[Abe] wanted the perfect portable computer. He has a DevTerm, but it didn’t quite fit his needs. This is Hackaday after all, so he loaded up his favorite CAD software and started designing. T…
There is something about the simplicity of this kind of thing that makes it so attractive. There’s no bloat, just a device for a maker individual to play around with.
But it makes me wonder if there’s something similar to this but more “ready” for people to buy and play around building software. I’ve thought about learning more low level stuff with emulators, not a real device. A real device like this with a minimal Unix-like OS and some development kit to play around would be interesting.
If it runs modern Linux, there’s enough bloat even compared to Windows 2000.
COMMENT: further I’ve completely forgot what you were saying, so wrote a very loosely connected text.
I agree in dreams, but in truth no piece of tech will change life. Life changes tech. Today’s tech environment wouldn’t happen were social environment different.
If we want to make computing better, we need to be able to live without computing.
To make downtime acceptable. Same as with repairing floors in a hoarder’s apartment, you need to remove all the furniture and junk first. So you (being the hoarder) need to be able to live just fine without what’s in that room for a few weeks (I know ideally the process takes much less time).
The reason Facebook and others are so powerful and competition doesn’t work is because many people can’t live without what they rely upon as utilities.
And the “users mustn’t think, users mustn’t overcome themselves” mantra is commercial bullshit. Users are humans and are responsible for themselves. We can help them become more responsible. We can’t pretend humans are not responsible.
Because ultimately only humans exist and tools are tools.
There is something about the simplicity of this kind of thing that makes it so attractive. There’s no bloat, just a device for a maker individual to play around with.
But it makes me wonder if there’s something similar to this but more “ready” for people to buy and play around building software. I’ve thought about learning more low level stuff with emulators, not a real device. A real device like this with a minimal Unix-like OS and some development kit to play around would be interesting.
If it runs modern Linux, there’s enough bloat even compared to Windows 2000.
COMMENT: further I’ve completely forgot what you were saying, so wrote a very loosely connected text.
I agree in dreams, but in truth no piece of tech will change life. Life changes tech. Today’s tech environment wouldn’t happen were social environment different.
If we want to make computing better, we need to be able to live without computing.
To make downtime acceptable. Same as with repairing floors in a hoarder’s apartment, you need to remove all the furniture and junk first. So you (being the hoarder) need to be able to live just fine without what’s in that room for a few weeks (I know ideally the process takes much less time).
The reason Facebook and others are so powerful and competition doesn’t work is because many people can’t live without what they rely upon as utilities.
And the “users mustn’t think, users mustn’t overcome themselves” mantra is commercial bullshit. Users are humans and are responsible for themselves. We can help them become more responsible. We can’t pretend humans are not responsible.
Because ultimately only humans exist and tools are tools.