A small laptop
The technology world has changed so much since the smartphone revolution that in 2021 it isn't possible to find some computing form factors anymore.
As my 7.9-inch iPad Mini begins to get very obsolete, as its jailbroken iOS 8 fails to negotiate a TLS connection to Wikipedia, I was set to find a small and open computing platform to play with.
The PineBook Pro is awesome, it has a great 1080p IPS panel, it's an open platform, but it is a 14 inch laptop. I already have such a large laptop, and there's always the desktop. PineBook Pro it isn't.
Something reminded me of the bygone era of 2009, when we all were chatting using nicknames and waiting hours for a "Linux ISO" to download on eMule, as we lived the golden age of the Internet wild west. Those technology magazines reported on the launch of the Sony Vaio P subnotebooks. 8 inches, ultra wide screen, high DPI, with a keyboard! As I dreamed of hacking stuff like John Connor in Terminator 2 on Sessão da Tarde, this piece of (dream) tech was very expensive for a 17 year old kid.
Some twelve years later, I found myself driving 3 hours round-trip to buy such a piece of (now) museum technology.
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It's specs are tarnished by the infamous Poulsbo chipset. Foreshadowing the next decade, it has soldered RAM. My unit has 1 GB of DDR2 chips, of a supported maximum of 2 GB.
Being Poulsbo, running anything not Windows was crap and still is crap. Such a cursed chipset Intel released on this world. And running 2021 Windows on 1 GB of RAM, on a 4200 RPM spinning rust disk would be torture.
Thus, two new projects are born: upgrading the memory to 2 GB and making Poulsbo's video acceleration work on Linux. Stretch goal: running Haiku as a daily driver.
Meanwhile, I'm stunned on how fast Windows XP is. Really. 2009 called and wants their snappy user experience back.