Hell Never Ends on x86
April 10, 2023 12:35 PM Subscribe
From CathodeRayDude, two deep-dives into old netbooks doing things they *really* shouldn't.
Pt. 1, Phoenix Hyperspace: Anyone who Computers Pretty Good can tell you that there is no holy way to do this. No priest would bless whatever is going on here. This is bad and wrong, and someone should have stilled the sinful hands of Phoenix's devs. So I knew, at this point, that Phoenix had invented multiple novel technologies in pursuit of an incredibly stupid product that nobody wanted, but I was not yet quite aware of how bad it was going to get.
Pt. 2, QuickLook & Daystarter:
Daystarter purports to show you your calendar while Windows is booting. And, okay, so what - they're just replacing the bootsplash image, like we all did on Windows 98 and XP when we were 13.
No. It steps through your week as it boots. And you can hit keyboard shortcuts to pause or clear it. This is a program that runs while Windows boots.
I don't... really... need to explain that this isn't possible. As-written: no, this isn't a thing, this can't be done, and I don't just mean "it's hard and messy," I mean this should not be possible.
Pt. 1, Phoenix Hyperspace: Anyone who Computers Pretty Good can tell you that there is no holy way to do this. No priest would bless whatever is going on here. This is bad and wrong, and someone should have stilled the sinful hands of Phoenix's devs. So I knew, at this point, that Phoenix had invented multiple novel technologies in pursuit of an incredibly stupid product that nobody wanted, but I was not yet quite aware of how bad it was going to get.
Pt. 2, QuickLook & Daystarter:
Daystarter purports to show you your calendar while Windows is booting. And, okay, so what - they're just replacing the bootsplash image, like we all did on Windows 98 and XP when we were 13.
No. It steps through your week as it boots. And you can hit keyboard shortcuts to pause or clear it. This is a program that runs while Windows boots.
I don't... really... need to explain that this isn't possible. As-written: no, this isn't a thing, this can't be done, and I don't just mean "it's hard and messy," I mean this should not be possible.
I realize this isn't the focus of the article but…
"Those are current headlines being pulled from the BBC! I guess they haven't changed their API in 14 years."
God bless the BBC for not fixing what isn't broken.
posted by Kattullus at 1:15 PM on April 10, 2023 [19 favorites]
"Those are current headlines being pulled from the BBC! I guess they haven't changed their API in 14 years."
God bless the BBC for not fixing what isn't broken.
posted by Kattullus at 1:15 PM on April 10, 2023 [19 favorites]
This is the most extreme example of Zawinski's Law that I have ever seen.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:17 PM on April 10, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:17 PM on April 10, 2023 [10 favorites]
Oh, this is fucking delightful. I've followed CRD on YouTube and various social media for a while, and they're always entertaining, but this is some of the best content I've seen from them.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:19 PM on April 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:19 PM on April 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
I could see that SMM thing coming. If we can't use ring 0, let's use ring -2, What Could Possibly Go Wrong...
There is a software development saying that the solution to every problem is another layer of indirection. SMM is Intel's way of doing that in their CPUs. Though there is a very subtle distinction between indirection and misdirection that sometimes gets lost...
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 1:30 PM on April 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
There is a software development saying that the solution to every problem is another layer of indirection. SMM is Intel's way of doing that in their CPUs. Though there is a very subtle distinction between indirection and misdirection that sometimes gets lost...
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 1:30 PM on April 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
MetaFilter: "diverges greatly from the similar (up to now) action"
posted by wenestvedt at 1:35 PM on April 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by wenestvedt at 1:35 PM on April 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
Look, it’s entirely possible that your CPU has a smaller CPU inside it, that has full access to your machine, that you and your normal software have no access to, so nothing surprises me anymore.
People are doing great work with computers, and great does not always mean moral, ethical, legal or principled.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 1:41 PM on April 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
People are doing great work with computers, and great does not always mean moral, ethical, legal or principled.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 1:41 PM on April 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
God bless the BBC for not fixing what isn't broken.
