There’s a guy in Wellington making a photocopied weekly gig guide which will do more for the local music scene than this attempt at making a profitable social media. I guarantee it.
Its actually a small volunteer crew not one guy, and they are great!
We have shared their posts on our socials, they do the guide, a weekly access radio show, free classifieds, all self funded... Which is exactly what Propel exists to support.
On the profitable social media bit. I have been a worker in the scene for 8 years, running events, promoting other people, pushing the scene. And i'll keep doing it here because I love it, not because theres money in it.
of course. that's the point. what matters is that there still is enough money in it that enables some people to make a living of it. and that's great. since we are discussing a decline, people no longer being able to make a living are the first casualties. being able to do get paid for that work is a sign of health.
as someone involved with Free Software and Open Source, i can sympathize. the number of people who can get paid while at the same time doing it for the love of it is very small. i love to work on FOSS too, but i can't afford to do it without getting paid.
LOL! It's a sign of the times that, before I saw the year, I thought "that has to be AI generated", because this sort of outlandish silliness is exactly the type of thing that genAI excels at.
Been working on a handheld cyberdeck with a good thumb keyboard. I'm masochistic enough to write entire projects on my smartphone with vim running inside termux, so I think anything that improves on this will certainly be used.
Measured my thumb's swiping arc and designed a split keyboard specifically for my hands. Managed to get every symbol in there with no layers. Now I just need to save up some money and order protypes so I can get a feel for the switches. Can't move forward until I've perfected the keyboard.
For general compute they will lose to a laptop, but that isn't supposed to be their purpose. I think the best use cases require extra hardware that would make a laptop too bulky or awkward. For example a deck with a VNA, SDR, scope, and arbitrary waveform generator for field work with radio equipment. The traditional computer capabilities are sort of extra. Any sort of diagnostic "cart" with a dedicated computer and a bunch of test equipment could be a candidate for miniaturization.
I'm imagining a computer set up for DJing with big-ass speakers on the outside top lid, and a bunch of analog controls on either side of the keyboard, and a heavy battery.
That's not only possible, but was done to death in the early 2000s during the heyday of car audio components, "home theater" PCs, iPods, and finally good enough laptops.
If you built one of those you were automatically the DJ after school, at the skate park, etc. You better believe those SLA batteries were heavy.
> "For example a deck with a VNA, SDR, scope, and arbitrary waveform generator for field work with radio equipment."
Any real world examples? I don't think that's plausible from a RFI, power, heat, or just plain fragility perspective even with the cheapo hobbyist instruments suitable for kitbashing and only energizing a couple of instruments a time.
The two non computer device I use today are my digital audio player (DAP) and my ereader. If I have the time and money, that would be the kind of specialized tasks that I could design a cyberdeck towards. The laptop form factor is quite nice for computing although I would like more direct ports than USB which is complex for experimentation.
Idk if it merits being called a cyberdeck, but i use my rickety suitcase tablet+keyboard+mouse (+ powerbank) setup which I VNC from to my house computers mainly. One of the reasons is local LLMs being often impractical to run directly in my laptop, especially as I also do other things. Before that I didn't use it as much. Sometimes I just put the laptop and the mouse in the suitcase, mainly because I find the trackpad virtually unusable for VNC, particularly for copy-paste.
I got a ClockworkPi uConsole and am not really using it much, and that’s because it’s become very hard for me to read on the high dpi small screen for too long.
GPD makes several devices that come close to the old compact Vaios. I have the GPD Win Mini and it's a pretty capable machine - 32GB RAM, 2TB storage, RDNA 3.5 gfx, built-in gamepad, full set of ports.
The keyboard is surprisingly usable, although of course nowhere close to that of a laptop, but still usable for short periods. I got a fully fleshed out Arch gaming setup (manual install) and I use it on a regular basis like a Steam Deck and just a portable dev/test machine at work.
I always wanted one of the tiny form factor laptops but during that period I had a specific need for a real non-usb hardware serial port and instead bought a laptop that actually had one which was very strange (2009 maybe?)
I assume if this was brought to his attention today, he would denounce anything said. People mature. Boy, if League of Legends chat logs from 2012 ever got out...
That was released as a joke. Twenty years later and no longer released as a joke, Apple is showing they are still in touch with the sensibilities of the modern Apple customer.
