Novel use of the uConsole

I'm taking some time from work to finish Gradient. Nearly there on my first day off! Part of the process was breaking out my uConsole, Dverger, from cold storage. I wanted to talk a little bit about the device because it's proven highly effective. First, though, an old memory.

I've always been highly distractable. In elementary school, not only did I get paddled for talking (yes folks, we used to get hit in public school), I was remanded to a cubicle, a little cubby where I couldn't see or hear anyone, as a form of isolation to try to shut me up. It kinda worked.

It also kind of didn't. That chatty kathy nature turned internal, and so I've had to learn through experimentation how to channel that noisy internal monologue (and sometimes, dialog) at need.

While I adore my mac, I sometimes find it a little too easy to do.. well, anything else, really. So, having a machine that limits me can be highly useful in getting work done, and the uConsole does this admirably. There's not a lot to it:

OS: Arch Linux ARM aarch64
Host: Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 Rev 1.1
Kernel: 6.6.51-1-uconsole-rpi64-g0fb3c83a9fa3
Uptime: 13 mins
Packages: 869 (pacman), 6 (flatpak)
Shell: bash 5.3.9
Resolution: 720x1280
Terminal: /dev/pts/0
CPU: (4) @ 1.500GHz
Memory: 688MiB / 3791MiB

The platform is a Clockwork uConsole, a purchase that not only took six months to get here from Germany, but that I instantly felt some buyer's remorse for; I thought I'd never really use it much. Very glad I pushed through that.

It's running Arch, btw, and the i3 window manager. I truly despise the trackball, and so having a window manager that doesn't require much mouse work is a real win, and it so happens that I love them anyway.

On top of that is Obsidian, which is quite possibly the best software I've ever used. This is not faint praise; I use a lot of things; I'm notorious for knowing the right app for the right job, and this one is my all time favorite. Yeah, it's Electron, but the Pi 4 doesn't have any problems with it, surprisingly.

On top of that are a handfull of plugins that make all the difference:

• Longform: Game changing plugin that allows me to draft "scenes" (standalone markdown files) into a sequence and compile that sequence into a manuscript, still in markdown, but minus the comments and links that make it a cross referenced Obsidian Doc. That also means I can alter order easily, which comes in handy more often than you might thing.
• Git: I self host Gitea, and having versioning in writing eliminates the fear of performing rewrites. I've historically been averse to such things, and I find that the safety net makes all the difference. The Git plugin for Obsidian makes it incredibly easy to commit and revert, turning Obsidian into an author's IDE.
• Typewriter Scroll: A small screen can be problematic when you're typing fast, and my eyes tend towards the middle instead of bottom row. This plugin keeps the point of the editing cursored centered vertically, and this helps far more than I thought it would.

Once I had these, I started gaining speed. You may be looking at that thing and saying to yourself "How can anyone type on that thing?" You're not wrong; I like it sometimes, but it can be a genuine impediment, and so I added a Vortex VTG-4700 to the mix. I'd picked this mini keyboard up years and years ago, and it's been a backup for a long time. Shame, because even though it has it's own quirks, it has a buttery smooth action, and I'm glad to have it out. Both these fit in a tiny little bag, so the work can go anywhere that I do.

On that keyboard on the device itself, the default firmware is absolutely miserable, but there's a better. I found it here, and relayed a little adventure I had in that thread.

I love this little machine. In a pinch, it's a web browser, ssh terminal, Gameboy (all the way up through PS1), and I can plug my SDR into it and pick up radio signals. Now that my firmware on the keeb no longer kills the built in keyboard on inserting USB gear, I suspect, now that I'm sitting on the porch in the sun and hammering away on a novel, that it will see a lot more use.