Apropos of that, they're retiring their Shoutcast streams (in favor of DASH and HLS) this year which is definitely going to force some older internet radios into the bin.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:41 PM on April 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
Apropos of that, they're retiring their Shoutcast streams (in favor of DASH and HLS) this year which is definitely going to force some older internet radios into the bin.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:41 PM on April 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
CPU has a smaller CPU inside it, that has full access to your machine, that you and your normal software have no access to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Assertions_that_ME_is_a_backdoor
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 2:21 PM on April 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Assertions_that_ME_is_a_backdoor
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 2:21 PM on April 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
People are doing great work with computers, and great does not always mean moral, ethical, legal or principled.
I think I would just go with 'wise'. I don't think
These decisions arenecessarily immoral, in the sense that morality was never considered in their conception, and the same goes for ethical or principled (the law largely doesn't hold an opinion on this stuff). Plus in many cases it isn't that the concept is immoral or unethical, it is that it enables others to be immoral or unethical. You might well argue that that should have been factored in at the time, but it depends on the case in question.
SMM was invented in the early nineties, predating the widespread public use of the internet and any significant use of malware, and probably wouldn't have looked as terrible in that context as it does in hindsight.
There's a far weaker case for the management engine, where it should have been clear what it could lead to (along with the continuing argument that it was clear, and in fact intentional).
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 2:41 PM on April 10, 2023
I think I would just go with 'wise'. I don't think
These decisions are
SMM was invented in the early nineties, predating the widespread public use of the internet and any significant use of malware, and probably wouldn't have looked as terrible in that context as it does in hindsight.
There's a far weaker case for the management engine, where it should have been clear what it could lead to (along with the continuing argument that it was clear, and in fact intentional).
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 2:41 PM on April 10, 2023
Wow, what a bonkers solution to a non-problem. I wonder if the engineers were told, make this happen by any means necessary so we can sell these bastard netbooks. I don't care what dark magic you have to employ. And they proceeded to employ the darkest magic available in 2008.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 3:23 PM on April 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 3:23 PM on April 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
People are doing great work with computers, and great does not always mean moral, ethical, legal or principled.
Great meaning large or immense! We use it in the pejorative sense!
posted by dephlogisticated at 3:52 PM on April 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
Great meaning large or immense! We use it in the pejorative sense!
posted by dephlogisticated at 3:52 PM on April 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
This was back in the era where the Steve Jobs cult of personalty was cresting, so any suit with enough attitude could just stamp his foot and say "this sucks! make it better!" and the engineers would just fucking scramble to find some wackadoo hackeroo they could handwavey pretend with a powerpoint would "make it better!" and then the suit would say "fucking go do that!" and they'd be left alone for six months, and when the result was shit, because it could not be other than shit, the exec would be furious but have no choice but to accept it, because laws of physics.
We still get that exact same thing these days, except the suits are hoodies and track pants worn by fucking 27 year olds with erectile dysfunction who park their Bentleys in the bike lanes and really, truly, deeply believe what the cocaine tells them, but now it results in an endless raft of alphabet soup "disruptive" web apps that do everything worse but still manage to kill off what was simple, worked and even modestly profitable in the hopes of a Unicorn Orgy.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:53 PM on April 10, 2023 [31 favorites]
We still get that exact same thing these days, except the suits are hoodies and track pants worn by fucking 27 year olds with erectile dysfunction who park their Bentleys in the bike lanes and really, truly, deeply believe what the cocaine tells them, but now it results in an endless raft of alphabet soup "disruptive" web apps that do everything worse but still manage to kill off what was simple, worked and even modestly profitable in the hopes of a Unicorn Orgy.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:53 PM on April 10, 2023 [31 favorites]
Yup, the first article made me laugh, when it got to the Cursed Technology. Like someone offered it to their supervisor with malicious compliance: "it technically does what you asked for, here's your curling monkey paw, sir"
posted by Pronoiac at 4:10 PM on April 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Pronoiac at 4:10 PM on April 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
Favorited for "really, truly, deeply believe what the cocaine tells them;" what a delightfully vivid image. Thanks for the chuckle. :)
posted by ZakDaddy at 4:31 PM on April 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by ZakDaddy at 4:31 PM on April 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
I sat for the Maryland bar on a Dell netbook. I regret nothing!
