Episode: 1882
Title: HPR1882: How I Compute Away From My Computer
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1882/hpr1882.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:46:18

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This is HPR Episode 1882 entitled How I Compute Away From My Computer.
It is hosted by Ajara and is about 28 minutes long.
The summary is Ajak Plains is set up for computing outside of the house without his laptop.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthaus.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at Ananasthaus.com.
What's good Hacker Public Radio? This is Taj and I wanted to come to you guys with a new episode.
I just got back from Ohio Linux Fest this weekend, which was a really cool experience.
If you've never been and have the chance to go, you should definitely check it out.
So while I was at the conference, I had some time to set at a table in one of the hallways
in between where all the talks were happening and I was sitting there working on my device.
I was trying to catch up on things and take care of some stuff that I needed to do.
Multiple people came up and asked me about the device I was using and how that was working.
There was a fair amount of interest.
More interest than I thought there would have been about the device I was using.
What I thought I would do is if it's of interest to people at Ohio Linux Fest is probably
of interest hackers, talk about my portable setup and just sort of how I use that device
and the different things it can do for me.
My laptop that I normally have is a Lenovo Y580.
It is fantastic.
It's probably my best tech purchase I've ever made.
It's a great laptop and it's a 15 inch laptop, so it's not gigantic, but it is a desktop
replacement.
So it's pretty heavy.
I have a really cool bag to carry it around in, but it gets pretty cumbersome at times.
So I decided a while back that I wanted to come up with a device that would serve the
purpose of my Linux laptop and still be very, very, very portable.
So I could just carry it around.
I have a little satchel bag.
It's probably no more than 12 inches by maybe 8 inches that I can just sling over my bag
in ways almost nothing.
And I wanted something that would fit into that bag to make it just very easy to carry
this thing around.
I had initially played around with a Chromebook that my school had given to me to work on.
And I put Linux on that and that worked great, but that wasn't my device and eventually
they took it back because they needed it for other things.
So I didn't have access to that.
So it left me to purchase a device to use.
And so the condom was do I buy another Chromebook which worked okay.
There were some things I was not able to do with it.
Or could I use something else that may be a little more portable and would give me everything
I needed.
So what I finally settled on was to go with an Android tablet.
Now Android is not the most free or open source thing in the world, but it is based on
Linux.
So if you can get to the underpinnings of it, you can get a lot of the functionality
that you would normally get.
Now the caveat with this is I would not be able to make this work if it were not for having
a home server that I am able to SSH back into to use the tablet.
Now that doesn't mean that you have to have an independent server.
If you have a laptop or a desktop that you use at home, you could set that up as your
server to where you could reach back into it.
But having a self hosted server here at my house, I run several applications off of it
that make it really easy to use those on any device.
Actually now that I'm thinking about it, it would probably be a grid hacker public radio
to talk about that server and the different things on it.
But at this point, I kind of got to where I could almost use anything and get access to
what I wanted.
So it didn't really need to be a Linux device to use my Linux tools.
So that makes any sense.
And I love my tools.
So that was one of the things that was definitely interested in getting the tablet because
the tablet really is no bigger than the size of a large book.
So that would make it very easy to take around to do what I needed to do with it.
Now I added some accessories to make it work better.
But really at the heart of it, I could take that tablet and do everything I needed to
do.
The device I chose to buy was actually the Nvidia shield tablet, which is marketed as
a gaming tablet.
I am not a gamer.
If I do play video games, they're like 20 years old or in ask a text.
So I didn't need the horsepower for that.
But I figured that it had all the features that I really needed, micro USB.
It had a stylus, which is something that I use all the time.
I love styluses.
I don't know why more tablets don't have them.
And it had some horsepower behind it.
The Tegra chip that is in it for gaming actually works really well for other things.
So that's what I used.
So I went with that tablet.
There were a couple things I bought with it to make it more usable for what I was going
to use it for.
Now some of these things I bought, some of these things were given to me as gifts for
different holidays and whatnot.
So I'll just kind of go through the list of what I have and how it works for me.
The first thing I bought was a thin tie FINTI case for it.
And I originally got the Nvidia shield case that comes with the device, but it broke
within a month.
It was pretty terrible.
And it only really protected the front.
So this thin tie case actually encloses the entire back.
It still gives you access to everything you need.
And it has the front cover that folds and makes a stand as well.
And it has the magnets in it to the can turn on and off the screen by just folding it over.
This cover was like literally I think seven or eight US dollars.
So it's very cheap and it's pretty sturdy.
I've unfortunately dropped the tablet several times and it has never seen a dent or scratch.
