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What is a tablet? I’ve been pondering a bit more upon the philosophical imperatives and tensions, also the historical and poetic dimensions of the cybercortex.
When I think of the word “stylus”, for instance, a word inextricably yoked to “tablet”, the image in my native pictorial language is of a learned woman of Roman era Hellenistic Egypt, holding a stylus to her lips in pensive thought. She was captured thus, in a gesture likely taken from living memory, and painted upon hear mummy’s death mask. Thus her ba (Earthly spirit), or was it ba, might recognize her to return for rest. Her stylus spoke without a word from 2000 years to us, of who she was and how she inhabited the written word. She was a woman I’d like to know.
Just so, the wax or clay filled wooden tablet upon which that lady wrote is likely now long gone. Probably no words remain from that scholar or poet, even on parched papyrus buried in the desert. It’s a poignancy: this one person is now famous for an image meant to be kept more secret than her writing. Thus does the modern gaze violate all propriety. But apropos, it also connotes the evanescence of the written word, even in stone. Oral band cultures could pass stories along for 10000 years or more, we know now. Something about the written word dies young in its desperation for permanence.
Amidst this poetry, the tablet is a device of communication more intimate than the pretence of the permanent word.
A tablet is for today. A tablet, like a blackboard, is jake with its impermanence. It holds and transfers from one to another, or one to oneself.
A tablet is portable. It moves where we do in the immediacy of the human hand. It asks as little as possible for its heft.
But unlike a smartphone, say, a tablet is broad enough to accomodate a range of human interactions. It’s field is wider to admit our literary or graphical interests. In this, a tablet is a mirror, and like a book, must needs be of similar dimensions to a human face. But unlike a face, a tablet doesn’t stare back (unless it has a forward facing camera, a device for which I’ve little use).
Tablets are quiet and unjudging witnesses. A tablet holds for us what we cannot hold otherwise, and at best does so according to our convenience. A tablet is dear diary and Moby Dick and painter’s helper and news at 11. If we want to speak to posterity or join the Great Debate, a tablet only serves for us to do so in the meantime, for the little words yet uncurated by aspiration.
This, I think, is what I mean by “information prosthesis” or as some imply by “cybercortex”. The tablet extends and protects the person as a mitten does the hand in winter. This liminal intimacy of the tablet requires a level of candour and trust which other devices don’t quite approach. One might readily share the screen of a PC, but one will think twice before lending a tablet. Conversely, a smartphone also requires guarded personality, but is less amenable to reflection. A phone primarily exists for others. A tablet first abides for oneself. And on this tablet, this “little table”, one spreads out matters one must tend for oneself.
As far as nuts and bolts go to be a tablet as painted above, the Raspad is “almost there”. Whether I can yet coax it the rest of the way is yet to be seen. Accomodations to common habits I don’t share must be allowed, as I’ve little skill to code or configure. But the basics of ergonomic interaction are ready:
MATE riding Ubuntu Linux allows many helpful widgets on either side of the screen, ready for thumbs. Dual side panels in the end maximize screen space, as window decorations and menus can be removed thither.
A keyboard pops up, readily modifiable for even obscure languages. In Onboard, as a Western text keyboard, the Linux tablet is easily superior to iPad, I reckon. But this doesn’t work for vertical CJK text until Onboard implements split screen keyboards. (I believe this feature is forthcoming.) For vertical CJK, the optimal tablet interface is a split keyboard on either side of the screen, combined with a malleable handwriting square. Mozc shows what is possible for the latter, but is still rudimentary. Rime in Ibus works well to mediate all this, if lacking in GUI. Ibus also lacks some modern helpful CJK doohickeys. iPad input allows for post-input character filtering by 部首 and stroke. As an information prosthetic function, this sort of table is what tablets do best. Whether checking exotic English spelling standards or helping the semi-educated remember how to write 豪傑， iPad does well as a prosthesis in this. Hopefully Raspad can do as readily.
I got MLTerm into some kind of shape yesterday. MLTerm allows for vertical text and is very malleable for non-Latin languages. It is also an obtuse terminal; until recently it had zero documentation nor preference GUI. But reading through the voluminous man page, I cobbled a long string of CLI options to tweak the interface to my preference. Until Onboard has split keyboard, vertical mode is just not on. Though not setup by default, MLTerm *does* allow for powerful styling here: one can configure to show fonts by Unicode blocs! Thus I hope to use a “half-height” 8 pt. font for ASCII &c., with a “full height” 16 pt. font for CJKVZ. As it stands, the hard mandate for most fonts to provide space above a character make vertical text ungainly, especially with Latin text. The w o r d s look thusly. This jibes with a neat, proper CJK text grid, but is impractical and unreadable for mixed script text on limited screen real estate. I’m hopeful that by shuffling fonts, line width, character height, and a tidy background for bamboo slip cartouches, that MLTerm might suffice for most CJKVZ text.
I sketched out an image which distills my ideal tablet interface. A mix of MATE, a spiffed up Mozc or Rime schema front end, and a tamed MLTerm.