posted by Mr. Excellent at 5:40 PM on April 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Mr. Excellent at 5:40 PM on April 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
I loved netbooks so much. While unemployed during the Great Recession I borrowed one from a friend; I had a laptop, but the netbook was so much lighter and had decent battery life, I was able to tote it around to job-hunting workshops and such.
Hyperspace reminds me of Tandy DeskMate, the character-based "operating environment" from Radio Shack, which was built into the ROM of the Tandy 1100FD laptop (and many other Tandy computers) I owned for a brief time. It was the 1990s, before the intro of Windows 95, and the 1100 had a single 720K floppy, no hard disk, and DeskMate and MS-DOS 3 in ROM. The computer booted instantly (and fairly quickly) into DeskMate, If you had DOS software on the floppy, you could run it, or use it for storage. I remember it as a decent little machine.
posted by lhauser at 6:40 PM on April 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
Hyperspace reminds me of Tandy DeskMate, the character-based "operating environment" from Radio Shack, which was built into the ROM of the Tandy 1100FD laptop (and many other Tandy computers) I owned for a brief time. It was the 1990s, before the intro of Windows 95, and the 1100 had a single 720K floppy, no hard disk, and DeskMate and MS-DOS 3 in ROM. The computer booted instantly (and fairly quickly) into DeskMate, If you had DOS software on the floppy, you could run it, or use it for storage. I remember it as a decent little machine.
posted by lhauser at 6:40 PM on April 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
I had an 1100FD. It was nice, but not as nice as my Toshiba Libretto.
posted by mikelieman at 8:18 PM on April 10, 2023
posted by mikelieman at 8:18 PM on April 10, 2023
The wildest thing about all of this is that it doesn't work. Hyperspace isn't "instant-on," it's maybe a few seconds faster than Windows 7 to boot, and almost certainly the cost of developing and adding it far outweighs the 1GB of additional RAM, which probably would have made Windows much spritelier even on these pallid Atoms.
*jazzhands*
posted by Literaryhero at 9:42 PM on April 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
*jazzhands*
posted by Literaryhero at 9:42 PM on April 10, 2023 [4 favorites]
The first article turned me into David Tennant as the 10th Doctor. I just kept going, "What!?"
I normally love off-center Linux stuff, but these things make me want to hide in a nice clean progress bar.
posted by Ignorantsavage at 11:28 PM on April 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
I normally love off-center Linux stuff, but these things make me want to hide in a nice clean progress bar.
posted by Ignorantsavage at 11:28 PM on April 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
That post was memetically hazardous and I may regret reading it. I've done some slightly mad hacky stuff for work but nothing close to that level before...
posted by Foosnark at 5:05 AM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Foosnark at 5:05 AM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
I too had a netbook, carried it around on roadtrips, tried to get a GPS puck to work with whatever wonky map program I was testing out at the time, writing logs etc. It was actually more fun than having everything just neatly wrapped in a smartphone.
posted by Harald74 at 5:47 AM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Harald74 at 5:47 AM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
I don't see an intrinsic problem with abusing sleep/wake to effectively sideload a alternative minimal 'instant-on' environment and had assumed this would be the trick once it was clear it wasn't some kind of bizarre alternate environment running on top of the Windows kernel. After all, snapshotting the state of the OS as it's running and then restoring that running state transparently from a stopped state is what that function does. It's not supposed to care what transpires in the meantime so long as the saved state is being restored to exactly the same hardware.
