Holiday Reading

I’m about to go on holiday in January. And it’s time for a new adventure in travelling without my laptop. I can’t go anywhere without the safety blanket of a Unix computer. And since my PocketCHIP got stolen, I’ve been without something portable.

Anyway, what you see in the photo is my new Xaomi 8″ Pad 4 tablet. With UserLAnd Debian, running Emacs, with Sam Aaron’s EmacsLive (which is my preferred packet of Emacs modes and extensions for writing Clojure). I’ve opened up the source-code of Liquid, which is a nice project to create a powerful text editor, heavily inspired by Vi and Emacs (though not aiming to be a clone of either) written entirely in pure Clojure.

I’ve got Clojure installed on the machine. Along with git, leiningen, Python3 and SWI-Prolog.

I’m able to compile and run Clojure (including this Liquid project). So that’s one sort of holiday project I might find myself getting up to. Playing with and seeing if I can figure out how to write new “modes” or extend Liquid to my own nefarious purposes.

Or, I can continue my playing with Prolog.

I also have a Bluetooth keyboard, which is nice and small and portable, and seems to be OK. (After a couple of hours playing). Obviously because it’s small so I don’t know if I can adapt to doing a lot with it. But … so … far, the bluetooth connection seems fairly reliable, and not dropping.

So, the whole package is remarkable small and light. I would have liked one of those keyboard covers, but no one seems to be selling them here in Brasilia (the only one I found only has an old microUSB connection, not the USB C that the tablet uses)

In terms of software, including powerful programming languages and a powerful editor (Emacs) … this looks viable. Of course tablets are powerful things these days. The whole UserLAnd Ubuntu with all the above software is taking up only a small chunk of the 64 Gb storage.

The big bottlenecks will be the keyboard and screen and working without a mouse.