Issue is that Apple doesn’t allow apps to run JIT so if you want the JIT version of UTM, you need to sideload or Jailbreak. The non-JIT version is on the App Store.
I'm sooo ready for the one device life! :D
I rigged together a torso/chest mounted keyboard system using rugged keyboard and laptop chest harness modified. It actually kinda works but this Tackle keyboard would work really well for my use case, which overlaps significantly with this post.
I use Viture XR glasses, similar to the Xreals in the post. And I have a rugged laptop in a backpack with LTE modem and external antenna. Then what I do is go hiking in woods and periodically stop and open a Ta-Da chair, which I use as a walking stick or carry on my back, then put on the XR glasses which connected to laptop just using the Viture HDMI adapter, open the keyboard harness, and start working, all terminal based work.
The worst worst part of this crazy setup is the keyboard system. It’s awkward and kinda scares other people as it looks like maybe I have a tactical military vest on. opening it up and getting oriented is like 90% of the hassle.
Please someone help me get this Tackle keyboard. I don’t have the physical engineering skills needed, I’m a software guy. DM me on reddit with same username as HN. I will PAY decent money to anyone who can deliver me a working version of this Tackle keyboard.
I also own and tried tap strap and it’s not viable. Keys needed. LLMs combined with Voice to Text is promising and something on software side I’m looking into actively, but I don’t think no keyboard is a productivity retaining option anytime soon.
I do at least 10K steps daily when I have this system working and my goal is to get to 15K steps and drop weight. My preferred environment is outdoors away from desks and tables and civilization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHAK1kJtMVQ - have a listen. Some of them are inaudible under a mic, but really you need to buy a grab bag and play around at home to see what works.
Shame that rooting is such a pain, and risks bricking the device. (Apparently Google's introduction of an anti-rollback bootloader this month has caused a few people's devices to get bricked when they tried to root.)
Is there a window manager and/or eyeball tracking trick that could be added to this setup to bring content into the center?
You can't comfortably use any XR system for more than videos, if you can't use your neck to look around.
It's not really related I know but it's neat how all those not-strictly-computers are getting more useful!
Edit: forgot the video link! It's https://youtu.be/4ZAzi-4Ko3g?feature=shared
Unless they have a way to lock open, foldable keyboards will always subtly bend which is annoying enough for me to ditch the folding part entirely.
Tempting!
that said, my surface pro 3's keyboard is quite old now, so maybe the new ones are nicer
There’s also https://www.esrgear.com/products/ipad-air-13-2024-ascend-key... which I think are standard Bluetooth as well.
In full sunlight I think this requires opacity. I lost the plastic cover for the lenses and I hacked up some cardboard thing.
These glasses have a really cool 3D side-by-side mode. The button activation is awkward, but it effectively turns this into a 3840x1280 screen. I couldn't really find much desktop support for this, but there are a few YouTube videos that are 16x9 SBS and they look really really cool. Unfortunately in this mode the desktop is then super-wide and spread across two eyes, so it's almost impossible to use a regular laptop with them. A 3D OS desktop would be killer on these!
I didn't try to go full mobile with a phone.
The cord is somewhat annoying, but I think I prefer it over a big stupid battery and some wireless protocol.
One wrinkle is that the interface is USB-C. The glasses need power, and though you can/could power them over HDMI, they don't support that. You need the device to support HDMI over USB-C and recognize the glasses as a display. The manufacturer offers a completely hilarious battery-powered HDMI-to-USB-C adapter. I have no idea why there is no powered solution; maybe there is.
https://www.amazon.com/Formerly-Connects-Lightning-Compatibl...
Yup, I found laying my head on the left side where the cord comes it also causes them to overheat quick. My solution is to always lay on the right hand side of them and I actually put some stick on heatsinks on the left "leg" body that also really helps keep them more comfortably cool.
Also weird quirk with them and USB-C I've found.
If you plug them in to a macbook it's 50/50 if they work or just turn on the tint. If that happens, rotating the USB-C plug causes them to work.
I also run a low spec android phone, and I tried the same brand of glasses with it. My workaround was a screencast to HDMI adapter, paired with an HDMI to to DP over USB-C. Both are cheap.
Occasionally the screencast flakes out. But when the network is working well it's pretty good.
I guess you'd need a stable connection though. I might try this as soon as Android actually impliments desktop mode correctly. Surprised OP didn't use Samsung Dex.
It's funny that 3500 seems sooo much to spend for hardware now... over the last 25 years, it's gotten so much cheaper between lower price macbooks and not needing to upgrade phones and laptops nearly so often.