If it's suspended to disk, I suppose you should be able to disassemble the whole machine to its components, reassemble them and resume (though I wouldn't want to try it if it mattered, and am not sure if there's anything essential in RAM).
But then imposing journaled changes to the NTFS file systems on switching back is truly bizarre and hazardous choice.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:47 AM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
If it's suspended to disk, I suppose you should be able to disassemble the whole machine to its components, reassemble them and resume (though I wouldn't want to try it if it mattered, and am not sure if there's anything essential in RAM).
But then imposing journaled changes to the NTFS file systems on switching back is truly bizarre and hazardous choice.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:47 AM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
(What I mean by 'anything essential in RAM,' is that it's never been clear to me why Windows resume from sleep to disk after a total battery failure works sometimes, but sometimes results in a reboot and a loss of the suspended session.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:01 AM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:01 AM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Heh, I had that exact Samsung netbook for a while but it was given to me used and wiped, so I never had the system discs or factory partitions, and AFAIR I just ran Knoppix and/or XP on it. It didn't suck for a computer you could fit in a large jacket pocket if you didn't try to force it to run Windows Vista.
While I vaguely remember it had a key or sticker advertising this instant-on mode but I never figured out what this was about and I'm kind of glad I didn't because I too would have been totally freaked out by the missing partitions and what it was doing and I probably would have ended up wiping the whole thing out of sheer self preservation instincts as soon as I realized I couldn't easily see where it kept it's brain or even what it was doing.
Even if I did have it installed from OEM system discs I'm not sure if I would have even made it far enough to discover the horror of it being able to read/write to Windows files which was supposed to be either off or suspended, but if I did I know my reaction would have been visceral revulsion and a hearty "Oh, fuck this! What the fuck kind of witchery are you doing in there!?" for all the reasons he's describing.
I honestly wish they still made modern computers in that form factor. A miniature version of the Lenovo Ideapad/Flex I have now would be really ideal to me. As in I don't want a tablet running iOS, Android, Surface or Chrome and I want a real x86 machine and CPU, convertible pen compatible touchscreen, permanently attached keyboard chassis where I could choose my OS.
I had like three different Atom powered netbooks over the years. The MSI branded netbook I had for a while actually handled something like an 4-8gb RAM upgrade, had an overdrive mode for the Atom processor that pushed it to like 2.2 ghz and it would probably still be useful today with an SSD.
But I was and am a huge fan of that form factor. Something like a Lenovo Flex/Ideapad but with about an 8-10" screen, a more modern Ryzen processor, plenty of RAM, a newer HD touch/pen screen and a fast SSD would kick so much ass.
And it wouldn't even have to be razor thin and sleek like today's laptops. I'd be totally fine with it being thicker like a paperback book, even up to 2.5-3" thick would be fine with me, especially if it had some real ports on it instead of just USB 3 and C. At a minimum I'd like to have an integrated Ethernet port and HDMI and/or VGA, plus USB C, 2-3 USB 2/3 ports, a memory card reader, and even a swappable battery.
A few of the better netbooks had swappable batteries and you could choose between a slimline battery or a big honking brick of a battery that effectively doubled the weight and thickness of the netbook.
I had one of the huge 9 cell batteries for one of these, I think the Samsung NC10, and I remember getting like 20+ hour battery life out of it for basic stuff like browsing and writing. And I actually liked that form factor with the thick battery sticking out of the back of the netbook. It made a nice, chunky handle and acted as a keyboard stand and didn't really get in the way unless I was trying to jam it into a pocket that was too slim for it.
Yes, there's some companies still making "pocket laptops" kind of like this but everything I've seen is way too small with like 6-8" screens and even tinier and less useful chiclet keyboards with rather underwhelming specs even by netbook standards, and they seem to be focused on being some kind of hybrid portable gaming, browsing and general "fun" kind of machine with analog joypads instead of a track pad or normal mouse pointer or whatever.
