tal

Much to my surprise, it didn’t take long at all to get used to working while wearing AR glasses.

Could you see yourself spending a full day working with smart glasses instead of using a monitor?

For me at least, that "HMD all day" is the limiting factor. I don't want to wear an HMD all day. My experience has been that they're sensitive to being slightly misaligned and going blurry. Traditional displays are nice and crisp.

I think that to be something that I'd want to use, the thing would need to do something like mechanically move the displays or optics internal to the HMD to keep it at a very precise, calibrated position relative to my eyeball, so that I don't need to futz with not having my movements slightly misalign the HMD.

In 2025, we don't have an HMD that can do that.

EDIT: Also, this doesn't matter much if you're watching a movie or something. Not visible then. But it's a visible issue if you're working with text or the like, if you want to full-on replace your display.

It's longer than a laptop, but honestly, I have my laptop set up to hibernate if I have it closed for more than ten minutes or so, and it takes several seconds to get that dehibernated, even off NVMe, and some of that is happening in parallel. My last laptop was a lot slower, took something north of ten seconds to get dehibernated. He's gotta drop a keyboard on his desk, unzip his HMD case, and plug each in (if he's not using a wireless keyboard or the wireless accessory for that HMD, neither of which I would personally use). Some of that at least can be parallelized. And that HMD has integrated headphones, IIRC

I carry headphones with me for my laptop, so he doesn't need to do that bit.

EDIT: Oh, and his trackball/trackpad/mouse or whatever. I carry a trackball with my laptop, but don't usually use it.

I originally had that when people started using Bluetooth earpieces with cell phones, and you'd see them talking to the air.

I've looked at this before and I agree that mini-ITX is probably the most realistic. You want to look hard for a small mini-ITX case. Though even that isn't that small. I think that you could maybe save some space

the mini-ITX power supply pushes the case size out in one dimension, so there's probably some unused internal volume -- if you could stick components, like the HMD, into part of what would normally be airspace interior to the case.

While I've also been interested in similar such systems, the author can accomplish one of his goals

the mechanical keyboard one

with a fairly-traditional laptop setup: he needs one of those hybrid laptops that has a screen that can swivel to act as a tablet. Then he just converts it to "tablet" mode and uses it as a monitor, without the keyboard sticking out at him, and he can use whatever keyboard he wants without the laptop keyboard being in the way. Does limit the laptop hardware options, though.

And doesn't buy him the other stuff that he's gunning for, like more customizable hardware or a screen with a larger FOV or such.

Yeah, I don't get that either. I assume that they're thinking that the author must be trying to sell the glasses or something.

I've written numerous comments before talking about the challenges and pitfalls of building almost identical portable mini PC systems on here, and people didn't downvote those. And most of the outraged comments in this thread seem to be asserting that it must be some kind of paid promotion.

Hell, I've talked about these same Xreal glasses, among other HMDs.

I'm pretty sure that the Xreal glasses have a carrying case, based on when I was looking at them. I carry a pair of headphones with my laptop, and they come with one. Does require some volume in a backpack or bag, though.

I've thought about doing this too, with a very similar setup.

Larger FOV for your screen than anything else portable. Potentially more power efficient too, as you don't blast light everywhere to get a tiny bit into an eye. Can be used in very bright conditions, like outdoors on a bright summer day, without issues. More comfortable to use in some other orientations

I use a split ergo keyboard with my laptop when lying back in a recliner or on a couch, lets my hands not be jammed in front of me and obstructing my views of the screen, but an HMD is even more flexible.

Laptops have limited hardware customizability, so it's really the only route other than carrying a portable display if you want more control over the PC hardware. Want a 100Wh battery or larger? Non-soldered memory and more of it? More expansion ports or storage slots? Moving the hot-and-noisy stuff beneath the table instead of beneath your hands? For the form factor: have airflow vents that aren't on the bottom and covered up when on a lap (ironically, "laptop"), chest, couch, or bed? If you're a woman and want to use the thing on your belly while lying down, not having your breasts in between your eyes and the screen? For anyone, not having their hands in the way?

Laptops have a lot of limitations as to input devices. Do you want a Trackpoint? You're limited to a very few models of laptop. Trackball? Few laptops and it has to be very small. A trackpad with three physical buttons? Very few laptops on offer make that an option. Particular about your keyboard layout? If you're getting external hardware, there's a cornucopia of options, and you can mix and match as you'd like. Yeah, you can also do this with laptops and a stand and a docking station and external hardware, if you're aiming for use at a particular desk, but that's not really suitable for a couch, say.

The privacy is nice -- and I don't think that that reasonably can be reduced to looking at porn, which I assume most people aren't going to want to do in public anyway, for obvious reasons. I can throw a password list up onscreen, don't need to deal with those inane "hide your password as you type it" things that try to mitigate privacy issues with people using computers in public places.

