Episode: 3422
Title: HPR3422: Update about Phones and Devices
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3422/hpr3422.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 23:06:49

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 342242, the 14th of September 2021.
Today's show is entitled, A Played About Fones and Devices.
It is hosted by JWP and is about 22 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is an update about my new phone and second one that is coming.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Good day, Hacker Public Radio Community.
I'm JWP and I wanted to talk to you today about several items, actually.
The first of which is something that are happening with Pine64.
These guys, they've come up with this $399 E-ink tablet that runs Linux.
I've got this huge monster collection of movies and e-pubs and
everything that I've ever liked from Gutenberg and just a bunch of things that I won't read
unless I get something like this, like this PineNote to do it.
It really looks like a very interesting product.
With 10.1-inch E-ink panel with a 1404 by 1872 ability with 16 gray levels,
that seems extremely interesting. It's going to come with a pin.
It has 128 EMC storage and four gigabytes of RAM, so that's going to be really interesting.
You would be able to get your e-book reading software,
Klebra, to run directly on that. You could really work that.
The only thing that I would say is that I'm very used to the Kindle software,
and so it would be a learning thing. It looks extremely helpful and the big size is very interesting as well.
Also on the Pine64, it looks like their watch is coming right along and it's available.
You can get it really for 27 bucks on their store. It really is an open-source watch,
and it's compatible with the Xomie. It's right around the same price point as the Xomie watches
that you can get for 30 or 40 euros on Amazon. Basically, the Xomie watches if you don't want
to buy a Garner, a Fitbit, or an Apple. The Xomie is a pretty good choice because it keeps track of
your steps. It's not the most accurate thing on your sleeping or whatever, but it does a pretty
good job and they have an app for your phone and all these things. But the Pine64, for 26 bucks,
you can't really go wrong. It's Bluetooth 5. It can be used as a basic fitness tracker.
Of course, it's open-source, so it doesn't have nearly the software that Xomie does in a moment,
but still, it looks like it can keep track of your steps just fine.
I've noticed on the mailing list that there's a lot of, it seems to be some negativity.
Please, everyone, be nice to one another and treat people the way that you want to be treated.
It's an open-source community, and Ken is looking for shows, and Dave Morris doesn't work out
of the goodness of his heart to help us. So, please think before you become
undegative on the mailing list or send hate to the sponsors of our platform.
So, I'm finally beginning to clear the Evernote thing away. I've really enjoyed it.
It works really well, but the sharing on the devices, it's just two things. So, you get to have
two devices to share with the Evernote. And I know that there are many open-source things, but
in the moment, I'm gyrating to the Microsoft product, the OneNote. And the reason is that my
work still uses the Microsoft 365 pretty much, and the, probably, if you have an MSN account,
you get seven or eight gigabytes, sometimes even more. And if you do a lot of notes,
or you do a lot of traveling, the OneNote and the Microsoft Lens are incredibly useful
with these kind of things, and with eight gigabytes of space, you get, that means your work desktop
can sync your home, your home can sync, or your home windows server slash Apple iTunes, whatever
server you have to have can sync all of your phones, tablets, all that stuff can sync with that
with that kind of thing. And so, I'm slowly but surely, I mean, I have over 1,200 entries into
into the Evernote and trying to get them out and get them into the OneNote is pretty interesting.
And if I did a Linux thing, well, the Linux thing is in my phone, and the support that Microsoft
gives for Android and iOS is pretty amazing in the moment. So, I think the OneNote and the Lens
in particular for business travel is a really good way to go about things.