That 9-10" screen form factor with a smaller but "real" keyboard was just about perfect for me. I loved that I could carry around a "real" computer in a small gadget bag instead of a full sized backpack, or just slip it into a jacket pocket like a book and not need a case or bag or accessories at all because I knew it could last all day on a battery.
It was a pretty ideal machine for using at a coffee house to do some homework and writing, or use it for freelance tech support calls. Load it with one of the many techy/netsec linux distros and a Windows dual boot and you have a full on diagnostic tool because it had real ports like ethernet or even serial.
Anyway that was a hell of a read and dive into some arcana. It was fun reading CRD's writing instead of just passively watching one of his videos. Though I can note I read the whole thing in his voice.
And it sounds like a dodged a bullet by never having the system discs to that Samsung because this weird hybrid hypervisor shit would have freaked me right the fuck out as soon as I realized it was doing things it shouldn't be able to do. That would have driven me totally bonkers.
posted by loquacious at 12:16 PM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
While I vaguely remember it had a key or sticker advertising this instant-on mode but I never figured out what this was about and I'm kind of glad I didn't because I too would have been totally freaked out by the missing partitions and what it was doing and I probably would have ended up wiping the whole thing out of sheer self preservation instincts as soon as I realized I couldn't easily see where it kept it's brain or even what it was doing.
Even if I did have it installed from OEM system discs I'm not sure if I would have even made it far enough to discover the horror of it being able to read/write to Windows files which was supposed to be either off or suspended, but if I did I know my reaction would have been visceral revulsion and a hearty "Oh, fuck this! What the fuck kind of witchery are you doing in there!?" for all the reasons he's describing.
I honestly wish they still made modern computers in that form factor. A miniature version of the Lenovo Ideapad/Flex I have now would be really ideal to me. As in I don't want a tablet running iOS, Android, Surface or Chrome and I want a real x86 machine and CPU, convertible pen compatible touchscreen, permanently attached keyboard chassis where I could choose my OS.
I had like three different Atom powered netbooks over the years. The MSI branded netbook I had for a while actually handled something like an 4-8gb RAM upgrade, had an overdrive mode for the Atom processor that pushed it to like 2.2 ghz and it would probably still be useful today with an SSD.
But I was and am a huge fan of that form factor. Something like a Lenovo Flex/Ideapad but with about an 8-10" screen, a more modern Ryzen processor, plenty of RAM, a newer HD touch/pen screen and a fast SSD would kick so much ass.
And it wouldn't even have to be razor thin and sleek like today's laptops. I'd be totally fine with it being thicker like a paperback book, even up to 2.5-3" thick would be fine with me, especially if it had some real ports on it instead of just USB 3 and C. At a minimum I'd like to have an integrated Ethernet port and HDMI and/or VGA, plus USB C, 2-3 USB 2/3 ports, a memory card reader, and even a swappable battery.
A few of the better netbooks had swappable batteries and you could choose between a slimline battery or a big honking brick of a battery that effectively doubled the weight and thickness of the netbook.
I had one of the huge 9 cell batteries for one of these, I think the Samsung NC10, and I remember getting like 20+ hour battery life out of it for basic stuff like browsing and writing. And I actually liked that form factor with the thick battery sticking out of the back of the netbook. It made a nice, chunky handle and acted as a keyboard stand and didn't really get in the way unless I was trying to jam it into a pocket that was too slim for it.
Yes, there's some companies still making "pocket laptops" kind of like this but everything I've seen is way too small with like 6-8" screens and even tinier and less useful chiclet keyboards with rather underwhelming specs even by netbook standards, and they seem to be focused on being some kind of hybrid portable gaming, browsing and general "fun" kind of machine with analog joypads instead of a track pad or normal mouse pointer or whatever.
That 9-10" screen form factor with a smaller but "real" keyboard was just about perfect for me. I loved that I could carry around a "real" computer in a small gadget bag instead of a full sized backpack, or just slip it into a jacket pocket like a book and not need a case or bag or accessories at all because I knew it could last all day on a battery.
