The Þog of 2022-03-28 — The Surprise Plan B

Yesterday the power supply in my main workstation computer inexplicably died. As I write this, I'm currently waiting for a new power supply to be shipped to me. I've learned my mistake with the last one and have bought a higher-quality and higher-wattage supply than I had originally.

I'm currently writing this on my Pinephone, with a mouse, keyboard and ethernet cable attached through the convergence dock that I'm glad I spent that little bit extra on when I purchased it, now that it's come in handy.

The Pinephone is a surprisingly usable Linux machine, with the only real issues coming from its general sluggishness and its not-great battery life. I would have connected it to my main monitor, as I did for a few minutes, but the Pinephone started becoming unstable. I've heard that the HDMI connector on the convergence dock can overdraw current on the Pinephone's battery. Either way, the monitor had to be set to a low resolution like 800x600 or 1280x720 just to get an above-10 FPS output, so I'm making do with the small screen on the Pinephone, which at 2x scaling gives a very small effective resolution of 720x360. It's not great, but it's workable. My Pinephone's networking seems to be a bit unstable on both Wi-fi and Ethernet and often cuts out for over 30 seconds at some times.

While it's annoying that I can't draw with Libresprite or communicate with anyone on Discord, — where most of my contacts are exclusively, unfortunately — it's nice to occasionally break the mold and do something different. Thankfully I'm not working a job that requires my workstation to be working.

I imagine my Pinephone's battery won't be too happy with it being cycled between 10-90% ~3 times a day.