So, I had to make some changes to my phone lineup. I had to switch from an old 64 gigabyte iPhone SE
that I had had for a couple of years, and I had switched the battery out a couple of times,
and I still had extreme battery swings, especially in the cold with it. And I had it in a
autobox offender, so it was in mint condition, mint condition, but it just wasn't,
you know, to have to carry a battery with me all the time, and because it was in an autobox,
it was pretty thick. And so, what I ended up doing was I decided that it would be a two-prong
approach that I would go dual SIM and try to come down to three devices that I use, and really
only two at probably the same time. And what I ended up doing was getting a Redmi REDMI
from Saturn, and the Redmi 10 was out, or the Redmi 10 family, so they had a pro in the S and the
and the note, and Saturn had even a Redmi, a Redmi cells rep there. And so we talked, and I had
been really joned them for 256 one, but there wasn't a 256 one there. And so it sent me a 128,
and the interesting thing with this was it was dual SIM that I wanted, and it had a SD card slot.
So, and these new Android phones that can take a 200 gigabyte, I didn't even know they made 200
gigabyte SD cards or SD card, but they do. And so I've been slowly trying to get this new Redmi,
a Redmi phone up to date, and boy, it's a real journey to take your work phone, take your work
phone, and your private Android phone, and try to combine it into one phone, try to combine it into
one phone, and one of the things that I did with this, and it was I did make sure that I got the
the two-year warranty from Saturn so that if I drop it, break it, whatever happens, they'll give me
another one. So I felt that 300 euros for two years was was quite a okay thing, and who knows,
maybe I'll keep it longer than two years. But I wanted a more offline capability with this
phone, more offline, and that I wanted to learn more with this phone. And so what I did was
I found that the Google podcast app is the hands down the winner in my life today, and the reason
is that it seems to be really low utilization, you know, but it doesn't take a lot of resources,
and it doesn't download a lot of space, so it's not like I would before when I was downloading,
putting everything on the iPod touch, and off I would go, and we'll listen to podcasts for
months and months. Instead, I listen on demand now, and the Google podcast app seems to do this
extremely well. And the second thing that I did in addition to the OneNote and the Microsoft
Lens was to get this app, it's called KIWIX, and what this thing does is it downloads Wikipedia,
it downloads Wikipedia and Wikipedia sister things, and puts them and makes them available offline
on your SD card. So you can have the entire Wikipedia on your phone, so when you're sitting there,
you can actually learn something while you transmit, and if you don't have 4G or the signal's
bad or whatever it's going on, you can sit down for a few minutes and actually learn something,
and they have literally hundreds of offline things to download with this thing. And so if you want
to, you know, US history, if you want to learn various programming or educational things,
it's all there with that app. And of course, this new phone does the complete Android Auto experience,
so it brings up Google Maps, it brings up everything that you sent to your phone, so if you sent
like, oh, I need to go to this business meeting and do this, and then I need to get go from here
to the hotel, and then I need to go to the hotel to where we're going to have something to eat,
and if you sit down and maps the day before, and you can have all of this sent to your phone,
and then because it's sent to your phone, it means that it's in your Android Auto also,
so you can go to all your business appointments and everything, and of course,
all the COVID stuff, the COVID pass, the Luka, all that stuff is in there, and oh boy, that's
really interesting now that many German city states are considering going from the German 3G,
which is either you're tested, you have your vaccination, or you've been infected,
to Tucci, or either you have your vaccination, or you've been infected, that means that there's
no longer these city states of Hamburg is the one that's testing this, is not going to
put up with if you're not vaccinated anymore, if you're not vaccinated, you have access to the
grocery store, the drug store, doctor, and hospital, and that's about it, and maybe some basic
clothing items, or something like this, but after that, you're out of luck, you can't go anymore,
and so of course, with today's mindset, you sort of have to have a COVID and Luka pass on your
phone, or you're constantly pulling out paperwork, and I refuse to do documents and be searched
like it's 1939, or something like that, where I'm showing a passport, a vaccination certificate,
and these things, it's just two 1939, like for me, and likewise, a few of the games on the new
