Putting the cart before the horse a bit here, as I haven’t been writing much lately, but I got this education market ARM Chrome tablet pretty cheap and followed some instructions to get it fully converted to Linux. ChromeOS is gone. It’s running Debian Trixie via the “velvetOS” project. I could’ve just used the Linux container in chrome OS, but everything has such high guardrails that even the most minor of customizations got very frustrating. Anyway, I specifically picked the 10E because it was known to at least mostly support Linux.
Some limitations, as the camera doesn’t work, I don’t think the external speakers work (could be specific to this particular boot image), and on full boot I have to manually rotate the screen to make sure the touchscreen coordinates stay aligned with the display. Otherwise it works surprisingly well.
Firefox is probably too slow on this old MT8183 with 4 GB of RAM, but it is much faster on the EMMC install compared to the USB, and it was not torture to go online and grab a couple of files directly. The word processor is Focuswriter with their green theme tweaked to amber and it runs perfectly. Suspend/resume is working well enough with auto-login that I can just leave Focuswriter up. Battery life is an open question, but before I wiped it, Chrome OS reported it had 96% battery health 🤷. With a mobile-grade SoC, and with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi turned off, I’m optimistic it won’t be too bad.
I also fixed up one of my DIY mechanical keyboards, and I think it’s a pretty nice little writing setup. Right now, I just have Wi-Fi turned off, but I could theoretically strip out the drivers altogether, or (if I remember correctly), even take the Wi-Fi module out of this one. I opened it briefly to short out the hardware write protection on the firmware, but forgot to look for the Wi-Fi card. As an aside, this was by far the easiest I could imagine a tablet being to service — zero glue connecting screen to case.
I always find those “distraction free writing” things really neat until I think about them for a bit…
Like yeah it’s cool but only for very specific things (well - one thing). Basically a typewriter.
So my interest quickly wears off lol
My thinking is that I tend to do better reading on an e-reader, maybe I’ll do better writing on an e-writer? If not, it’s Linux on a tablet, LOL.
Thats a fantastic idea. Throw an e-reader at it.
Imo, those devices tend to be too “extremist” on the distraction-free side. Something with a comfortable keyboard, a smaller screen (e-ink would really be nice) and an available browser for doing some online research is nice. Just removing notifications and access to social media is enough to eliminate most distractions. That one from the post looks interesting if the browser is reasonably responsive.
I’ve used this exact same method for procrastinating when I should be writing. 😉
That’s the beauty here. I don’t HAVE to write anything, so it’s not technically a failure if I don’t, and either way I got to do something amusing and pointless with a piece of technology!
Is gpu based browser video decoding acceleration working? Ive been playing with arm based SBC for this kinda thing and that was an issue i was facing. I was watching youtube on 1080p and dropped lots of frames. Figured out you have to force enable it on certain systems or inside firefox config.
I’m not sure, but there’s also the Postmarket Arch-based distro that has a more polished website, and its page for this class of devices says 3D acceleration is generally working. Whether that extends to video decoding in the browser, I am not sure. I guess I could pull up some videos and see if they play well, LOL. “Jailbreaking” tablets and getting an OS someone else worked out how to install onto them is towards the edge of my technical skillset, TBH.
If you would like my thoughts on the Shakespeare authorship question or why The Last Jedi is unfairly maligned, I can help you out all day, however.
If you wanna know you can type in about:support into the firefox address bar and check if
HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODINGsaysavailable. Cool stuff either way tho, thanks for sharing :)If you would like my thoughts on the Shakespeare authorship question or why The Last Jedi is unfairly maligned, I can help you out all day, however.
We all have our little troves of more or sometimes less useful knowledge dont we :D
If you wanna know you can type in about:support into the firefox address bar and check if HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING says available. Cool stuff either way tho, thanks for sharing :)
Ahh, well in that case, it appears not, at least for this distro. “Runtime | unavailable | Force disabled by gfxinfo”
Hate to be the odd one out but I would love more information on the keyboard.
The keyboard is one I designed myself. It doesn’t use any stabilizers, the extra parts needed to make long keys press evenly. I did this by, well, not using any long keys. Otherwise, I did as much as I could to keep it pretty mainstream, unless you touch type lots of numerical digits or need your arrow keys in the traditional shape.
It has a bigger brother with a numpad, but I had to order 5 PCBs, so for this one I simply snapped off the numpad and used a wire to bridge the one broken connection. It’s fairly low profile, using the narrowest height I could cram everything into and using switches that are reduced height above the “plate” but are otherwise normal mechanical keyboard switches. I got blank low-profile keycaps and designed my own legends and used a laser engraver (instead of an iron or press) on Cricut’s infusible ink markers. They photograph better than IRL, but they did come out pretty well. There is a Raspberry Pi Pico wired to the circuit board and running custom firmware (KMK). The rest is made of painted Masonite hardboard and 3D prints.
That is awesome. I just purchased a CO2 laser last month and would love to give this a shot. Any recommendations on how you went about designing the panels, PCBs, and picking caps/keys?
