Stuff like a pretty case with slots for optical drives, a laptop with a shitton of ports and all-day battery life or anything else that seems to go against the trends.
This thread is for complaining about how you can’t find it and (maybe) finding it thanks to someone else.
Shoes with build in wifi
Rootable Android (or Linux) based “mp3 player”. Basically an iPod touch. No cell radio.
I might struggle to make it the size of an iPod Touch but that’s not difficult to build out of a Raspberry Pi.
That’s cool, hadn’t really thought about it. Basically looking for a wifi-only device I can install Signal on.
You’d get the desktop version of Signal doing it that way.
Nah. With an Android device, you can install the Signal app (it’s even on FDroid now). You’ll need a phone number to register it, but just to receive the code. Could be a mobile number you have, a landline, or a VoIP (ie, jmp.chat) number-- as long as you haven’t already registered for Signal with it.
A Linux device could pose some difficulty, but I think there is progress being made on running Android apps.
Edit: sorry, forgot some of the context here. Leaving it since I’m pretty sure you can install Android on a RasPi.
Yeah I usually think of the Raspberry Pi as a box for running Debian on.
Literally couldn’t fall asleep last night, thinking about how much I’d want this and how hard it’d be to neuter a cellphone to make this.
Why couldn’t you just use a custom launcher? This isn’t a hard task.
Let me preface this by saying that, compared to your average Lemmy user, I am not a technical person. What stuck in my head was removing the radio and comms tech completely - no cell radio, no wifi, no GPS. Literally just make it an average cellphone sized offline tablet, where you’re adding stuff only via the USB port or SD card slot.
Assuming this were possible/actually worth it, would probably need custom firmware to actually make it useable anyway. Just taking an off the shelf smartphone and using a custom launcher would likely be the more practical route, but I’d be more interested if it was offline only from a pure hardware perspective.
But I digress - I just thought it was funny to see this when it seriously was the “What if?” that made it hard for me to get to sleep the other day.
You’re thinking about it too hard.
Just use a launcher, sometimes called Kiosk mode/launchers, to launch one app. You can disable the other hardware if you want, but it doesn’t seem like it really helps you reach your goal.
You could probably pull it off with a Pi Zero, battery pack, and screen if you want to get into it a bit. It’s not that hard at all.
Probably - thought about it harder anyway (see: actually read stuff), and the closest you can probably get to what I was thinking about with your average smartphone is disconnecting and terminating all connections to the antennas.
Let’s be real, though - if I actually intended to use something like this, it’d for sure be something cobbled together using an SBC like the Pi Zero.
It’s not uncommon to just disable hardware you don’t intent to use. You don’t have to do it mechanically. There’s a lot of kiosks around that have a lot more capabilities than they’re used for.
If you’re looking to do it with a Pi, banana, orange or raspberry, let me know. I’ve spent way too much time finding the perfect screen to use and case to print. I build a rechargeable handheld device that can pull up all my surveillance cameras and functions as a master remote.
I’m amazed I can’t find such a thing on AliExpress.
A SBC with SATA ports, to use as a Plex server. I’ve only ever found one (the Zimaboard), but it’s a bit pricey for something that I’d still have to find some way to house with an external HDD.
Ive heard some people use usbC connecting drive enclosures, could probably rig something up with the backplane from one of those, but yeah a finished product like that would be neat.
I think ive seen a mini-PC with a hotswap m.2 bay built in though?
The ODROID-HC4 has two SATA ports. Alternatively, you can get one with an NVMe slot and stick a NVMe to SATA card in it that will likely get you four ports.
I hadn’t looked at any ODROID stuff, and the HC4 is a cool looking solution! I’m actually even more impressed with the M1S, which has a built-in M.2 slot. Can’t use my existing spinny drives, but for the price of the M1S, I could pick up an NVMe drive to go with it.
Another option would be to get a RPi and throw a hat on it:
I had looked at those, but the hat alone is over $70. Plus they need an RPi5, because earlier ones don’t have a PCIe interface. For that much, I could get a Beelink or something similar.
The hat is a cool idea, though.
the battery thing is real. I basically can not find a laptop with weak/low power cpu and igpu, but a huge battery. I get that we can not do more than 99whr, but for weak stuff, I can not find anything above 50 practically.
well, if you carry around a bag anyways a battery bank could alleviate that
yes, but that is a separate investment
There are plenty of portable second screens for laptops now. But it seems weird you can’t just hardwire a second laptop without having to resort to internet based screen sharing solutions.
if you’re saying what i think you’re saying you may be interested in something like a nexdock
Basically a laptop with no internals that acts as an external monitor, battery bank and peripherals for another device
some cheap all-in-ones i’ve worked on have hdmi in and out.
one of 'em i have here is an old atom celeron dell aio with 1600x900 native screen but on its hdmi input, it’ll run at 1920x1080. and yea, running that instead of its true native res sucks about as bad as you think it would–but it is still ‘usable’. the real sucky bit, though, is the pc has to be on in order to switch it to hdmi in.
a lenovo aio that went through here a couple years ago had to be rebooted to switch it from hdmi input mode (acting as a standalone monitor) back to pc.
