Episode: 2449
Title: HPR2449: Org-mode mobile solution
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2449/hpr2449.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 03:15:51

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This is HPR episode 2449 entitled Board Mode Mobile Solution.
It is hosted by Brian in Ohio and in about 10 minutes long, and Karim a clean flag.
The summer is my search for taking odd mode on the road.
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Hello HPR radio, it's Brian in Ohio again, I wanted to record another show before the
end of the year, and a follow up to my last episode, I wanted to tell a little bit about
my trials and tribulations, finding a solution to taking org mode on the road, and if you're
asking yourself what's org mode, you can either listen to my last episode, or you can do
a duck duck go and find out about it.
So after switching from using a bullet journal to using EMAX org mode as my organizing device,
I immediately saw that lugging a laptop everywhere is not going to work for me, and I wanted
to be able to access org mode, especially the agenda view anywhere I wanted.
Laptops with limited battery life and the large physical presence were not going to work
for me.
So there are a number of solutions out there, I tried a few, and here's what happened.
The first solution I tried and the most obvious one was the mobile org app.
It's available for Android or iOS, I can only test to Android version, you can get it
from the Play Store, and this solution just did not work for me for a number of reasons.
And then first, the documentation for the setup is terrible, even not just from the actual
GitHub site, but actually even searching around, it's mostly people using it on iOS, very
few people on Android had any examples of how they got it working in a reasonable way.
So I became frustrated by the workflow and I couldn't get any use for results from
using the app.
It seems mobile org is built around using Dropbox, and in order to get around that I was
tried various methods of syncing my org files using onboard storage via USB sync.
It just wasn't going to work out doing it that way as far as syncing it over USB, so
I bit the bullet and I set up a Dropbox account, I installed the clients on my Slackware
laptop and on my phone, only to find that the Dropbox itself doesn't support this application
anymore.
I did a little digging around and it seems that the API used by mobile org is out of date
and it's not up to snuff anymore, so fail.
So I cut my losses and I moved on to another possible solution.
My next rack at solving this problem was actually a laptop, it was a pie top, which is a laptop
based on a Raspberry Pi.
I'm not going to go into the details of the device here, but I'll just say that the reason
I thought this device might work is it had an advertised 8 plus hour battery life, and
so my old Linux laptops really give me two hours of battery life, so even though the
pie top was physically larger than I wanted, it still isn't very heavy and so I thought
it'd give it a whirl.
But let's just say the battery does last 8 plus hours, it just can't survive many recharges.
So I went through two battery packs and the second battery pack failed and I got no more
response from customer service there, and so I went looking for another solution.
And my next solution was actually inspired by none other than Claw 2.
He mentioned the device called a pocket chip on his podcast Gnu World Order Season 11,
I think it was the first episode zero.
So I looked into this pocket chip device and I thought it might be something that could
work, so I ordered one and pocket chip is a handheld Linux computer and after ordering
the device and it came, I started messing around with it and there's plenty of tutorials
on the pocket chip website on how to extend its usefulness.
The size of the device was good, it's like the size of a book or an e-reader, a little
bit fatter but not too bad.
Some people complained about the chicklet keyboard, but actually I didn't mind it too much.
It just took a little getting used to it.
Took some fiddling to get the Emacs keybidings used to work on the old, because it has to
have an odd keyboard layout, but I did get it all to work and I was successful using Emacs
org mode on this small Linux handheld computer.
I was using a thumb drive as a repository for my org files and I wrote a couple of scripts
to sync up the files with whatever device the drive was plugged into.
And voila, I had a mobile org solution, but at last the pocket chip's demise was its build
quality.
The heart of the pocket chip, the system's board, USB mini plug fell off.
I tried to have somebody fix it and it fell off again and so I had to kind of cobble together
a way to program it or at least to recharge it at this point, I couldn't even reprogram
it.
And then I was messing around doing some system tweaks and I bricked the device.
I'll recover it eventually.
You can program it through the GPI pins that are on it, but this was a quest for portable
org mode not for fixing pocket chips, so onward.
My next attempt at a solution came when I saw a build of a Raspberry Pi tablet that looked
very nice.
There's links for all these things in the show notes.
It was a nice build, so always up for a challenge.
I cobbled together a prototype and tried it out.
The reason I eventually dropped the solution before I spent any more money or more time
on it was the virtual keyboard just didn't work very well.
And I couldn't get the official Raspberry Pi LCD that I used for the project to rotate
from portrait to landscape dynamically.
There's just wouldn't do it.
Tried different commands.
Things that work on a regular monitor on a laptop, commands for the X-server just didn't
work.
I couldn't get it to rotate.
So it was still a fun project, but it left me hanging there.
I'll get some use out of it sometime, but then I was left still with no solution until
I found the solution that I'm actually using now, and that is my Android phone.
I was searching around a few EMAX websites, and I came across a one called Endless Parentheses,
and in there he was an article blog post about this man running EMAX on his Android phone.
And it's actually not that difficult to do.
It involves installing a couple of applications.
One is Termux, which is a terminal emulator for Android.
And then a keyboard, a different keyboard.
The hacker's keyboard is the one I chose.
That gives you control keys and alt keys and things like that.
Both of those are available in the Google Play Store, and once those are installed, you
just do a simple app get install to get EMAX on the phone.
And so after installing EMAX on Termux, I had a full EMAX running, albeit it isn't a
terminal.
It's not an X-server.
So it's a little bit different.
You have to do a little reading on how everything works.
But it does work very well.
And when you have EMAX, you get a drum roll, please.
You get org mode.
That's what you get.
With this, I have the device that I always take with me, my phone, and it's running EMAX
and so I can easily run org mode on it.
I sync my org mode files between my laptop and my phone using the aforementioned Dropbox
account.
The hacker's keyboard works flawlessly.
It's small on my phone, but it does work.
And I can pretty much run all the commands I need to do captures or to mark off to do's
and things like that easily on the hacker keyboard.
And if I do need to do some more editing typing, I've got a small Bluetooth keyboard that
I've purchased that works excellently also.
I can actually type up quite a large amount of stuff and I actually typed up these show
notes on my phone.
So my conclusion, I find org mode so useful that I wanted it to be available to me wherever
it go.
And over the course of the last eight months, I went on a journey trying to find a solution
to that desire.
And in the end, the solution actually seems pretty obvious.
These portable computers we carry around are amazing.
And thanks to the developers of Termux and the hacker's keyboard, my phone is now infinitely
more useful to me.
So thanks for listening, Brian and Ohio, hoping all of you have a good Christmas season and
happy new year.
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