So definitely a purchase that is well worth it.
Okay, the next thing that I wanted to get for it was a mouse reaching up and touching
the screen is okay, but really I worked the best with the mouse.
So I wanted to get a mouse that I could use that was portable and one that I could use
for everything.
It also works for my laptop.
It's pretty nice.
What I wound up settling on was a Bluetooth mouse.
That way I could connect it to the tablet with no dongle.
I wouldn't be taking up the micro USB port.
And I could also use it with my laptop or any other device.
I went really cheap.
The mouse I got was called a toner T-O-N-O-R Bluetooth mouse.
It has a scroll wheel.
It has forward and back buttons and it charges.
The only thing I don't like about it is it charges off of not micro USB but mini USB,
which means I have to carry around another cable.
That kind of sucks, but really it's been pretty awesome.
It does what I want.
Sometimes I have some trouble getting it to sync up, but really all in all.
It's a pretty good purchase.
I think it was $15 USD at the most to buy it.
So definitely something that's helped out and I carry that in any bag now.
So I always have a mouse because I hate track pads on laptops anyway.
So this is a good thing and it works with Android perfectly.
Okay, the next thing I purchased to go along with this was a fold up Bluetooth keyboard.
The particular model that I got is an I cross.
It's an I-K-R-O-S-S Bluetooth foldable keyboard.
It has a battery and it charges off of micro USB so that's something I don't have to carry
around.
I've already got those cables.
And it is a full keyboard.
The reason that I wanted something that had all the keys.
You can get a lot of Bluetooth keyboards that have some of the keys.
But not many that have all of them.
And so this one had pretty much every key I needed.
I love EMAX and so having a keyboard that has all of those keys really is important to
me so I can do all my key bindings.
This works with multiple devices as well.
I can use this with my phone.
I can use it with my tablet.
I can use it with other people's phones or tablets.
I've had people borrow it before of all the things that I had at the convention that people
talked about.
They really liked this keyboard.
I got several comments about, oh, that's a really cool keyboard.
Would you get that?
The only downside to this keyboard is since it folds up, it's a little foomsy on the
table.
You've got to lay it flat.
So there's no angle to it.
So it's got a hundred of type on it times.
And the other is that it has a function key down in the left hand bottom corner to let
you access additional functions on keys, which is great.
But that's usually where I expect my control to be.
So I slow down sometimes when I'm using EMAX doing that.
But really for that little trade off, it's still a great device and it actually has built
into it.
You pop out tablet holders that you can put together.
And if you don't have a case that will hold your tablet, it has a tablet holder built
in.
So that's a really cool feature about that.
So the only other thing that I carry around with this, so basically I keep all of that together.
And occasionally I will add, I have some Bluetooth headphones that I keep.
My tablet will talk to all three at the same time.
I can run the Bluetooth headphones, the mouse and the keyboard at the same time.
But really sometimes I don't have that and I just have a normal set of earbuds.
I have those Bluetooth ones for running and so sometimes I'll have them with me sometimes
I won't.
But the only other thing that I have that is a must have for me, if I'm out with this is
I bought a power brick.
It goes directly into AC power and it has five charging ports on it and it's an anchor
power port five.
It has some smarts in it that can determine how fast something can take a charge.
And so my tablet will charge faster on this, but it has five USB ports on it.
So technically everything that I have to run this, I can charge at the same time off
of this as long as I have an AC jack.
And it's pretty small, it's a little bigger than a deck of cards, not too much bigger.
But I use it all the time, I can charge my phone while, literally I can charge my phone
while I'm using the device and charging all of that at the same time.
So it's a little heavy, but it's worth carrying it around just so I have the ability to recharge
anything I want while I'm there.
One of the most important things about using an Android tablet to do my Linuxy things
because ultimately I wanted a Linux device.
I would love to be able to buy a Linux tablet, but really nothing works right now or nothing
that I wanted to spend the money on on a maybe where I knew with Android, I could make
everything I wanted to work with some caveat.
Now to do that, you've got to use a lot of app.
I tend to stay away a far away from the play Google Play stores I can.
There are lots of reasons for that.
I just prefer free and open source software.
And that's not to say that there's not free and open source software on the Google Play
Store.
It's just very hard to tell what isn't what isn't.
So things that I know are free and open source, I will download from play if I have no other
alternative.
But thankfully, there's the Eftroid repository, which is all free and open source software
for Android.
And you can download it and it's like basically like the Play Store, but it's all free
and open source.
So most of the things that I'm going to talk about on this list come directly from Eftroid.
