A Geek Goes Flying

I initially backed (on prelaunch.com) the Kickstarter BYOK project on August 7, 2024. Yesterday, January 7, 2026, one year and five months later, it arrived (about a year after the initial projected . I've now had a chance to unpack it and play around with it a little bit. Getting it working with a keyboard was ... interesting. The USB-C cable I carry with me everywhere didn't work on a Tokyo 60 board , or with a RK71 in cable mode (I suspect the cable was charging only, so I picked up a new short cable that I confirmed supports data). The RK71 in Bluetooth mode was seen by the BYOK and paired successfully via Bluetooth, but the BYOK did not recognize any input. Likewise an older Keychron K2 and my Ajazz K620T. Not great. (Edit: See below; a firmware update fixed this issue.) I finally used the cable that came with the device to connect the Tokyo60 and that worked, and it's what I'm using to type this. The device works well enough, so far. There's a tiny bit of ...

Decluttering, I found an old HD 8  (mine’s actually an 8th generation, one year newer than that SKU, but they’re both obsolete and discontinued, so whatever) that I’d apparently never even setup (or if I did, I’d factory reset it). It’s like 7 years old but the screen is immaculate and it seems to have a working battery, albeit not the strongest - as you’d expect. Anyway. It’s running Fire OS 7.3.2.9 with a build date of Decemer 5, 2023, 1:59 p.m., so I guess I did have it online at some point, long enough to update the system software. I’m told this software is a fork of Android Pie (a/k/a Android 9.0), which is getting fairly long in the tooth, but I have apps that will work on the much older Android 5 (Lollipop) (from my Nexus 7 restoration project ), so ...  The hardware isn’t anything to write home about either: 8-inch IPS LCD (1280x800); quad-core MediaTek MT8163B CPU; 1.5 GB RAM; 16GB internal storage (~12GB usable after factory reset); VGA front camera, 2MP rear ...

A Windows CE Palmtop I have an old NEC MobilePro 780. I got it to install Linux or a *BSD on, and achieved some success with that project (about 18 years ago?!), but the machine really didn’t have the horsepower to be a good UNIX portable (168 MHz NEC VR4121 processor, 32MB RAM, whatever storage you had in the CompactFlash spot), nor was/is the Linux desktop experience really optimized for the screen geometry (it has an 8.1" 640x240 DSTN display). But I hung on to it, because it’s got a great keyboard and it’s perfectly usable as a Windows CE machine, and why not? But over time I’ve misplaced the AC adapter, the battery is toast, and, well, yeah. I didn’t see the point in spending $50+ for a dubious quality replacement battery, so it sat. NEC MobilePro   But at  9.6" x 5.2" x 1.1" and 1.7 lbs., it will totally fit in even a LoungeFly, and a moment of distracted Googling led me to learning about the MC-BA10 adapter, which lets the MobilePro run off of (4) AA batterie...

Going to try this. Doubt I’ll win. But it’s a start. Created an account on https://nanowrimo.org/ . As of this writing, November starts in 7 hours, 21 minutes, and 55 seconds. 54. 53. You get it. NaNo Prep 101 . Create a project: https://nanowrimo.org/participants/<username>/projects For this round, I just want to see if I can knock out 50,000 words, so I’m setting it up as a Memoir. Next time, I’ll prep something fictiony. But I’ve got a bunch of stories I can tell, so why the hell not. No one’s ever going to read it, but it’ll be good mental exercise and should be an easier hill to climb to get to that 50K. Deep breath. Here goes. This sets up the goal name, the type of goal (“writing”), the word-count goal (50,000), and the start and end dates (11/01/2024–11/30/2024). Update: I’m behind (shocking). Got off to a decent start on the 1st (984 words), made less progress on the 2nd (736 words), and nada yesterday (Dapper Day at Disneyland). There‘s always time to catch up though.....

Getting ready for NaNoWriMo. The BYOK isn’t out yet. I’m not going to drop $350 on something like a Freewrite Alpha , as cool as I think it is. But I have an old IdeaPad S10 netbook (10.2" 1024x600 screen, surprisingly good keyboard, Atom processor, 2.5 GB RAM, whatever old SATA SSD I had close at hand, and I picked up this DC 5.5x2.5mm to Type C USB cable , which so far works perfectly to charge and power the thing).  IdeaPad S10 netbook   Now I’m on the hunt for a decent Linux distribution (probably DSL 2024 ), and word processing software : I’ll probably end up with AbiWord , but old WordPerfect is still a contender (was using it for years on my 1024x768 VAIO PCG-Z505R), and FocusWriter looks interesting. LibreOffice is probably too heavy. Was not previously aware of FreeOffice TextMaker before, but I should check it out at some point It just needs to provide a relatively distraction-free writing environment that I can work on whenever I have spare time; think this’ll wo...

Tried out the ultra-crappy Android tablet I had handy on the MOFT Folding Laptop Stand Lap Desk in the 60° configuration on the POÄNG Lap Desk Workstation (might try it in the 45° configuration ). Worked well enough with light weight “distraction-free writing” tools and my Keychron Q60 Max. An iPad will probably work even better. MOFT stand holding a tablet