phone are offline, they work offline as well as online, it syncs with your Google Play after you
come back, after you come back, and it's quite an interesting, and so the work phone, it's got six
gigabytes and 128 space with the 200 gigabyte SD card, it's got my private sim, which came from a
store called Lidl in Germany, and it's quite cheap, and it's got my work sim on it, and I found
it during COVID, that it was much easier to have, just a separate private number, so I don't
combine the work number, and I realize that that weighs seven euros a month, but it's not a
occasionally, I just absolutely have to step away from work, and Microsoft Teams, and this
Zoom meeting, and Blue Jeans from Red Hat, and all of these things, it just have to step away,
and that's why to do that is to turn off my work sim and just use my private sim in the phone,
but let's talk about the second phone I got, so I was really, really impressed, a few years ago,
I went to a, I think it was Oddcamp, and I had some curry with the fine gentleman that makes,
I'm going to mate, and he had this phone that was called a jelly, and I was quite impressed with
it, because he could, that thing sort of fit in his watch pocket on his jeans, and so it was all
been on the lookout for something like this, and of course I also hunt, and I do a lot of things
outside, and so I don't necessarily want a 6.9 inch phone with me all the time, and I tried
carrying, Nokia came out about the same time that he had the jelly, they came out with the old
banana phone again, from TCL was making it for them, and I was carrying around, and they had the
car OS, which is a very interesting thing, but it was really tough to go back and start texting
like the Nokia used to back in the late 90s, early 2000s, you know, you're doing it with the
with the candy bar phone, going back and texting, and what's happening, like that, and so what I
got was it had the jelly too was just was too expensive for me, too expensive for me, and so
somebody came up with something called the Mint Monti, so Mint M-I-N-T-N-M-O-N-Y, and it's the
thing at our Hong Kong, it was on Indiegogo, and I looked at it, and I was like this is exactly
the kind of thing that I wanted, it's really really small, and it doesn't have the specs of the
jelly too, but it's a 4G phone, it's going to run Android 9, it's got the 3 Gigabytes and 64,
which is still okay with a 4Core CPU, it's got a front and rear camera, it's got dual-sum cards,
and it's got a GPS, and it fits in your watch pocket, it looks a little thick, it's not,
it's gonna come with its own case and its own screen protector, and that I can get outside with
this is going to be the thing, and there's a lot of things, and I've never done a front and
back zone, but that's how it's going to do it, and it doesn't appear to have a SD card, so I will
have to be really careful with what options I do, and it does all the European bands and all
the American bands, that's the other thing, and so I went in and I got the early bird, and so for
99 bucks I get the phone, and like I said it's not the jelly, it doesn't have the specs of the jelly
too, but it's the same size, and it's sort of like a companion phone, and I was really also really
impressed with the Palm when it came out, so Palm came out with a new Android phone, and they
called it a companion phone, and so I consider this a companion phone, it's really small, you
wouldn't do it for work, and it wouldn't be your camera, or your camera, or your work phone,
but it's definitely, if you want to get outside and you don't want to do any work,
this is a very good phone, and it looks like it would work just fine with the car, with everything
with the car as well, so Android, Auto, it looks like it would work, and the other nice thing about
both these phones is their USB-C, so I can begin to standardize all of my things,
a live phone, USB-C, so no more lightning connectors, no more mini micro USB, it's slowly,
my laptop is USB-C, and both the phones will be USB-C, and slowly, but surely I will fade out all of the
all of the other things that are not USB-C, so everything is USB-C, the other thing about the
Redmi phone is that it came with a 33 watt charger, so I can recharge the entire phone from
like 10% an hour, and it goes all day, with a 5,000-dollar watt battery, and so that was the other
thing that I have no battery trouble, and I can work with the phone the entire day, all right guys,
again, please try to be as kind to each other as possible out in our community, and I know that
COVID is hard on everyone, but COVID is not an excuse not to be human, not to be human,
in particular to with kin and Dave, for all the things that they've done for us over the years,
and so please, please try to keep your comments about vaccination, or not vaccination, or
these things to yourself, if you're not being positive, all right, you'll have a great day,
and if y'all need to get in touch with me, I'm at JWP5 at hotmail.com.
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