If it's not from Eftroid, I'll let you know.
So by default, you can just assume that everything came from Eftroid unless I let you know.
And then at the end, I'm going to have some dirty little secrets that are not free and
open source that either they are the best tool for the job or I haven't found a good alternative
yet.
And if you do have a good alternative, please let me know.
I would love to replace some of these.
So just starting down the list, I'm going to try to keep it now about a good order if
I can.
I'm not sure if that's actually going to be possible, but we'll see.
First is antenna pod.
Antennopod is my pod catcher and I use that on my phone and on my tablet.
It has all the features that I want.
I will admit that it is a little weird and it takes a little getting used to to use it
the way that they want you to use it.
But once you get your head around that, it's great.
And it does variables to be playback, which is something that I love.
I used to use beyond pod and I switched from beyond pod to this and really didn't notice
any major differences other than kind of getting used to the method of antenna pod.
So that's definitely what I use for pod catching.
Next is an status and I use this to get on good news social.
And so I am on the frag dev server.
So if anybody is interested in doing good news social, that's a good place to go hang
out.
And it's just a simple easy way to use a good news social.
The next app is called Atomic and Atomic is an IRC app.
It lets you jump into all your IRC rooms, which is something I'd like to do.
Now I will say Atomic is my backup plan.
Actually what I usually do is I use the device SSH into my server and use a RISI because
that's what I use almost all the time.
This is just in case for some reason my server goes down or I can connect to it for some reason
I have a backup and I can jump in and use IRC pretty easily without any problems.
The next one, this is kind of the linchpin of everything and that is connect bot.
Connect bot is an SSH terminal basically and it lets me connect back into my server and
do anything on the command line that I can normally do at home.
So for me, that's a RISI that's, you know, if I want to use a light 8 browser, I can
do that, I can move files, I can transfer files, I can FTP into things.
It's just a nice way to connect back to my server and do anything I need to do.
Now recently on HPR, somebody did an episode about a RISI connect bot which is a, I guess
a fork of connect bot that has some more features.
I have not played around with that but that is something I'm definitely interested in
looking at.
So that may be something in the future that replaces connect bot but for right now connect
bot is what I use and it's great.
It does everything I needed to do.
Okay, the next one is FB Reader and FB Reader is an ebook reader.
It works great for what I want to do.
I do buy things from the Kindle store but I promptly rip the DRM off of them and convert
them into ePub.
So I can use them in FB Reader.
FB Reader has a couple functions that I really like.
One, it does text to speech on anything which is great for me because a lot of times I want
to read things, especially in my line of work.
There's a lot of research I need to read.
I can plug it into my car and listen to it read it to me which kind of saves me sometimes.
And also I'm not the world's best reader.
So sometimes if something's dense or technical, the text to speech really does help me understand
it.
Okay, the next thing is FDroid itself.
I use FDroid to pull all of these programs down and it's a simple app store that's
full of free and open source things.
If you don't have this on your phone, you really should check it out.
Like I've said before, very rarely do I have to go to Google Play and when I do, I kind
of feel dirty doing it but this is pretty awesome to me.
I love using FDroid.
This is the first place I go to look for things and it's just spectacular.
This is an app called HN and it's just a simple app to access hacker news.
If you've not seen hacker news, it's kind of like Reddit but with hackery things.
So that's very, very simple and very easy.
Definitely something you should check out.
The next one was something I waited a long time for somebody to be able to make.
I love YouTube and I think most people love YouTube and it's one of those things where
anything you want to know on YouTube, you can find.
The problem with YouTube on a mobile device is that it lacks one feature that I love.
In case you haven't noticed, I love to listen, slash watch things faster than normal and
that's just so I can get everything I want to do in.
But on the desktop, I can watch YouTube videos at double speed and so I'm able to watch
more.
But when I'm away from the desktop, I, to the point where watching normal speed YouTube
videos isn't my thing.
I can't do that anymore.
It's just too boring.
But the mobile app didn't have a way to speed up or slow down.
So enter new pipe, new pipe is brand new, like within the last month, this has happened
as far as I've seen it.
It will allow you to take YouTube videos, you can search YouTube and never touch YouTube,
which is awesome.
I don't have to go into the half, I can play it directly in YouTube or I'm sorry,
new pipe.
The nice thing is this new pipe allows me to take those YouTube videos and spit them into
an external player.
Now later, we're going to talk about my external player choice and the fact that it will play
at multiple speeds.
So that really solved a huge problem for me on Android that I really wanted to fix
before I switched to this is my full time, like out of the house device.
