I like reading. And ever since I bought myself an ereader1 after
having to move with a lot of physical books one too many times, I have
never regretted that purchase: It is light (and thus I can always have
it with me), can hold thousands of books, allows me to read in the
dark (as it has background light), has an integrated dictionary, and
(given my reading habits) is also more environmentally
friendly
than buying paper books.
However, not all is well with the current ereading ecosystem.
I bought myself a Pinebook Pro
in December1. The current Pinebook Pro batches come shipped with a
default Manjaro ARM plus KDE as a desktop
environment installed on the laptop’s eMMC. Apart from some weird
sound issues (for
which workarounds are discussed in the same thread), the software
works fairly smoothly. However, Manjaro is a somewhat
problematicdistribution. Additionally,
it also is not lightweight enough for me for a lightly powered device
like the Pinebook Pro. Thus, I spent some time adapting my new laptop
to my needs.
Over the Christmas break I have (yet again) overhauled this blog. I
had reworked it earlier this year already, when I moved the blog from
the www to the blog subdomain and changed from the
hydeout to the
minimal-mistakesJekyll theme. However, I was not convinced of
the result for various reasons.
You’ve most likely found yourself in situations where you needed
internet on your computer but had no WiFi network close-by. What do
you do? Fire up a hotspot from your smartphone and share its internet
connection with the laptop. The technical term for sharing a phone’s
internet connection with another device — be it over WiFi,
Bluetooth or USB — is tethering.
Recently, however, I found myself in the opposite position: I had
internet on my laptop but not on my phone! Reverse tethering to the
rescue!
After I replaced my old smartphone, which hasn’t been receiving
Lineage OS security updates for a long time anymore, I was looking for
good uses for the device. Given it’s age, looks, and lack of software
updates, selling it would have been a challenge. Porting postmarketOS
onto it would have been interesting, but realistically I lack time
(and skill?) for that. Throwing a working device away was definitely
not an option; but just having it lying around also felt wasteful.