraction free.
Oh, and since I’m playing with mesh stuff, I also plug in a radio and do some development on it. I really like it. And the new keyboard makes it even nicer.
my expensive mac
When the M1 came out it sounded really nice. I liked the hardware and that you could get them with a reasonable amount of RAM. The power management and the battery capacity were awesome. When friends asked about computer suggestions for their kids, depending on the situation, I would occasionally recommend they get one. But I stayed away from them since they could only run MacOS. Then Asahi happened. I knew support was early, but I figured I could make use of VMs or containers or whatever to make up the difference of whatever support was missing on the Linux side.
So I bought one on a payment plan. It is the second most expensive computer I have ever purchased. The first most expensive was a 66MHz IBM laptop back in 96 or 97. I had to borrow money to purchase it, too. And despite the massive price, I think I stopped using it by 99. I traded it for a slightly faster Compaq laptop that ran Linux much better.
Between then and now, other than my custom systems, I made use of EeePCs for a while. I’ve had a few desktops here and there, too. But they’re generally less convenient to use and I switched to gaming on consoles, for the most part.
Anyway, back to my expensive mac. It’s more powerful than I need for what little development and tinkering I do, but the power management is excellent, and the support under Asahi has been getting better all the time. It’s a good compromise system.
This next comment needs some context: typing on it sucks. Context is needed because it’s really subjective. The MacBook Pro has a very solid feeling keyboard and for a laptop it’s better than many laptop keyboards, but I do not like typing on it.
I hope to make more extensive use of my custom system because the battery use is even more effecient and the keyboard is more comfortable to type on. So the biggest drawback is the keyboard. I have a nice Atreus keyboard that makes it a bit less painful, but that gets a bit awkward to hold and destroys the convenience of it.
I would be using that Atreus in my custom laptop setup, but the size isn’t right for the housing and the extra cable is troublesome. If it were bluetooth or other wireless technology, I would be using it. Instead, it’s mostly used for work. That way I don’t have to worry it will suffer the same fate as my Vortex Core – frequent unplugging and replugging have destroyed the connector on that beautiful little keyboard. I can’t risk that for my beloved (and very expensive) Atreus.
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updated: 2024-10-14 15:34:24
generated: 2024-10-15
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