Problem is that at least today, wearing HMDs is not as comfortable and sharp as looking at a display. Easy to get something slightly blurry if it's not perfectly aligned. My HMD tends to fog up, though the Xreal thing in the article has more airflow and it's probably less of an issue. Also, VR goggles and headphones tend to compete for the same spot around the ears

circumaural headphones need to seal there, so you may need to accept whatever sound, if any, the HMD can provide. You have less awareness of your surroundings, which matters in some situations.

A lot of work has gone into making laptops particularly low power, and if you build your own system, some of that is on you, to pay attention to component power consumption.

Also, I couldn't find a way to get some kind of external battery to be treated by Linux as a power_supply class device, which lets Linux do things like automatically hibernate when power gets critical and use nice in-UI reporting of low battery. On the power source side, USB PD power banks, which it would seem would be a good solution, technically have the ability to report a battery level but AFAICT do not actually do this, or even present themselves as visible devices on the USB tree. You could probably work something up yourself with a modular battery bank

at the very least, even if Linux can't use it as a power_supply device, NUT can be rigged up to treat some hardware that you can put on a modular battery bank as a UPS, which accomplishes some of the same stuff, like auto-shutdown. And a modular battery bank is pretty user-configurable. But...that's not necessarily all that portable.

I would definitely do this instead of a laptop if they managed to get HMDs to the point where I'd be willing to dump my displays and go all HMDs. We aren't there yet, though.

I would like to start managing ebooks and manga properly.

I guess my question is how is everyone using these services for their own library :)

I moved away from dedicated readers. They're nice, but I have a tablet, a phone, and a laptop. I don't need a fourth device with me.

For me, the major selling point for dedicated readers is that they buy eInk: their insane battery life and how they work very well in sunlight or otherwise brightly-lit conditions, so you can read outside.

For comics

I don't know if you're only viewing black-and-white manga

my understanding is that color eInk displays have limited contrast compared to the black-and-white ones. I think that if I were viewing anything in color, I'd probably want to use some kind of LED or LCD display.

I will occasionally read content on my Android phone with fbreader. The phone isn't really a great platform for reading books

just kind of small

but it does a good job of filling the "I'm waiting in a line and need to kill a few minutes". With an e-reader, you need something like Calibre to transfer books on and off, but with Android, I can just transfer files the way I normally would, via sftp or similar. I don't have any kind of synchronized system for managing those books spanning multiple devices.

I use an Android tablet sometimes, almost always when I want to cuddle up on a couch or just want a larger display or want to watch videos. Same kind of management/use case. I think I used fbreader to last read an epub thing. I've switched among various comics and manga-viewing software, am not particularly tied to any one. There's a family of manga-viewing software that downloads manga from websites that host it; I can't recall the most-recent one I've used, but in my limited experience, they all work vaguely the same way.

I've increasingly been just using GNU/Linux systems for more stuff, as long as space permits; I'd rather limit my Android exposure, as I'd rather be outside the Google ecosystem, and the non-Google non-Apple mobile and tablet world isn't all that extensive or mature. For laptops, higher power consumption, but also vastly larger battery, and much more capable. On desktop, it's nice to have a really large screen to read with. For comics

and I haven't been reading graphic novels or comics in some time, so I'm kind of out of date

I use mcomix. For reading epubs, I use foliate in dark mode. I have, in the past, written some scripts to convert long text files into LaTeX and from thence into pretty-formatted PDFs; I'll occasionally use those when reading long text files, as I have a bunch of prettification logic that I've built into those over the years.

I don't have any kind of system to synchronize material across devices or track reading in various things. Just hasn't really come up. If I'm reading something on two different devices, I'll just be reading two different books at the same time. Probably have some paper books and magazines that I'm working on at the same time too.

Just to be clear, I'm pretty sure that they don't have a no-DRM-across-the-board policy, though, so if you're going there for DRM-free ebooks, you probably want to pay attention to what you're buying.

checks

Yeah, they have a specific category for DRM-free ebooks:

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/drm-free

I'll also add that independent of their store, I rather like their hardware e-readers, have used them in the past, and if I wasn't trying to put a cap on how many electronic devices I haul around and wanted a dedicated e-reader, the Kobo devices would probably be pretty high on my list. When I used them, I just loaded my own content onto them with Calibre, not stuff from the Kobo store.

Will read about firejail.

It's a single frontend to using a variety of the tools that permit for running software in isolation on a single machine. Like, you can expose only limited parts of the filesystem, have them be read-only, disallow network access, run software under Xephyr or Xnest for X11, disallow sound access, stuff like that. You set up a profile for an application, and it'll run it with those restrictions. It comes with a very limited set of application profiles made, so it's not just an "install it with one command and then run everything maximally sandboxed" piece of software -- you gotta set up a profile for an application to choose what you want restricted.