Am I the only one who wishes they could be inside in a windowless room 24/7/365? There’s climate control, HEPA filtration, good chairs, peace and quiet, precisely the light level and color and direction I like, etc, at all times. Every time I go outside, the environment is worse than being at home indoors.
Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one on the planet who doesn’t enjoy being outdoors at all.
I still go out though to walk and cycle, sometimes eat, but anything else is more comfortable at home.
I spent a decade in a building like that for my 9-5 job. It gets old, unless you really hate sunlight and fresh air.
i do just go outside on the building deck instead
I do really hate sunlight, but fresh air is essential. If you don’t have fresh air indoors, your HVAC design is bad. Air is one of the easiest things to move around.
I had to cover the windows in all the adjacent rooms to make this work, but it does.
I enjoy outdoors for relaxation and forgetting about work though.
Seems like the sort of thing that might later turn out to have been a bad idea regardless of how it seemed at the time.
By contrast, you have to use a giant screen on the Vision Pro to get equivalent resolution, which means you have to move your head. It still has its advantages (you can take it wherever you go, and the resolution of the virtual screen can be higher), but it's not yet comparable to a physical monitor, to my chagrin.
Apple have since purchased at least one lens design company [0], so future iterations of the Vision Pro should hopefully be less optically-challenged.
[0]: https://mixed-news.com/en/apple-buys-lens-manufacturer-limba...
I certainly hope it'll get smaller, cheaper and more efficient. I would love more resolution, of course, but I'd be more than happy to keep the existing resolution if the actual ergonomics were improved.
Void FTW!
So good enough for gargoyling or other situations where even a laptop form factor is a pain, but not a proper replacement yet.
grab a set on a ledge somewhere and think. that works for work, if the thinking is about work.
major benefit is that none of the people walking by are going to try disrupt what thing youre working on to be different work
Working in a park is amazing. You are still enjoying the ambience/vibe, but yeah, you're also writing a blog post or whatever. For me, that doesn't distract from the park or the productivity. They both enhance each other.
Same with a coffee shop -- this is why coffee shops have wifi passwords, because many people in there are on the internet, soaking up the ambience/vibe.
I'd like to use AR glasses for this, as it means I can look straight ahead and take in more of the atmosphere, while still keeping good posture.
As far as being outside, I imagine it's very dependent on personality. I often get restless and distracted working from home, and being outside or in a public space will help me feel a lot calmer and more focused. There's also a certain amount of intentionton it takes to "go to a specific place to do a specific thing" that helps me mentally.
It's not something I'm doing every day, but when the weather is beautiful and I'm feeling stuck behind a desk it's so nice to be able to work outside.
The keyboard I use and really like is the iClever BK05:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018K5EJCQ
It is backlit and has a standard full size PC layout, including function keys and an "inverted T" cursor key section. The key feel is nearly as good as my ThinkPad. And it comes with a nice little stand to support your phone at a typical laptop screen angle.
It comes with a soft pouch that holds the keyboard, the phone stand, and the manual. Folded up, it fits easily in the cargo pocket of my pants.
Like the keyboard described in the article, it is not suitable for use on your lap because it doesn't lock open. That doesn't matter for me, because I need a place to put my phone anyway.
If you read the reviews, note that the "top rated critical review" has a glaring mistake:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1RVWODQ8SCS2X?ie...
The reviewer says that the keyboard has no support at the left and right edges, so those outer sections don't lay flat and tap against the table as you type.
Wrong! This reviewer didn't notice the two little black tabs that you need to flip out so the keyboard lays flat and well supported. This is also described in the short manual.
Guess it's good to hear I must have had a dud.
[0] https://eshop-cy.com/en/product/targus-pa820u-stowaway-porta...
the best and greatest is that pen+touch experience, and its gonna be gone maybe forever
(Also, not everyone can throw money away! The US tech market is an aberration compared to the rest of the world.)
This just adds more value more simply than the new ecosystems most AR/VR glasses are trying to establish.
Or head tracking.[1] Aphysical rotation exaggeration avoids trading eye for neck stress.
> I do feel a little weird wearing these in public, but not that weird.
Non-weird can be an expensive constraint, fruitful to relax if going beyond a minimalism setup. A baseball hat can barnacle quite a bit before people find it remarkable... at least around Boston. For instance, for head tracking, an Intel RealSense, or a hat fisheye camera and tennis ball on the table, or an optical marker on a hat chopstick, can be simpler, easier, lower power, and less expensive, than invoking "and it has to look non-weird". With current tech, that's almost as challenging as "and it has to be a product".
