I've been looking into portable text terminals lately, and I think i've
found a real deal. The other day I foundthis thing called the
{ }
{ } $29.95 <<<<< USD
{ email PostBox(tm)Express } That may mean $49.00
{ } -$30 rebate
{ } if you sign up
------------------------------- for a years service
manufacture by VTECH @$9.99/month
featuring YaHoo!(also tm) Mail.
I'm pretty sure it's a 286 system on chip (2400baud modem, 512k memory)
but it can connect to the network and the speed is highly doable for an
aftermarket radio link ;-)
The ad and the box were surprisingly unforthcoming about technical specs,
yet i suspect a somewhat chopped and folded version of our favorite
operating system might lie underneath it' s little 40*80 grey screen. It's
about the size and thickness of a paperback thriller and it has a little
little keyboard with a little bit of button cruft, and a Phone Jack!
It would acceptable for thumb typing or deliberate touch typing. And the
blurb says it stores up to 500 messages (1_buffer * 500) where 1_buffer is
the size in bytes of what they call a message. It looks like it would make
a half decent reote terminal and it has a store and forward type of model
where it squirts messages up and down and is read and edited offline.
Who wants to have a go at hacking it? I bet we can do this thing up to to
at least run short scripts or at minimum cross-compile with gcc and get a
decent portable editor and ssh-terminal. I see it as meeting our own needs
for portable longlife rugged terminals. And you dould probably get decent
comms in the field if you hooked it up to a spread spectrum radio box
;-)
Dependencies are the following libraries gcrypt,OpenSSH,glibc, and
jabber on the servers to handle presence etc.
Make no bones about it this a challenging hack, at present we don't know
exactly what hardware lies underneath that tiny little keyboard but if it
can run linux we can do it!! Grab 'em now before they get yanked off the
market :P They're way too cheap to last. And they're marketing 'em to
bored and jaded who want to get their email on the go, recase with a
decent keyboard and they're ideal remote controls. (think couch and
multimedia and editing global config files for your house)
Yum, if you have one and are at mikes next week, we can get started on the
reverse engineering...
Larry Price | "We have seen the truth.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | And the truth makes no sense." -chesterton
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