A cheap ARM laptop.
Pinebooks have been sold out for ages, and then it’s a massive leap up to MNT Reform or Copilot+.
I just started watching eBay for used Pinebooks, but nothing has popped yet.
This is adjacent, but it’s worth pointing out that framework has recently started selling risc-v motherboards for their laptops for adventurous folks.
A device I’d really like to have would be something like a phone but would replace the need for having any cloud services. Imagine if it had a really large drive where you could just keep all your media, and if it had an API that’s something along the lines of NextCloud where it could expose calendar, contacts, email, music streaming, photo gallery, video streaming, etc. that your other devices could connect to.
Since you carry your phone around everywhere anyways, there would no longer be any need to have cloud services because their whole raison d’etre is to act as a central server that allows you to sync data across different devices. If you just carry the server on you, that problem goes away entirely.
You could also have a dock with a backup drive where it would just automatically sync when you plug it in at the end of the day. This way if the drive died on it, you’d always have a backup ready that you could swap in.
Another neat thing you could do would be to have a dock in a shape of a laptop with a big screen, keyboard, maybe faster CPU, more RAM, a good video card. This way you wouldn’t need a separate laptop, you could just plug your phone in the dock and voila.
This approach would result in way better privacy because all your data would always be on you as opposed to some server somewhere. It would also be way more reliable since you wouldn’t have to worry about network connectivity. You’d still need some external services like a mail server, but these would just be endpoints you use for communication.
Removed by mod
Ahh, the ol’ breaker breaker
Only $28.00 on Amazon!
Google stopped making Chromecasts to push their stupid Google TV box, and secondhand ones are $150
So… That
So like, fuck walmart, but I believe their private label sells pretty much the exact same thing as the most recent chromecasts running android
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Phone with dual sim card slots and a sdcard, plus pop-out camera (my present phone has all of that except the second simcard, and I refuse to replace this phone!) ** Charging port on top ** Slightly thicker to fit a larger battery - and possibly slightly better optics for the main camera.
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Computer mouse about 15% larger than the “large” mouses they presently sell.
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Detachable 10-key that’s mirrored for easy left hand use.
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In general, small electronic devices should have more than one button for interaction. It’s easier to remember 3 different buttons than 3 different Morse codes to achieve the three different functions.
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What phone do you have? I used to have a work phone that had 2 sim card slots and an sd card reader, a huge battery that was removeable without requiring restarting and an audio jack for headphones but no pop out camera and the camera kinda sucked. bluebird ef500r-anlt. no longer being made sadly. has an ir blaster too. love it, wish it still could operate as a phone.
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Have you tried a vertical mouse? I have a Logitech MX vertical and a left handed generic one that is pretty much identical to it in size and love them.
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I saw a mirrored one once, that wasn’t detachable but on the left side of the keyboard and I regret not buying it because I haven’t been able to find one since. Plus it was close to $1,000. I tried making a picture of the keyboard i dream of. It’s still a work in progress, somethings aren’t correct and i’m missing a few keys still. https://i.imgur.com/wBBxNf8.png
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devices should only have one button if they only need to be turned on or off.
The phone is a moto hyper one. 4 or 5 years old, I fear the day i need to switch. Technically it has two sim cards slots. More precisely: one sim card slot and one slot that can be used either for sim or SD card. Since sd card is non-negotiable for me, it means one usable sim.
Audio jack yes, but not replaceable battery.
I haven’t tried vertical mouse. Maybe I ought…
No luck with the imgur link :( I’ll try again later
yeah i need to find a better image hosting site. this might work https://imgur.com/a/uQCwjX9
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Something like this ?
If you’re wanting a mirrored classic numpad with the bigger enter/plus I am surprised it seems like an unexplored niche of custom keyboard stuff. Can’t find any atm.
Could probably grab a numpad kit like this and mount the everything on the bottom of the PCB, but you’d need to do some soldering. On the other hand, that kind of kit is generally recommended as a first soldering project.
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A few things.
A laptop with 2-way HDMI, so i can plug it into a game console and use it as a small TV. Note that i’m aware that HDMI might not work like this.
A wearable soundboard with speakers and batteries hidden in my pockets, and controlled by chorded buttons in my shoes. Use cases include crickets, canned laughter, the Seinfeld theme, and audible air guitar riffs.
A handheld computer that:
- Has physical buttons instead of a touchscreen
- E-ink display for all the benefits of that – Physical light switch for a backlight for the screen (my phone is e-ink but i have the backlight turned off by default, a side effect is i can’t see the screen to turn the backlight on when i need it) – Button to refresh the screen, instead of relying on automatic refreshes (Light Phone II) or updating what’s on screen to get it to refresh (Sony PRS 505) – Solar panel, if the OS is light enough to permit it. Ereaders are totally low-power enough that if one had a small solar panel like a calculator you’d almost never need to charge it. A full handheld computer could probably also benefit from this.
