shomMy PineNote blog posts were linked to from the main body of a discussion thread on Hacker News but due to the consistent and prolific AI scraping it's barely a blip on my traffic. Remember when humans used to hug sites to death? In the old days this would absolutely stick out.
The good news is a human emailed me and asked me for my experience one year in and that was nice (which is also how I found out about the HN post). I'll share my response below until I get around to fleshing out a blog post from it:
I should absolutely do a write-up a year in. I'll give you the highlights:
- I lost my original PineNote and after a few months of trying to get it back, I ended up getting a replacement, which should say something all in itself.
- I wish the device was a little bit smaller and lighter, but I have gotten used to it.
- I use it as a single function device at a time, mostly writing or reading, very occasional computing.
- However, I on a month-long trip and I only brought along my work laptop and the PineNote instead of bringing a personal laptop. I can do all the personal computing that I need on the PineNote and my phone. See my setup here: https://shom.dev/posts/20250406_a-pinenote-only-5-day-weekend/
- I wish Pine64 would update their images with the kernel optimization created by the community member hrdl, they do link to it from their official docs.
- There is also an interesting project called QuillOS, which provides a nice interface to the whole system, but it's not ready for primetime on PineNote.
Kraksen