ewaste pda style

Back when PDAs were a thing, I owned one of just about every interesting device. Psion? Yeah. Palm? I had a half a dozen. Newton? Check. Sharp Zaurus? Check. MagicCap device? Got it. Franklin REX? These were the mainstream machines. I had a dozen of the weird ones as well. The worst of those was probably the Agenda VR3.

The Apollo program closed out 1972 with humanity's last manned mission to the moon so far. The eight year lull before Shuttle launched in 1980 seemed like an eternity though Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz took a bit of the edge off.

The PDA market had an Apollonian slump between the release of the last terrific PDA (1999's Palm V) and the release of the original iPhone in 2007. Weird things turned up in the market during that time but they really only ever took a bit of the edge off.

I needed a fix of personal digital love in 2005 and jumped on the new Nokia 770 with vigor. It is hard now to explain why in terms other than a fix. It was perhaps the first PDA-like thing to come with a kernel that supported the Plan 9 file system protocol. Maybe? That seemed breathtakingly important at the time. It also seemed like the perfect platform to run Paul Guyot's Einstein emulation of the Newton. Your PDA platform may have problems if a Newton emulator seems like a high calling.

I can't say that it was awesome, or that it seemed awesome. It seemed then that it would eventually be awesome. And then it wasn't. It was a preview of modern high-DPI displays. Its 4.1 inch screen rocked 225 ppi at 800x480 two years before the iPhone rolled up with the retro resolution of 480x320 at 163 ppi. It was unlocked. It was the first PDA I owned to run a real web browser. It was interesting.

The 770 was easy to tether to a bluetooth phone and I used it this way until I had owned an iPhone for about 15 minutes.

It was beautiful and well made. My copy was made in Estonia, an ancient Baltic country taken as part of the Soviet Union until 1991. That's as close a PDA analogy as I can make to Apollo-Soyuz. It was a relative heavyweight. Mine weighs in at 235g. My iPhone 5s weighs in at 112g. The Palm V weighed 114g.

An old joke says that the Americans spent a million dollars to develop a pressurized pen capable of operating in outer space while the Soviets simply used a pencil. The tale is reversed with the 770. Nokia spent a lot of money to develop the last of the resistive/stylus machines when the Americans, here Apple, simply used a finger.

My 770 goes off to recycling today with its original stylus still tucked safely in its slot.

Nokia 770 tablet (pictured with Sparky for scale)
photo courtesy your correspondent

chromecast audio

I wrote this morning about my disappointment streaming simple audio from a Chrome tab. I placed the blame, correctly, on Chrome and not the Chromecast but I may have been a bit harsh. I may have blamed son Chrome for the sins of father Google.

I've now had a Chromecast audio in my hands for about a half an hour. It is much less horrible than its video cousin. The SDK is still broken by design. The Cast Chrome extension is still very large and complicated. It still required my phone, and not my Macbook, to configure.

If you set aside the setup, the pointless cryptography is pointless but only modestly worse than Apple's scheme in Airplay.

Our beloved RMS used to say that it wasn't really important to have the source to the firmware of a device that behaved like a circuit. An OTP PIC micro controller pretending to be a quad NOR gate was as good freedom-wise as a real quad NOR gate. The audio Chromecast works almost as transparently and reliably as an old 900MHz wireless speaker and I'm prepared to treat it as a circuit for now.

I stand squarely behind the rest of this morning's rant. The browsers with native APIs are the only local, graphical, general-purpose platforms worth programming. I look forward to the day that my web app can stream to a Chromecast, or an Airplay, directly without obnoxious SDKs or extensions or App IDs or the cloud. Until then, I'll listen to some tunes.

chromecast

I've had a Google Chromecast gathering dust in my workshop since just after they were announced. This dusty nap wasn't really its fault. The device just didn't seem very useful after I gave away the television.