Adafruit, bless the first lady of computing, has cooked up several options for adding a RTC to Raspberry Pi. The wiring is simple enough. The tutorial is geared to RaspiOS. These clocks serve a time signal via i2c. I’ll be looking into implementing this for Ubuntu, unless it is another thing likely helped by Manjaro for Arm64.
My next taste test will be to shuffle off Ubuntu MATE temporarily to HD, and give Manjaro for Pi a whirl. I downloaded both the MATE and LXDE edition images. There are conflicting virtues to either, natch: power versus elegance. My main interest in Manjaro is that it runs Wayland. This is an iffy prospect. On the one hand, I want to give Waydroid a whirl, as running a few Android .apk files is mission critical. On the other hand, skimming the Wayland fora indicates that avant gard isn’t ready for prime time on Raspberry Pi. Several Arm chipset hardware functions apparently aren’t yet implemented, though they are in X11.
Ah, well, compromises shall be made.
One respondent on a Raspberry Pi forum indicated that several functions of 64 bit architecture aren’t supported by Raspad 3, which is why the setup guide suggests installing a legacy 32 but version of RaspiOS. What those functions might be is not explained, neither by Raspad documentation nor the respondent. So far, I’ve found little practical difference in the issues between legacy RaspiOS and 64 bit Ubuntu MATE. The main issue are the occasional menu bugs in GTK3 windows.
Perhaps these were solved for 32 bit and I installed 64 bit RaspiOS? At all rates, I’m not going back to 32 bit. Mama wants her full 8GB of memory. No PAE for me anymore, thanks.
I also can’t fathom why the system arcitecture on the Raspi 4B might matter to the Raspad daughter board. The Raspad is an IO shell and PSU around the Raspberry Pi, little more. It chucks things to and fro via USB. How would the kernel have issue one way or the either with the touchscreen as such?
I’ve been educating myself as I can about how Linux handles touchscreen. Apparently this is all handled by Xinput, for which there are a few GUI calibrators. And the Raspad touchscreen could use a dollop of calibration. Touches in th screen middle land the cursor on point. Touches toward the screen edges move the cursor a few mm further past the finger toward said edges. It’s a minor bug; one would think touchscreen calibration would by now be a default tab in MATE Tweak along with mouse and keyboard.
A wee box drawn graphic to show what I mean, stars meaning cursor point, circles meaning touch point:
╔════════════════════╗ ║⁕ ⁕║ ║ ∅ ∅ ║ ║ ║ ║ ⊛ ║ ║ ║ ║ ∅ ∅ ║ ║⁕ ⁕║ ╚════════════════════╝
I’ve yet to find a CPU frequency scaling widget to match the one in MATE. A test yesterday on my wall mounted ammeter showed that portable deployment already has potential. (~Nota bene, this ammeter is hardly accurate.) When set to the Powersave profile, Raspad draws between 0.9 to 2 ~amps when on and in use. When one pushes the screen button to turn that off, the system draws down to between 0.16 to 0.3 ~amps.
Furthermore, the daughterboard turns off the fan, bless her, a feature I hadn’t noticed before. This likely improves battery’s life very much when portable. I hadn’t noticed any such action before on RaspiOS.
The key to portable deployment is a suspend and/or hibernate feature. With a relatively thirsty chip like the Pi 4 Broadcom, a “workflow” for portable use mainly consists of pulling the system in and out of suspend or hibernation mode. So far this hasn’t worked, probably because it needs a swap partition. My current MicroSD for Ubuntu MATE only has 32gb. When funds permit, I shall upgrade to a 256gb+ chip for which I shall provide a capacious swap partition.
The ratings for r/w speeds of MicroSD infamously are a morass of corporate cruft. A virtue of a Raspi 4B with 8Gb of RAM lies in its little need for a fast MicroSD. The swap partition would mainly be for hibernation.
I’m pondering designs for a tablet cosy. A protective casing. With the wedge form factor, we cannot avail of an off the shelf option. This is just as well, as I would like to sew one myself. I’m contemplating the hard shell made of sheet plastic quilted with foam, with a simple zipper. But I’d like it to also have a pouch for my folding Bluetooth keyboard, charger, and assorted gewgaws. If it all doesn’t fit in the purse per se, I shall MOLLE web one side to secure it to the outside.
Purses. Every few years I used to simplify and downscale my purse to a small handbag. City life requires less. Then I find that there isn’t enough space for knives, radios, lotion, and other gewgaws, so I scale up again. Carrying a tablet put this over the edge. My current purse is more of a satchel. Good exercise, and practical for the bush, but hardly travelling lightly.
The travails of a tomboy femme, I suppose. What do men do about this issue? Where do they put things? Pockets, I suppose.
I suppose I might take to carrying a backpack when needful, but that isn’t easy to access. Anyway, my tablet cosy will be built for rugged deployment.
Freeciv makes a bally good tablet game. And it helped to pinpoint the menu bug. Freeciv comes in two flavours: gtk3 and gtk2. The former doesn’t allow menu selection, the latter does. So whatever be the issue with the window manager, it evidently prefers the Gnome oldschool. But then, who doesn’t?
Anyway, playing Freeciv whilst watching Critical Rôle in a corner window is a basic tablet checkpoint achieved.
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