Notices by Jonathan Frederickson (jfred@jawns.club)

@freya @cwebber I think especially in that case it should always be possible for the user to choose where to upload data to though. Both for privacy reasons (you can choose a provider you trust, or run your own if you're able to) and so your glasses don't stop working when the manufacturer decides to stop supporting them

@cwebber This is basically where I'm at too. I'd like to keep using the Pocket Reform in some incarnation for as long as I can - with some tweaks and upgrades along the way, to be sure, but with the same chassis. (We'll see how that goes as I get older and my vision gets worse but I can always chassis swap)

Of course I feel a bit hypocritical saying that while continuing to buy each new MNT thing, but I can afford it and I want to support them. It's only partly an excuse I tell myself 😅

@cwebber @theesm Ooh! :D

@cwebber @vagrantc That's kexec, yeah. It's usable from a technical standpoint, though I think it can be a bit fiddly to set up. That's what Heads uses to load the OS kernel: https://github.com/linuxboot/heads/blob/master/initrd/bin/kexec-boot

(...and it's used sometimes for faster reboots as well: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kexec)

@cwebber @vagrantc Oh yeah that bit me years ago too when I was booting a Guix machine off of Heads (which likewise doesn't use grub). In that case though I could manually decrypt from the recovery shell, which isn't possible on the Reforms yet due to the lack of graphics in early boot

That might be a sticking point for Guix on MNT hardware too, since rolling back to previous generations from the boot menu is one of the nicer features of Guix

@cwebber Saaaaame. I'll let you know if I get anywhere on that - I think before I can daily drive it I need to find a good way to use bits of a community config for the hardware-specific stuff rather than trying to bundle it all into my own config. Gotta share the load somehow!

@cwebber Daydreaming about a Wayland WM designed after StumpWM but written in Guile

@chirpbirb @cwebber I'm using the rk3588 module on my big Reform rather than my Pocket, but since it's the same module: works great! It's more than powerful enough for YouTube

@cwebber The eternal struggle of niche open hardware projects. They're hackable, but sometimes they *need* some (potentially involved) hacking to get to where you need it to be.

The Pocket Reform with more polish (around suspend, battery life, etc) would be pretty much my ideal machine for personal use. In its current state it definitely requires some compromises. But I buy these things in part because I want to see them succeed :)

@phantasus @cwebber Re: "The Pocket Reform has the advantage to be that quirky small computer thingy which would be carried around in movies like Hackers or any cyberpunk-esque story" - this is basically how I use mine 😆

I should probably put together a blog post on my setup at some point

Short one about my #DecemberAdventure progress so far on guile-horton: https://www.terracrypt.net/posts/decadv-horton-persist-debugging.html

Haven't gotten as far with this as I would have liked, because I've gotten myself a bit stuck in troubleshooting mode. Knew this could happen though; this is an old project (relatively speaking) that I figured might be difficult to bring up to date. Getting there though, slowly but surely!

#spritely #ocap #guile

@cwebber A bit more in this update from a while back: https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2025-04-14-april-update.html

@cwebber Tablet device for Reform modules: https://nlnet.nl/project/MNT-Reform-Touch/

I'm not sure that's super far along yet with Reform Next still on the way, but it's planned at least!

@cwebber The Reform Touch could be an interesting platform for that when that comes out, given you wouldn't be using the built-in keyboard anyway

Battery life feels like the perennial issue with these sorts of things though. Your phone lasts all day on a charge, you probably want your other mobile computer to do the same. Phones have gotten really good at sipping power over the years

@cwebber I was wondering recently if you were still using that :)

@16af93

@mntmn From what I've heard the US government isn't providing key information like "where do we send payment to?" and the exact amounts they need to charge for different products. My gut feeling is that UPS is charging extra to cover the risk of getting it wrong on some packages + the cost of figuring out how to deal with the new system

That's my feeling because other postal carriers have halted shipments altogether, which makes me think they decided the risk is too great to continue shipping

@mntmn DHL also suspended shipping to the US though, aren't they also a courier?

@cwebber This is a great idea omg

I probably need to find other flavors because onions for me are a bit of a problem, but it sounds like a great base for a lot of things

@cwebber @mauve Also a weird thing I've noticed that may be tricky to compensate for: my heartbeat through the frames makes the virtual display visibly shake a bit

@cwebber @mauve I have the Viture Pro and yeah I get some eye fatigue from it after a while. The FoV is also pretty disappointing, which might be unavoidable with glasses that use birdbath optics like these

I'm hoping in the next few years we'll see glasses with waveguides that you could conceivably just wear as your regular glasses and then boom it's a display when you plug it in