I'm back to thinking about my frankly unhealthy relationship with computers, and trying to figure out a new alternative.
I have and love my omnibook 300. It's a great computer, instant on, great battery life, DOS and Win31. Fast enough to do everything I regularly need a computer for. It was my daily driver, outside of of work, when I was in VA.
I don't use it GA as much, because the screen is not lit, and I do a lot of work in the evenings, in a cabin, in the deep woods, where there is little natural light and the practical lights in the house are insufficient for me to use it here.
Uhh #personalcomputing so I can find this later.
I had done all kinds of convoluted things to get the omnibook online before, and I'm not really willing to put up with any of that right now.
But I think I want whatever box I'm using recreationally to have at least some real time networking, and for it to require less hoop jumping than I was commiting on the omnibook.
A working SSH implementation would be nice too.
What do I need out of my computer?
I want to be able to browse some kind of networked documents. Gemini is fine. It's neat, it'll serve my needs. Some kind of javascript-free web browser.
I'd like to be able to send and receive emails, maybe access brutaldon. I'd like to be able to update my blogs which means git, or at least ssh.
I've grown accustomed to syncthing, so access to that would be nice. When I'm at home these days I do a fair amount of writing, but occasionally video and audio editing.
I don't *need* to be able to edit video on my recreational rig, necessarily, but being able to *produce* some kind of video would be nice (even if it's just, like, a slideshow, or a theatrix studio cartoon, or a Windows 3D movie maker film) that would be nice.
I am occasionally struck by the whim to do desktop publishing, or image editing. Again, I don't *need* to be able to do these things on my recreational rig, but it would be nice to be able to do it occasionally.
I think the more important thing here is to highlight what I don't want.
I don't want to be able to do my job from my recreational computer.
I don't want to have to watch the battery, or think about it.
I don't want to be spied on, or tracked. I don't want to get sucked in to the corporate internet. I don't want to be able to get sucked in to the corporate internet.
I kind of want to ask:
What's the simplest piece of hardware that has a functioning Gemini implementation and a basic networking stack?
but that's the wrong question.
Because I could implement nearly everything I want out of personal computing with #cybredeck and a linux command line, and I've done that at various points in the past.
I did it for years, really.
I could implement nearly everything I want with dosemu and a local proxy to strip https so that old dos apps can access the internet.
But uhh, neither of those things is really the thing I want right now.
I think I am going to attempt to construct a collection of lightweight, low powered, small, whimsical applications, and find a way to interact with them that I don't despise.