> as these AR glasses continue to improve and Linux continues to be flexible and awesome.
I suggest Nreal (now Xreal) made a bad call here. They developed internally on Ubuntu, but chose to shut out linux. (Caveat: I've not followed in a few years, maybe that's changed.) Unicorn dreams and race to mass market - maybe the right call if everyone started watching media on phones with glasses. But it could have been an inexpensive risk mitigation, and a worthwhile investment once market fit was clearly a long haul. Is there some doc which lays out alternatives for a company who thinks they have a crown-jewel binary blob, to allow the community to wrap it for linux consumption, with minimal "we just throw a blob over the wall - we don't support linuxes" cost? It's been a lot of years that something like TFA has been possible, during which a lot of developers could have been exploring for viable market niches. Instead of... not.
im running the newer pixel fold, so ive already got a ton of screen real estate.
ive made a couple code changes phone-only now, using the amazon internal browser that has ssh access to my dev desktop.
im missing the ability to get cloudwatch logs and the like, but when i get a good mcp, i think i can leave my laptop at home
my previous workflow was mostly on pen/paper though, only touching the keys when i know what code im going to write, or when i need to lookup something specific, so i think im in a better spot for phone dev than somebody with ten monitors each showing some chunk of code
> Termux, which is an Android app that provides a mix of terminal emulator, lightweight Linux userland, and set of packages that are able to run in that environment.
Tim Cook, I know what you know (and fear losing Mac sales to iPad and iPad sales to iPhone, so you want them nerfed), but this would make me upgrade my 2018 iPad Pro. I’d love to be able to leave my expensive macbook home for the vacation, and still be able to do some emergency hotfix on a tablet with keyboard (ideally connected to eg. hotel TV).
I have two now - the SPX - they're ~$200 used, with LTE and 16GB of ram, and a SP8 - i5/16gb of ram ~$350 used from FB marketplace. The SP8 runs Fedora 40 and it's light enough that I just keep it in my backpack whether I'll need it that day or not.
Can check out side-loading UTM using AltStore or a local dev account.
https://docs.getutm.app/installation/ios/
You do lose JIT support in newer iOS though.
The issue with the top and bottom edges and the too low res are the only downsides; both will be fixed as time passes and the inconvenience beats lugging a laptop and charger around and finding outlets instead of literally never needing any except while sleeping.
The part that makes it so tough is monitor arms come in standard sizes and are nowhere near long enough or extend far enough for me to sit comfortably. My dad modified my desk for me years ago to mount a monitor arm on wooden blocks, but it means I can't move the monitor much.
Being able to wear glasses and ditch the monitor entirely would be a game changer for me. I know next to nothing about AR though, being as I assumed, perhaps wrongly, it isn't something that would work for me.
Edit: Thank you for the replies. It means a lot. I've got some options to explore here now thanks to you.
The other problem is they aren't quite up against your eyes the way VR headsets are. They project a screen that appears to be quite far away. I imagine you could lower the resolution though, and it might look closer.
If your corrected vision needs stuff 6” away, don’t expect AR or VR to be a solution with current optics
It's not crazy to think you could move the microdisplay position and get a virtual display at 6". There might be other optical consequences (aberrations, change in viewable area) but in principle it can work.
Xreal claims
> To mitigate this, the industry usually maintains the VID at over 1 meter; for instance, Apple's Vision Pro employs a distance of 1.1m, Meta Quest 3 sits at 1.25m, and Hololens boasts 2m.
https://us.shop.xreal.com/blogs/buying-guide/prescription-le...
Though strangely they don't give a number their for their own devices.
The article claims the focal plane on the xreal glasses is 10 feet (roughly 3m).
My other recommendation would be to consider a standing desk. Even if you prefer to use it sitting, you can tweak the desktop height to your liking and help mitigate the posture issue.
Back to the Jarvis, though: see how the photos of it show the arm in a typical "bent knee" shape? You can totally use it with both halves of the arm pointed in the same direction. I just did a quick measurement on mine and each of the arms is about 25 cm long, and they're fixed at a ~45° angle. So if you center its mount on your desk, you should be able to bring the monitor around[2] 35 cm closer to your face and still retain a lot of height adjustment (~34 to ~50, as measured from your desktop to the center of the display).
If you go this route (and your desk doesn't have an existing grommet hole you can use), they sell a drill bit to bore one in the right diameter.
[0]: https://store.hermanmiller.com/office-furniture-desk-accesso...
