💾 Archived View for gemini.cyberbot.space › gemlog › 2021-03-16-portables.gmi captured on 2023-06-16 at 16:43:17. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
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If it's not obvious from the content of my capsule then I will declare it here that I am really enthralled with portable, handheld, pocketable electronics and computing devices. Anything small and portable is pretty rad and fun to play with. I usually stick to the pretty low end an inexpensive stuff because I'm not rich and I find the quirks and limitations of the low power stuff fun and intriguing to play with. Now that everyone is aware how much I like little portable doodads you won't be surprised that I *gasp* HAVE BEEN PLAYING WITH LITTLE PORTABLE DOODADS!
I mentioned recently that I reorganized my micro sd card that's in my Odroid Go to have a smaller and more focused game selection and that decision I think was a wise one. I have been playing it more and sticking with a game longer than I was before when I had way to many options and could never decide what I wanted to play. I have been on a bit of word and board game kick lately. Specifically Scrabble on Game Boy Color, and Boggle and WordZap on Game Boy. WordZap took me an embarassing number of minutes before I actually understood how to play. I'm going to blame that on distractions reducing my focus but once I got it it has been a very nice game. Plus it has these neat pixel art famous landmarks that blast off into space at the end of each stage in challenge mode for some reason and the chiptunes have a nice beat. Fun fact: "yeet" was not a word in the Game Boy era. I enjoy word games in general but they also feel very well suited to the Odroid Go. I find the slow pace brain teaser game play to be relaxing and fun when just chilling on the couch in the evening.
The Eiffel Tower blasting off into space
WordZap not accepting "yeet" as a valid word
My PocketCHIP has been getting a fair bit of use mostly for gemini browsing and hopping on the fediverse. Making some quick edits on my gemini capsule is something I have done once or twice but the keyboard is not great for higher volumes of typing. I started working on a mini version of my terminal dashboard for the PocketCHIP but that will probably come along slowly.
My Pinephone has not been seeing much action lately. I think that will change when the Pinephone keyboard finally arrives and turns the Pinephone into a kickass portable linux computer with a good keyboard that fits in a pocket. I'm still up in the air on whether or not to give it a go as a daily driver phone. Messaging is my stopper at the moment.
A couple other tiny electronic devices I've been interested in lately are two gaming handhelds that I do not own (yet?) the arduboy and the pokitto. Very interesting super low end spec microcontroller powered handhelds. We're talking 16MHz for the arduboy and 48MHz for the pokitto. It is really impressive some of the games that are being made for these. The arduboy is so tiny and thin too that it would be so easy to carry with you all the time. The pokitto is bigger than the arduboy but smaller than the Odroid Go and sits in between them as far as processing power as well. I remember being interested in the pokitto in the past but had forgotten about it and it seems there are quite a few impressive looking games out for it now. What prompted my look back into it was stumbling across an awesome looking breakout/space invaders mashup game in a youtube video called Starbase Defender. I don't know if I will end up getting either of these handhelds but they are both very interesting and appear to have a really good game library.
