[Toybox] Phone docking stations for general purpose computing.

[Rob Landley]

On 5/23/20 9:27 PM, David Seikel wrote:
> On 2020-05-22 00:20:06, Rob Landley wrote:
>> My wife's experience with that was it's an overengineered solution that requires
>> a gratuitous wireless router between the phone and the chromecast, and won't get
>> the volume to become cheap becuase of it. But it's available today. Somebody
>> should try to prototype a usb solution with a pi zero and VNC or mp4 streaming...
> 
> And I found out the hard way that the security settings on the WiFI in
> the local city councillors office prevented Chromecast from working.

Oh yeah. Her dorm wifi at UofM has a login screen, which the chromecast couldn't
handle at all, so she spent something like 4 hours on the phone with various
tech support people getting them to whitelist the thing's mac address so it
didn't have to click through anything. (And then she wound up swapping it for a
tivo stick due to a chest-beating contest between amazon and everybody who isn't
amazon over being able to show prime _and_ hulu _and_ netflix _and_ youtube.
(And nothing reliably shows crunchyroll but that's a bog standard bufferbloat
problem at crunchyroll's end which we knew better than either in 2010
https://lwn.net/Articles/419714/ or in 1985 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc970
depending on "who's 'we' kemosabe'?.)

> I didn't have a proper phone docking station working at the time either. 
> So when they let me sit in their office all day during a 40 degree C hot
> day, I ended up having to borrow a spare office laptop, instead of the
> impressive "look, I can computer on my phone" demonstration I had
> planned.

There are a number of reasons I don't consider this part of the problem fixed
yet. A mature technology is generic to the point of being fungible. "Google
Chromecast" has the vendor in the name.

> When it works Chromecast is great for the portable VR demos, I can watch
> it on their big screen and tell the novice with my phone strapped to
> their face, "no it's on your right, and look down a little, yes the blue
> thing", coz I can see what they are seeing instead of guessing.

VR is a bit like videophones. It's been coming soon for so long it's hard to get
excited now it's here, and it turns out not to be what we actually want most of
the time?

On the videophone front, we have a weekly call at $DAYJOB which moved to google
hangouts last month (well, randomly toggling between the "hangouts" and "meet"
apps because the google scheduling thing creates a link to one or the other
randomly depending on moon phase or something)... and everybody switches off
their camera unless they're screencasting the todo spreadsheet.

As for VR, I keep wanting to buy beatsaber but the HTC Vive goggles are $700 and
then I think it needs an x-bone instead of any of the game consoles I already
have on top of that, so no.

>> Once upon a time the Ford Model T wasn't like other cars, you could only get
>> what it offered from the one manufacturer and were then locked into a
>> proprietary vendor ecosystem. These days neither the gas station nor jiffy lube
>> cares that much who made your car.
> 
> And now with Android for cars, you still can't plug a KVM into your
> dashboard and sit in the back seat developing on the thing during a long
> drive.

40 years ago you didn't get a vt100 connecting you to the flight computer when
you were on an airplane, either. Not even in first class. The "for cars" part is
an embedded system, those tend to be sealed as a general thing.

>> And cars aren't NEARLY as mature a technology as socks or silverware or a bag of
>> rice. "Great spoons, who did the metalurgy" is not a question that comes up much
>> these days.
> 
> "That spoon isn't compatible with this soup, so you can't eat it." I
> suspect is something no one ever said, but I'm not as great a scholar of
> history as you.

I just googled, and caviar spoons exist because eating caviar with a metal spoon
supposedly affects the taste:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caviar_spoon

Eating eggs with actual silverware tarnishes the silver:

  https://www.quora.com/Why-are-people-advised-not-to-eat-eggs-with-a-silver-spoon

And as a wedding present we got some lovely austrialian stainless steel sporks
that are surprisingly effective spoon, fork, and knife all in one (flat edges
for spreading):

  https://www.splayd.com.au/

> "There is no spoon." is something someone did say, but
> that was part of a movie.

I like that word, Arthur. Henceforth it shall be my battle cry.

  Announcer: Welcome to point and counterpoint.
  The Tick: Spoon!
  Neo: There is no spoon.
  Announcer: This has been point and counterpoint.

>> Even with LED light bulbs, I have no idea who manufactured the ones
>> in my kitchen because it doesn't matter. I have no idea who made my dishwasher
>> or microwave. They're amazingly high-tech by the standards of 100 years ago, but
>> are mature technologies today, and they just work.
> 
> I haven't managed to find an LED light bulb that was compatible with my
> last two 'fridges.  It really doesn't matter, I don't leave that bulb
> turned on for hours, but I have switched everything else to LED.
> 
> Light bulbs, microwave ovens, dishwashers, are becoming IoT things these
> days, that want to talk to some specific companies web server.

That's a sign of monopoly leverage, in this case out of control IP law but back
in the 1970's it was just:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

On the one hand, I miss the Linux Luddites podcast. ("Not all change is
progress.") On the other... for-profit corporations attempting to extract
increasing revenues out of a saturated market via anticompetitive means du jour
is _not_ a new thing. It's why capitalism is self-limiting.

> When that
> company decides they no longer can profit from supporting that model of
> light bulb, they switch off that web site, and the light bulb stops
> working.  The mature technologies are becoming immature once more, coz
> PROFIT!

30 years ago Compaq used Torx screws to force people who wanted to service their
own machines to pay Compaq for all upgrades. The generation before that had the
"Dec Field Circius".

Did you know that one of Cicero's recorded speeches to the Roman Senate is a
long "kids these days" rant?

> I do hope that smart phones do reach the level of maturity we are talking
> about here, and stay that way, coz I've been failing to replace my
> desktop with a phone for many years.

I am _working_ on it.

> I can do it now, but it's still
> very clunky.  A smart phone where I can replace the operating system with
> something I compiled myself, and everything still works?  I really want
> that.

Eh, I can't even replace desktop linux with something I compiled myself and
everything still works reliably, but it shouldn't be _worse_ than that...

Rob