[1]: https://www.upliftdesk.com/desk-accessories/monitor-arms/
[2]: cos(45°)*50cm
I use this one myself: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00B21TLQU
It can go far taller than I need it to, and the length of the arm itself should be enough that, positioned well, I imagine you could get it situated however you wanted.
So far I haven't seen anything that can deal with more than -8, and getting a custom prescription is usually prohibitively expensive. I can wear contacts to offset things somewhat, but they just cause added eyestrain.
Which I could see that being a deal breaker, but maybe it's lower than you thought
I pay more for eyeglasses than for a Quest 3, so... I don't want to double that.
b) There are monitor arms that extend quite far, and are easy to install. I use this one: https://a.co/d/fV5llce. Granted I don't keep it 6" away from my face and my desk is a bit too big for that, but I could get it really close if I wanted and my desk was smaller.
Google for "long reach" monitor arms; some models have a reach of 30 to 40+ inches. They're not exactly cheap since they come from ergonomics vendors but they allow you to bring a large monitor as close to your face as you like and, depending on the model, clamp to a table like a standard monitor arm. I've had various models of them for a couple of decades now.
FWIW, I use a monitor arm that's mounted on the front left side of my desk (my dad also modified my desk so this would work) so I can pull it as close as I need. It does mean I can't push it back to a normal monitor distance but I'm the only one using my PC so that's not a problem. Oddly enough, I recently got cataract surgery so now I have a lens that makes me focus further away, but now text is too small to read at that distance so I have to use readers to focus closer and use the arm.. seems a little silly but it mostly works out.
I don't know the specifics but it would be better than having to root the phone and use chroot.
It's sad that a phone running java on top of Linux isn't able to run Linux app without big downside like termux and proot. Hopefully it changes.
it was sorta possible before too, but now, it can start up programs with a window etc (and of course someone ran doom on it)
It can. It just can't run something expecting glibc, X11, Wayland, or any of the other large number of userspace libraries that Android doesn't have.
But a pure Linux app works no problem. Just shell in and run it, easy.
Isn’t this just a function of the parallax when rendering both screens?
Usually your brain learns a strong correspondence between focus and convergence, but this can be unlearned quite easily, and indeed must be in order to view e.g. VR, 3D films, Magic Eye pictures, etc... - all of which encode 3D information through convergence, while requiring your eyes to focus on a fixed plane.
There are solutions being developed for this, but they have not been successfully miniaturised and/or cost-reduced for productisation. It's unclear how far away it is at this time, but Reality Labs has several generations of solutions that physically change the distance between the lenses and the displays, and alternate solutions like lightfields capable of simultaneously displaying content at different focal planes are being investigated.
So to your eyes you're focusing at an object 2-3+ meters away rather than 2-3 cm in reality.
I guess as a start the chroot provides glibc and all the other libraries that run natively, but how does any of this interact with hardware?
> RAM usage often gets close to that 12GB ceiling.
Unused memory is wasted memory. Just because you're almost maxing out those 12 gigabytes doesn't mean you'd be in trouble with less.
> Can someone please make a good folding keyboard? This little $18 piece of plastic is decent for what it is, but this was the weakest part of the whole setup, and it feels like it should be the easiest.
I was an original Google Glass developer (2013) and not allowing development via a simulator was one of their biggest mistakes ever. You had to continuously test squinting into the actual hardware. After about 25min it would overheat and you were forced into a cooldown period of about 30min. You couldnt easily put together tests or parallelize testing mundane parts of the app off-device. I ended up with the worst headaches after three months and we pivoted our business to something else soon after.
But proot being slightly too slow is a real bummer. I was able to get a lot of stuff working natively on Termux, but every once in awhile you hit a wall and it's sad.
I can relate to the clunk of having 3 different pieces to the setup, but I found myself using just the phone + keyboard pretty often for quick things. And since the desktop environment seems to sit in the background just fine, it wasn't much more than just turning on the phone and opening the keyboard. So in that sense it wasn't much different than a laptop.
Anyways, ended up returning it but kind of wish I thought of just using the phone. Might finally get me to learn NeoVIM
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/13/android_15_linux_debi...
Very curious why these have stalled out at 1080p. They don't have to go much higher, give me 2560x1600 and I will be very happy.
az09mugen•17h ago
mikenew•10h ago
EDIT: To clarify, I meant the "Xreal Air 2 Pro", not the "Xreal One Pro". The latter are much more expensive.
Blankono•6h ago
They cost 800 new :|
1080p is that really okay?
growthwtf•6h ago
titzer•6h ago
josephg•4h ago
worldsayshi•6h ago