Before I was essaying into my server using YouTube DL to download the videos and then pulling
them in and watching faster on my media player.
Now I don't have to do that and it's a nice step and it's less cumbersome.
There are some things I wish it would do that it doesn't, but like I said, it's brand
new and they're working on it.
Next is K9 Mail.
K9 Mail is simple, it's not flashy, it doesn't do anything amazing, but it is a great basic
email client.
It does everything I wanted to do and nothing else.
And so K9 Mail is definitely where I go to get my email and it's free and open source.
Now the next two kind of go together, they are or bot or bot and or web.
Now both of these allow you to use the tour system on your tablet.
So if I want to do something that I would like to be anonymous, I can use or bot to basically
route all of my traffic through tour, which is really nice and or web is just a secure
browser to make sure that everything goes through tour regardless.
And I you can use your other browsers when using or bot, but I typically stepped or web
just because I know it's safe.
That may be overkill.
I may be wasting space having that browser on there, but it works for me.
The next two are very dependent on my home server.
One is own cloud.
Own cloud is pretty much everything for me on my server.
It is my contacts, it is my calendaring, it is document editing now that that's fairly
stable.
It had basically just file sharing, anything that I need to do, I can pretty much do on
own cloud.
So I use the own cloud app to be able to get back to my server.
And that is on eftroid.
The next thing I did is own note.
I use this to basically do whatever note does.
It doesn't have all the functions of ever note, but I didn't use all the functions of
ever notes.
So I didn't need it.
The only problem with this is it is an open source app, but it is not in eftroid and
I can't figure out why yet.
So I did have to go to Google Play to get this and you do have to actually install own
note as an app inside of owned cloud.
So that's something that if you want to use it, it's a little tricky to set up, but
it's not difficult.
So that's one of the things that you do have to go to the Play Store to find, but I use
it constantly.
It has become my little note taking app and it is great and I can actually pull things
from ever note that I used to have in there and upload them straight into own note and
it's on my server and I control it and I don't have to worry about anybody ever taking
it away.
Next is a little fun.
This is a game of eftroid, which is basically like a net hack, which I actually really dig
net hack, but it's called pixel dungeon and it's basically taking net hack and slapping
a eight bit visuals on it, which is kind of cool.
If I have a few minutes to kill, I'll just play this just for giggles.
It's a lot of fun.
Next is plumble.
Plumble is how I access mumble if I need to.
I will admit I have used this and it doesn't sound as good as my home setup obviously because
I have like an actual studio at home, but plumble is good in a pinch and I can use it to contact
whoever I want.
Now I have a mumble server on my server, so if my family wants to connect, we can use
that to be on our own server and use plumble and all of us talk in our own little system
and it's kind of nice that way.
Next is red reader.
Red reader is just a reddit client that lets you read reddit and it does pretty much everything
I wanted to do.
It's simple and easy and perfect, so I just use that all the time.
Next is termix, T-E-R-M-U-X.
Now what's interesting about this is it basically loads a Linux shell on your tablet, which
is kind of cool and I'm assuming it's like a charute or something because you can load
apps into it and it uses apt-get so it must be Debbie and based I'm assuming.
The only reason that I actually still have this on my device is that it allowed me to
install E-Max on my tablet.
Now there is an Android app for E-Max that is terrible, you should avoid it like the
plague.
But this let me just load E-Max like normal, it was really easy and I could just use it.
Now normally I will SSH into my server and use the E-Max that's there because it's got
everything I want already set up.
But in a pinch I could use this if for some reason I've lost connectivity to use E-Max,
which is if I'm completely honest, like a good 85% of what I do on a computer nowadays
is on E-Max, so that really took care of a lot of it for me.
Despite the fact that it is very close source, I do love Twitter and part of that is because
I'm an educator and if you're an educator and you're not on Twitter, you're missing
a lot of free resources and a lot of really good conversation between educators, it's really
a good platform despite the fact that somebody else controls it and that bothers me.
The client that I use is called, to a dear, I guess, T-W-I-D-E-R-E and it's a simple
Twitter client.
I mean, it does exactly what you expected to do and really I don't need anything more
than that.
So it's just a good, simple client, definitely what I would recommend if you want to stay
with an open source client.
Next is my media player and just like on my desktop, there is no media player that beats
VLC and VLC lets me do pretty much whatever I want on my computer and mostly on my tablet
now.
So VLC is definitely the way to go and it's fairly stable, I almost never have crashes
on Android anymore now in the past that was a problem, but now it seems like it's pretty
stable.
So VLC, if you want to do media playback, is awesome.
