Wrapping everything up!


...
4. It's great for Android - but don't expect to use it for Linux. It's not really optimized and struggles to run at the high resolution the screen has. LibreOffice runs incredibly slow - it's not usable. It runs a LOT faster on the Pyra...

Just my 50 cent on the linux side: you should try linux chroot with AnLinux (https://f-droid.org/de/packages/exa.lnx.a/) /termux. it works great if you dont need "fast" graphics since it uses a x11vnc to display stuff on android. but with a few tweaks (resolution to 480p) it's really useable. i use for example iceweasel and pidgin on top of xfce with this setup.

(some hint: on my gemini/termux installation the installation scripts dont work out of the box. since they are simple shell scripts i had to replace wget with curl -O and set the architecture fix to aarch64. then it worked - if someone want my patched installscripts (ubuntu/xfce) i could post it if i'm at home)
 
As I have now also a Ebook Reader in my Pocket, i wouldn’t mind if the Pyra ditnt play all the things of my Pandora in the first two months
But as the Pandora had a lot of emulator that’s still mapped for it, I think it wouldn’t take that long for the first few..
 
In a prior OS I was running on the devboard, I was just running the firefox bundled with Debian without too much issues. Also imported chrome (not chromium) from an armhf version of ubuntu and it worked alright.
 
@TrashyMG I didn't know there was an ARM desktop build of chrome. it was the only thing working with Netflix at one point, but now i guess firefox does... not that i'd be tempted to watch much netflix on the pyra, but it's the ability that counts :)
 
That PtitSeb man.
It's the websites that suck.

THIS
Web is just cancer. Think about it. All i want is several pages of text + static images. Original Web designed on a 25-33mhz 68040 with no graphics acceleration and ~24MB RAM for EVERYTHING. In 2018, to get say 40 static pages of information displayed on my screen, 8GB of RAM and 50 CRAY 1 supercomputers of CPU power sometimes isn't enough.........

M A D N E S S
 
That PtitSeb man.


THIS
Web is just cancer. Think about it. All i want is several pages of text + static images. Original Web designed on a 25-33mhz 68040 with no graphics acceleration and ~24MB RAM for EVERYTHING. In 2018, to get say 40 static pages of information displayed on my screen, 8GB of RAM and 50 CRAY 1 supercomputers of CPU power sometimes isn't enough.........

M A D N E S S
Something has to power all those trackers.
 
@TrashyMG does screenshare to chromecast work with chrome on the Pyra?
unfortunately I couldn't get that working at the time... I think it required some other library or something that wasn't on any armhf platform... but this was a few years ago when I played with this so my memory on it is a bit fuzzy.
 
unfortunately I couldn't get that working at the time... I think it required some other library or something that wasn't on any armhf platform... but this was a few years ago when I played with this so my memory on it is a bit fuzzy.
mkchromecast should work though.
 
Websites are bad, but people & companies are often worse. Who hasn't received an email (usually from a school or other institution that should know better), with a PDF attachment containing a static GIF image of a few dozen lines of text?

The abstraction layers are getting out of control.
 
At least pdfs can be read by open source tools. They do have their place, and I consider it much better form for users wanting to lay out graphics and text in specific fonts and places than those relying on html and then insisting on the invention of CSS and other DHTML wotsits.

I do miss the old days when no servers would take an email that was over the size of 10kB, but I'm much happier to open an included pdf than another bloody html only email. I've got reasonably adept at pulling out important links and text out of the unrendered html source code, so that I don't have to fire up any kind of potentially vulnerable browser just to display them.
 
nostalgic internet circlejerk yay!

I on the other hand am quite happy we've moved away, as a subculture, from the likes of geocities. While I'm not a huge fan of the chasing of one's own tail in terms of technical resources/requirements and having outdated technology before the dust fully settles, moore's law has still happened, and probably directly fueled by the concept of flashier/fatter content. I wouldn't want to imagine a world where technology was just like. "ok well, that's good enough, lets stop here"

If the internet stayed stagnant mid 80's/90's era and never evolved from that, or just went with the same level of fidelity but leaner, then the entire technological landscape would be significantly retarded in response, the content would have eventually gotten more optimized due to limitations and push to it's bounds, then pushing hardware to advance (through purchase power) would be at a much much slower rate. Advances we all enjoy today are probably directly because of the ever advancing requirements of unoptimized content constantly pushing the need for what the hardware was capable of and asking for more. The everyday consumer isn't intimately familiar with what they should actually expect from their hardware, and the concept of something amazing being able to ran on a toaster might be impressive to some, but is probably lost on the vast majority of the populace. While not a website, I remember being absolutely floored back in the day by the like of zsnes, and more recently drastic. People taking the time it takes to make something amazing that would be seemingly impossible when compared to the average much less optimized efforts.

Someday when moore's law hits the proverbial brick wall of the physics barrier (it's still running at full speed to) and potentially no longer able to go double the density at half the cost every couple of years, and going wider or taller has it's diminishing returns. Optimization will eventually again catch up with the old concept of throwing more resources at the problem. You see it on game consoles as they age. 1st wave of content is normally partially flashy and unoptimized, but as time goes on, you start seeing things like star ocean for the SNES happen. Like who in the hell would have thought you could do that much on the same chips that ran super mario world. True it was one of the last titles for the system, but coding skill, optimization, and familiarization show, you can do a whole lot once you know the ins and outs of a capability and learn to push the limits of what a no longer advancing system can offer. Those things take a lot more time, time we will have once we get to a point where the next major hardware advancement isn't just right around the corner. I look forward to that future, and it's a guarantee, but being able to throw another bigger log on the fire isn't and in fact someday... won't be possible..

