We have a 64-bit Toshiba tablet mounted on the wall in our kitchen that works wonderfully as a control surface for HomeAssistant. The battery was easy to remove and it runs off of its own barrel plug connector.
We were thinking to reproduce this in our hallway, but all the spare touchscreen devices (tablets and phones that were our own and from family/friends) have these integrated batteries, and research seems to suggest that none of them will work without a battery anyways, so we are going to attempt to do something like this with an old iPhone or Android phone.
We have some PinePhones lying around that have removable batteries and run just fine without them, but alas they are so underpowered that they can't really run the bloated HomeAssistant web portal, and we don't want to write a custom frontend.
If you have an evening to burn, 17776 by Jon Bois[0] is a surprisingly captivating multimedia story/project about this topic. It speculates about a future Earth where people have been immortal for thousands of years and explores what happens through the lens of absurd football games. Previously discussed on HN in 2017[1].
> I sort of would've preferred it was JUST a button
Exactly. The Pebble already has all the hardware to capture voice notes. There are at least a few third party Pebble apps that do this already. The problem that Eric has is limited to the activation of the feature, not the feature itself, but he overengineered a disposable standalone gadget instead of making an accessory for his already capable platform.
The Workbench feature to have an always-on-hand notepad overlay thing is really appealing. I always have a multi-tabbed text editor handy for quick notes and this seems like a good way to integrate that into the shell. I’d love to take this Workbench distribution for a spin based on that.
But to mirror the sentiment here on HN, the rest of it looks vaporware-y
I have a PC where I installed Proxmox on bare metal and put a daily-use desktop OS on top. It works surprisingly well, the trickiest part was making sure the desktop OS took control of video/audio/peripherals.
Yup my primary Windows machine is a VM and after passing through all the relevant peripherals (GPU, USB) it’s pretty seamless and you’d never know.
Cool part is I needed a more powerful Linux shell than my regular servers (NUCs, etc.) for a one off project, so I spun up a VM on it and instantly had more than enough compute.
I already received my Pebble 2 Duo and it's been such a joy to own, but I will definitely be canceling my Pebble Time 2 preorder if Eric keeps acting like this.
Rather refurbished, because those are longer on market thus development of custom ROM (like LineageOS) is more likely. And of course you save a lot of money.
We were thinking to reproduce this in our hallway, but all the spare touchscreen devices (tablets and phones that were our own and from family/friends) have these integrated batteries, and research seems to suggest that none of them will work without a battery anyways, so we are going to attempt to do something like this with an old iPhone or Android phone.
We have some PinePhones lying around that have removable batteries and run just fine without them, but alas they are so underpowered that they can't really run the bloated HomeAssistant web portal, and we don't want to write a custom frontend.
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