"Ce n'est pas un smartphone"

Tactility, Utility, Intentionality; a picture from 5 years ago of everything I used instead of a smartphone (although I forgot to include the Kindle 4).

The dumbphone, a Sony Ericsson Elm I used from 2010 to 2022 and only switched to a smartphone when I was forced to by a number of online services finally breaking on dumbphones post-pandemic; a move I continue to regret.

#psion #gameboy #ipod #dumbphone #retrotech #retrogaming

One of the best things about working on #plptools is that I get to work with developers who have far more experience in commercial software development than I do. I'm learning all the time and feel really grateful for it.*

On the flipside, it's solidified my want to work on the new #Psion #SIBOSDK by myself. I don't want collaborators for that project right now. Helpful hints and guidance is very much welcome, but I want to grow with this project in my own way. And yes, that will mean the development of the SDK will be slower. This might seem selfish in the grand scheme of FOSS development, but I know is the right thing for me right now.

* To be clear, I'm not a useless third wheel on the project. I have my things I'm good at. And I have ✨opinions✨! But still, always learning!

#plptools, the #Psion comms suite for Linux and other *NIX-related OSes (see below), is currently going through an overhaul.

We're currently wading through almost 30 years of technical debt, improving thread safety and code readability. Slowly, we're reintroducing abandoned features and adding new ones.

My co-conspirators @jbmorley and @captfab have done the bulk of the work on this. I've been doing a lot of testing with physical hardware, as well as working on the ports and getting a better understanding of the current build system (autotools with gnulib) to get a clearer idea of whether it still works for the project today.

Primary supported OSes:

• Linux
• macOS

Secondary supported OSes (stable, but support will be slower):

• #FreeBSD 14.x
• #NetBSD
• #HaikuOS (With caveats - Haiku's USB serial is broken, but the the main Git branch of plptools has a workaround. Regular hardware RS232 works well.)

Coming soon:

• #OpenBSD (mostly works, but some stability issues in plpftp)
• FreeBSD 15.0 (won't compile, possibly an issue with gnulib)

In the distant future:

• Windows

The current main branch feels stable to us (more stable than the last release). If you want to give it a go, you can get it from here:

https://github.com/plptools/plptools

RE: https://mastodon.social/@heliopolitan/116300058006632716

I'm going to try to replicate this on my Siena before #RetroFest this year. It's such a smart repair!

#Psion