So in summary, while we still have headroom for being able to throw resources at the problem, I say keep it coming, it's driving technology. It's unfortunate from the point of view of "look at what we were once capable of, it's all gone to shit!", and until we get to the point we can't just wait a year or two and buy something twice as awesome as we have today, I say let it be. But once we get to that point, then I'll be crying right next to you, clean up the code etc.
 
Websites are bad, but people & companies are often worse. Who hasn't received an email (usually from a school or other institution that should know better), with a PDF attachment containing a static GIF image of a few dozen lines of text?

The abstraction layers are getting out of control.

I know different people that to send away a PDF received by email, they print it on paper, take a picture of it with the phone, and send it using WhatsApp...

I asked them what was the point: "Because email is too difficult"
 
So in summary, while we still have headroom for being able to throw resources at the problem

I think you misunderstand the concept of progress. Progress is not always the advancement of complexity.

Most of the internet has become complex at the cost of efficiency and usability (the copy/paste-from-StackExchange generation of web development).

The spirit of Pyra and other projects is to encourage enthusiasm again to the raw aspects of computing: maintenance, upgradability, learning and fun.
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once we get to that point, then I'll be crying right next to you, clean up the code etc.

You really should take some advice from uncle Bob.
 
Your progress is never the advancement of your complexity. Your complexity is someone else progressing over you. They have made their life less complex by managing to make yours more complex.
Complexity is like entropy. In order to increase entalpy in a local system you increase entropy elsewhere. So complexity is the waste byproduct of progress.

The market ensures that the rich control technology and the poor pay for the technology that controls them. So the complexity you get is the waste the technology overlords throw on you. A decade or two ago
you could learn to make a website in a month, you could set it up in your basement and have it accessed through a dial up line. Now you need to accept the terms of very few companies that control
the dns, the content proxies, the networks, the content indexes and search, the rendering (browsers) and whatnot, and have to keep dancing the tune they play. For them it is simple to change conditions and standards, for you it's
restart all over.

Mobile phone vendors just buy closed IP from one another and throw shiny gadgets at you that sell your every breath to the highest bidder. The complexity of putting something together and selling it is simple (basically just get a budget).
The complexity of understanding it, maintaining it, keeping it runnig, keeping it barely secure... is thrown at the user. When the user is overwhelmed they sell a new device to the user. When the user brings their frustration to the neareast
technophile they are just criticized for being demodé. "Can't you see the new device is much better ? it even has NFC!"

The culture of accepting complex shiny things without understanding them is more like religion than technology. It is dangerous because it reinforces people that refuse to learn their very jobs and never think twice whether the time
they spent at it solves any real problem or creates more. I don't mean only technical jobs. The "email is too difficult" example is a very good one. If email is part of your job, just learn it, don't jump to shiny traps like whatsup (well,
I'm still in the old mindeset where a university could set up a mail server and mail was not a gmail monopoly, I guess now it is not really so much different than whatsup, still different but less each day).
"email is too difiicult " is like going to a pizzeria, ordering a pizza and being given a bare loaf of bread, "because pizzas are more difficult to prepare".

Modern websites are more annoying than old ones. Unwanted animations, huge images void of content, little text, little structure, hard to navigate, you almost have to wait until the content you look for happens to cross your viewport.
This is no longer hypertext, it is television. But of course with more tracking, miners, and credential stealing malware than (traditional) TV. Web design is "optimized" for devices that simply don't have the screen real state to browse the web, interaction
without any more input device than a fat fingers touchscreen and not even a box to show the URL you're at. The experience is worse than in the 90s and the equipment required is more complex, shorter lived and less under my control,
but somehow I am expected to love "the progress" because now the squares have rounded corners and everyone typefaces in Roboto. There's no technology progress, there's technology companies progress, which is almost the opposite.

Sorry for the new year rant.
 
I think you misunderstand the concept of progress. Progress is not always the advancement of complexity.

Most of the internet has become complex at the cost of efficiency and usability (the copy/paste-from-StackExchange generation of web development).

The spirit of Pyra and other projects is to encourage enthusiasm again to the raw aspects of computing: maintenance, upgradability, learning and fun.
[doublepost=1546346355,1546333900][/doublepost]

You really should take some advice from uncle Bob.
Not entirely sure how that ties into what I was saying, or maybe the intent of what I was saying wasn't clear. I'm not suggesting the internet (or applications & programs) is progressing for the better. But more the point that the SIDE EFFECT of that progress is ever advancing hardware requirements, and THAT is actually progressing for the better.

If "the problem" of the average website being bloated inefficiently coded and making it so cell phones and pc's need 8GB+ of ram and a supercomputer to be able to not turn into a slug while using them. I am suggesting it's fine, and welcomed, because you now have a market where supercomputer processors and tons of ram are being developed and priced for the consumer and forcing the price of everything below it down. You can improve or totally gut/replace code, hardware on the other hand is a bit harder to accomplish. Efficient code would have not gotten me my pocket super computer, at least not for many years. That is all I'm really saying.
 
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