A music player / DAC that:
- Has physical buttons, non-touch screen, & light switch for screen backlight like the above wish.
- Lets you mark some files as audiobooks/podcasts, so it remembers your place in those
- Isn’t just an Android phone that can’t make calls
- Has a reflective or transflective display, so you can use it outdoors without fighting the sun
- Can listen to the radio, if you unfold or plug in an antenna
- Has a headphone jack There’s more to this one because i’m planning to actually make it someday, simply because i don’t expect anyone else to make one that does what i want it to.
Somewhat ergonomic keyboards in laptops. I know split keyboards are hard because the screen has to be about as wide as the keyboard, but i’m sure there’s a way and i intend to someday prove it. I know we can do better than typewriter shaped keyboards with QWERTY by default, even ortholinear boards would be an improvement because layouts can be done in software.
An electric notebook with a touchscreen that instead of using OCR to turn handwriting into text, stores handwriting as vector graphics as a middle ground between OCR and images with huge file sizes. Probably with a slider for how much to simplify lines, and an option to select areas of a page to convert to text via OCR so you can still have diagrams and doodles alongside plain text that’s easy to export and edit.
A device like a generation I pokedex, but for real world animals and plants. This one probably won’t happen because stuff like this is only done as smartphone apps anymore, not as standalone toys.
HUD goggles that are the display of a full portable computer.
- Keyboard input could be done through a split keyboard that hooks onto your belt, with half on each thigh
- Mouse input could be done with a trackpoint / trackball on the keyboard (simple option) or with a bracelet that emits IR light from multiple points so it can be tracked by sensors on the goggles (if you don’t understand what i mean, kind of like a Wiimote and sensor bar), with a ring that goes around your middle finger attached by a wire to the bracelet. When you tug the ring down by bending your wrist or fingers down, that’s a mouse click. (complicated option)
- Two or more hot-swappable batteries, so you can change one out without the device having to lose power
- Transparent LCD over one eye, so the background of the image is just what’s actually in front of you
- Gyroscope somewhere on the head part, so you can turn your head to access different windows like it’s a VR headset. Imagine there’s a bubble around your head with program windows projected onto different parts of it. Large windows look curved around the surface of the bubble. You can drag them around with the mouse, or turn your head to move them relative to your eyes. Probably also makes this good for AR stuff.
- Headphone jack and bluetooth for audio, but not necessarily built in speakers This one might never happen, apparently making any kind of HUD is very hard and expensive and this one is asking for a lot. But it would be so cool. It would finally be a portable computer with a good input system (keyboard) and a display at the same time.
And there’s more stuff i want to exist that doesn’t fit the question. Software (why hasn’t anyone mad a 3+ D spreadsheet program?) and non-technical products.
A power efficient e-ink laptop.
A laptop with a colossal battery life, I don’t care how chonky it is.
A smart watch that can do much more than the simple crap they do now. Larger is fine, maybe a smart bracer.
Multitools that are specifically designed for trades. It’s not tech, I would just love to have a multitool with specific tools for welding.
Some kind of wrist device where I can copy a file from one electronic device and paste it onto another device with hand gestures.
A Clockwork uConsole device that’s a bit more powerful and can use m.2. Those things are neat little kits, but they’re alway always always sold out of the good version. I wouldn’t mind a laptop in this format.
Phones with smaller screens
Data cassettes using current LTO tech, but in standard compact cassette format
LTO cartridges are shaped so much more efficiently, for so many reasons, so why specifically compact cassette format?
Although I’m also just realising now that LTO is specifically optimized to be used linearly from start to finish (It’s even in the name) and is pretty inefficient if you’d want to use it a bit, remove it and using reading it later.
A high-quality laptop without any branding.
I’m currently using a 9-year-old, woefully underpowered laptop made by Xiaomi. Full aluminium unibody, and NO logo. Not printed on, not etched in, not glistening only in the right light. NO LOGO.
I’m not a billboard. I’m not responsible for your brand recognition. Ironically though, far more people have come up to me and asked “hey, what laptop is that” than ever would have cared if there was a logo on it.
It also just looks and feels fantastic, all-aluminium-no-logo just looks so sleek.
So yeah. I will not be upgrading until I find another laptop of the same build quality, with no logo. Tuxedo has that option for most of their laptops, but for some reason not for their only current full-aluminium body -.-
Oh, and don’t come at me with stickers.
Fully agree with the sentiment, and at the same time I think it’s a lost battle. Even more so with more niche tech like cameras (where one is usually invested into an ecosystem instead of having just one piece like a laptop that can be sold on its own 5 years in).
I’ll extend that to every product as well. I hate branding specially in clothing.
Oh, and don’t come at me with stickers.
Well then. Maybe you could wrap your heart in duc-ta-a-ape! *runs away sobbing*