One that I forgot to mention in alphabetical order that somehow wound up at the bottom
of my list for I have no reason why I just did is Chatsacure.
Now Chatsacure is made by a group called the Guardian Project.
I would download, if you're at all concerned about privacy issues, the Guardian Project
for Android is definitely a place for you to check out.
A lot of their things are very security conscious and they're recommended highly by people
who are in the know about these things and so I tend to trust it.
So Chatsacure is simply an XMPP chat client, but it uses off the record encryption.
So the reason that I installed this on at all is my daughter got into texting through
her grandmother, who my daughter is eight, so she's a little young to have her own phone
and she doesn't, but she does have a tablet that she uses and she got used to grabbing
her grandmother's phone and texting her mother and me whenever she wanted, but she wanted
a way to do that at home.
So I have seen what happens to children as being an educator when things they've said
online gets out, whether it's meant to be seen by others or not.
And so one of the things that I was really concerned about was what she says getting out
past our family, especially if it was going to stay inside our family.
And I want to instill in her the idea of encryption and privacy and being anonymous if you want
to be anonymous because I think that's important.
So what we did is we set up a, we all got XMPP accounts and we used this to chat with each
other.
So it's become our family chat that's completely encrypted, which is kind of nice.
This allows me to have her grandparents and everybody use the same system.
And so we are all able to communicate using this and avoid anything being out in the
public, which makes seem a little paranoid.
But I like the fact that we control that and that it is completely off the record.
Okay, now I'm going to go into the not so open source and friendly apps.
Like I said, some of these I've had long debates on whether I should use this or go
with another alternative or whether I just haven't been able to find an alternative.
The first one is last pass.
I know I could set up key pass to do a lot of the same stuff, but frankly, it's not as
convenient and it's always the security versus convenience angle.
And if it wasn't as convenient as last pass is, I wouldn't use it.
And so for me, it's definitely worth it just to pay the $12 a year, which is almost
nothing to ensure that it is better encrypted than I would do on my own.
They use a lot of open source tools.
They've handled their breaches tremendously well and they're very transparent.
So I feel okay leaving my stuff there.
Now I don't think it that it is going to fix all problems.
And I'm sure eventually it will be taken down like anything else.
But for now, I think it is a good alternative to at least have some version of security
because frankly, I'm lazy.
And if it was up to me, it probably wouldn't happen.
The next app is an app called easy PDF reader.
I use this for one reason only.
And if somebody knows an open source version that does this and does it, well,
I am more than willing to switch immediately.
This just happens to be something I've had on my phone forever.
And it works and it does PDFs, but it does text to speech of PDFs, which once again,
if I'm doing research, I can pull up the journal article that I need to read and hit play
and plug it into my car.
And if I'm driving to pick my kid up from something, I can listen to that research over the speakers
and it saves me a lot of time.
I have not found anything for your open source for Android that does the same thing as well.
I am completely open to suggestions.
So if anybody knows any good PDF client that is open source or free as in freedom
and does text to speech, I would like to know about it.
So please either comment or send me an email or something.
And I would love to switch off this as soon as possible.
Next is my RSS feed reader.
Now on my server, I use tiny, tiny RSS.
So the backend is completely open source, which is nice.
And I control it.
And it's on my server.
I'm still bitter about Google reader closing.
So actually, that was the impetus for me to set up my home server was Google reader closing
and why I don't really trust Google with anything important anymore.
So the app I use is called news plus with the plus symbol.
I use this because it has a plug in to talk to tiny, tiny RSS.
And it will cache the stories offline.
So it will actually pull down all the stories and stuff when I refresh it and store them
to my external SD card to not take up as much space.
And this lets me if I'm disconnected for whatever reason, I can still read all my news,
which is, which is nice.
I haven't found anything for your open source that can do all of that.
I found something that will cache it, but not cache it to the SD card,
which is very important because there's not a lot of space left on my tablet.
And I read a lot of RSS feeds.
So that's another thing that I'm completely willing to take any suggestions at all
on a way to replace that with something much better.
Well, that's about it.
That's my setup.
That's how I, portably, do pretty much everything I want.
It does about 99% of what I would do with my laptop, if I were to take it out.
And so being able to do that with a much smaller package really makes on the go computing much easier.
So I would suggest anybody, if you're interested in doing Linux,
he thinks and have the right circumstances and Android tablets, not a bad way to go.
So it is work for me.
I know a lot of people were very interested in it.
So just check it out.
So with that, I would just encourage everybody to contribute to hacker public radio
because if you oh, can a show, you need to do it.
And with that, I will say peace.
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