Google's recent announcement of second-generation Chromecast hardware included an audio-only version that sparked in me new interest. I dug my old Chromecast out of a drawer and plugged it into
an HDMI monitor that can split HDMI audio out to external speakers.

I was pleasantly surprised. The experience of streaming a tab-full of audio out of Chrome into the Chromecast was worse than streaming audio from iTunes to Airplay but better than directing Mac system audio into Airplay.

Airplay is just about the only thing that iTunes does well. In any case, I had already banished iTunes from my machine and I play all my tunes by drag-and-drop with a web app, phonoh, that runs in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, or as a Chrome app. I'm happy this setup but it has left me without a pleasant way to beam audio from the browser to any of the speakers in my house.

Ten minutes with the Chromecast had me beaming tunes from phonoh into speakers. The crippling downside is that I have to cast the entire tab for this to work. Why? For starters, Google's cast SDK fails totally for web apps hosted from the filesystem with file://. For nexters, there is a gigantic disconnect between the ease with which tab-casting works and the Kafka-ocracy of hosting a receiver app, registering an app id, enabling magic developer mode on your device, blah, blah, blah for an app where there is fundamentally nothing worth hosting anywhere but in Chrome in the first place.

I drop files onto the web app from the desktop or from another web app. That's it. Essentially every audio track I have ever played is smaller than a single RAW file from my eight-year-old DSLR. I'm not a media hoarding survivalist with a ridiculous HTPC, a shotgun, a vault of ripped Blu-Ray discs, and food for a month. I'm just a dude who is going to listen to less than a terabyte of music between now and death. Why stream the soundtrack to my demise when most of it would fit on a microSD card in the space of a fingernail?

I took a tour through the two megabytes (!!) of minimized Javascript that make up the Cast extension that Google distributes. I thought it might be simpler to just write my own Chrome extension that lets me manage the WebRTC plumbing that appears to make tab-casting go.

I poked around in there to find the Chrome mDNS support and I built that into phonoh. Chrome's mDNS found my Airplay devices in short order but not the Chromecast!

At this point, I decided that I would just build a registered custom receiver that could be used with any app. I thought I could build a receiver web app that presented a generic remote-DOM interface to
the Chromecast. This appears possible, but generic (or even re-useable) custom receiver apps are forbidden by the SDK terms of service! Nearly every aspect of what I wanted to build is explicitly forbidden by the terms of service.

The Chromecast dongle is now in the ewaste pile. I was never meant to be the customer for Chromecast. I was somehow meant to be the product.

My point isn't that Chromecast is broken or evil. My real point is that Chrome, or Chromium, and Firefox are the only local, graphical, general purpose computing platforms worth programming today. Chrome, through extensions written in Javascript, can even host its own local development. Chrome is demonstrably adequate for interesting systems programming -- look no further than the cast plugin or the Chromecast themselves.

Chrome and Firefox are essentially fully baked as platforms. Most of the rest is removing the damage they inflict on themselves through administrative fiat. For example, Firefox doesn't allow self-hosted apps to use privileged APIs -- which is most of the APIs that distinguish an app from a web page. I can't build an alarm clock in Firefox without permission from Firefox World HQ. Even worse, Firefox reserves some permissions just for the 'manufacturer' and presumably still others for themselves. Manufacturer, here, means one particular middleman out of the many between you and the orphans at the conflict mineral mine who dug your device up from the earth a handful at a time. There is no higher plane of privilege reserved for the owner. Or for the orphans, for that matter.

By the way, Orphan Rights Management would be awesome. This tantalum isn't for pornography. This indium can't be used for human trafficking. This tin can't be used by despotic regimes that don't follow the Terms of Service in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Let's stop treating audio and video as technological special cases. Let's give up on the idea that clients are somehow less than servers. Let's stop pretending that we can keep the bad men out by preventing users from using their computers. Let's take back 'rooting' and just call it 'owning' again. Leave the rooting to wild pigs.