It was a pretty ideal machine for using at a coffee house to do some homework and writing, or use it for freelance tech support calls. Load it with one of the many techy/netsec linux distros and a Windows dual boot and you have a full on diagnostic tool because it had real ports like ethernet or even serial.
Anyway that was a hell of a read and dive into some arcana. It was fun reading CRD's writing instead of just passively watching one of his videos. Though I can note I read the whole thing in his voice.
And it sounds like a dodged a bullet by never having the system discs to that Samsung because this weird hybrid hypervisor shit would have freaked me right the fuck out as soon as I realized it was doing things it shouldn't be able to do. That would have driven me totally bonkers.
posted by loquacious at 12:16 PM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
I still have a ThinkPad 510cs here somewhere. IBM BL/2 processor (a re-branded Cyrix 486 DX clone). PC-DOS and Win 3.1. (I think OS/2 was an option, but I didn't have it.) It was my first laptop and first computer with an FPU. I'd love something in that form factor (including the beloved trackpoint) if it made the most of that space using modern components.
I also had a truly terrible Asus netbook from the Win 8 era. I really tried to make that thing work as an ultraportable, but it was garbage.
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:33 PM on April 11, 2023
I also had a truly terrible Asus netbook from the Win 8 era. I really tried to make that thing work as an ultraportable, but it was garbage.
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:33 PM on April 11, 2023
I don't see an intrinsic problem with abusing sleep/wake to effectively sideload a alternative minimal 'instant-on' environment and had assumed this would be the trick once it was clear it wasn't some kind of bizarre alternate environment running on top of the Windows kernel.
Yeah, this part seemed reasonable and kinda clever to me. The real horrors are (a) the "replay journaled filesystem changes on resume" stuff and (b) that to pull off the "suspend one environment, resume into the other" trick they permanently remove 512M of the already-quite-constrained 2GB of physical memory from the Windows side.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 2:54 PM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Yeah, this part seemed reasonable and kinda clever to me. The real horrors are (a) the "replay journaled filesystem changes on resume" stuff and (b) that to pull off the "suspend one environment, resume into the other" trick they permanently remove 512M of the already-quite-constrained 2GB of physical memory from the Windows side.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 2:54 PM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
FWIW the patent does explicitly mitigate against the "Windows is editing a file, Hyperspace also writes to it, now what?" concern: it doesn't allow both sides to have a file open for write:
If a file is being opened in a write-permitting mode in HS and if HS Transition Manager finds from the metadata file that this file is in a state of “Opened-in-Windows-for-editing, then HS Transition Manager signals the HS Transition Manager UI to display an appropriate message and the file open is disallowed.posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 2:59 PM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
I bought a Toshiba netbook on the tail end of the netbook era and it's a beautiful piece of hardware: the keyboard is wonderfully thought out, the screen is impractically tiny with huge bezels, it's thick but thinness is overrated for portability. It just feels solid in a really nice way. I upgraded the ram to 2gb and loaded Linux on it and it's still slow as heck but kind of usable for web stuff and pretty usable for writing in a terminal. I've been using it as a syncthing server recently, it's still chugging along.
I did have to clean the rubberized coating off of the lid a while back, that got pretty gross.
posted by ropeladder at 7:53 PM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
I did have to clean the rubberized coating off of the lid a while back, that got pretty gross.
posted by ropeladder at 7:53 PM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Now I need to find my libretto 70CT. It probably has 20 years of Linux uptime at this point, at least of it is capable of unhibernating.
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 8:47 PM on April 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 8:47 PM on April 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
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I have no desire for the hamstrung user interface, but I suppose it's not much worse than a cheap-o Android phone at this point. I mean, a Kindle does all of that and more now, but these were pretty cool.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:03 PM on April 10, 2023 [4 favorites]