Daily Archives: 2023-09-24

Article note: ...This is a webserver running on a Pi Zero serving a page to the feeble internal browser on the Kindle over Wifi, and talking to a Bluetooth keyboard. There's that SolarWriter app that does the same trick with a phone as the intermediary. Either way, there are two relatively powerful computers (as in... bigger than minicomputer that would have served a whole department in the late 70s) running Linux and a complete web stack at each end, to attach a keyboard and display for simple text editing. It's shocking how the "little eink terminal" market has failed and always spirals into this kind of weird complexity and/or goofy proprietary closed devices freewriter type things.

Article note: This caused me to think. Remember when a little bit of judicious JS to do small updates on the client made pages seems super fast compared to doing a bunch of network roundtrips in the early 2000s? Notice how now connections are only slightly faster (only slightly lower latency, typical bandwidth has improved more) and most JS pages are so bloated they consume enough resources to be the limiting factor on otherwise-usable computers, which has made static HTML pages seem startlingly fast while typical JS-heavy pages are sluggish? It's quite an indictment of where the web has gone. Plus, we lost local presentation control/structure (for theming and alternative displays and screen readers and such) in the process.