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You don't need to be a software engineer to join! We welcome anyone who would like to come and share ideas :)

To quote the wiki:

Permacomputing can take many forms, and every context and situation is different, but even without a one-size-fits-all solution, we can share knowledge and resources that could be useful.

For someone, getting started with permacomputing may be:

• helping a school to work with recycled computers
• learning how to repair and replace components in computing hardware
• discussing the use and impact of smartphones in the household, or data centers in the workplace
• working with local farms and collectives to develop low energy weather prediction
• researching how to provide less resource-intensive tools and systems for their lab or workspace
• getting involved with initiatives to create energy efficient and accessible local libraries of information
• engaging with politics and policy making to advance tech and enviromental regulation in their institution, town, or region
• helping artists interested to engage with ecological topics using tools and media in line with this intention
• writing their own FORTH for a chip reclaimed from e-waste

https://permacomputing.net/permacomputing/

Organic Maps and Sidekick Pro

What is Sidekick Pro?

I love the concept for this. Syncthing is pretty good but it is annoying to have it running all the time on Android.

I'd love to use something like this to sync my Obsidian md files between computer and phone just when needed. I suspect this could be baked into to an Obsidian plugin to make it pretty seemless for folks.

Speaking of laptops. I've been kicking around this idea for almost a year now. I wanna make a tool that takes ebay listings for ThinkPads and basically shows them on a table that's super easy to filter and includes benchmark scores. Kinda like what lab gopher used to be. Lots of people want a good deal on ThinkPads but ebay search for them can be rough because of the fuzzy search. Like if I just want the best deal on a Thinkpad from the past 3 years that's not easy to search for on ebay. Main thing stopping me is ebay API requires an application and I'm sure they block scrapers to some extent.

F-droid is working great. Hard to say this vs a linux setup. It's not super lightweight but more than a laptop for sure if that matters for you. The 14 inch one seems pretty monster so at that point maybe a laptop is worth it.

So I've gotten to use the tablet a bit now and I would say it's fine. I might expect a bit more for $170 but because it's so big I can excuse it. Um, it's a little laggy, um, just out of the box. It doesn't have much bloatware, maybe two or three manufacturer apps, but not like Candy Crush and all that junk. My very basic research tells me it's not rootable. I'm really not sure if there is actually a special technology to the screen or it's just like a matte screen protector but I sat in the park in full sunlight and was able to read a book perfectly well not quite as good as a paperwhite but pretty close so overall it's decent and the pen works pretty well for writing and drawing. Compared to how much an iPad costs, I think the quality is fairly close.

This, and because there's no number it's easier for them to not have KYC.

You don't even need a zipcode if you use https://silent.link/ then you can pay with whatever crypto and have an esim where the balance never expires and it works in most of the world. I've used it a few months and it's pretty good if you don't need a phone number.

Do you have it setup to sync highlights/annotations? how does that work for you?

https://github.com/readest/readest is looking quite promising

I'm not that techy on the screens front but it's not totally a regular lcd but not as good as e-ink either. It's kinda something in between. I've only gotten to play with it a for a few minutes so far but it's hard to describe. These pictures do it some justice though: https://www.androidcentral.com/tablets/tcl-nxtpaper-4-fixes-one-of-the-technologys-biggest-hidden-issues

Does the pocketbook app/device let you annotate books? It seems quite interesting but not generally available in the US. Read era does look interesting though.