Bluetooth Keyboard for Aquaris E4.5

As I wrote on Gopher, I have got a wireless keyboard (Bluetooth-compatible) – the Stowaway ThinkOutside Sierra. It’s externally almost identical to these ThingOutside keyboards which were designed to use with old good Palm handhelds (I personally have Palm III-compatible one but I’m not sure if there was version compatible with older Palm machines).

So it’s rather small and compact. The main difference is that there is no Palm-style connector. Instead there is a space for AAA battery and for Bluetooth electronics. The stand for the device is located at the bottom of the keyboard and it is used detached.

As I have the keyboard for just a few days but it seems that it have eaten my alkaline battery in two weeks (I have no idea if the battery was OK initially so I will have to investigate this issue a bit more).

The biggest issue of the keyboard probably is its glossy metal enclosure (every tap of finger is visible here). It’s not a problem during use as these parts are on the bottom (they are visible only when the keyboard is folded).

The size was ideal when if was new: it is just about size of a Zaurus PDA and just lightly bigger than a Palm III. However, my current device (bq Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition) is much more slim and it is not so wide.

The typing on the keyboard is OK. It is foldable and it has 3 hinges and these hinges havesome influence on keyboard stiffness (my Palm-compatible one is stiffer and it less deformed in the center – I assume that is is related to what this particular piece of keyboard was shored and handled in the past).
The keys have normal size and distances. They have a short travel when pressed but it is comparable with normal notebook keyboard (yes, old ThinkPad keyboard is better but not much). There is even a numeric row. So typing (even in an arcane language like Czech) is easy and comfortable. The only important missing key is Esc (Fn+Tab here) and the right Shift and Enter are alightly smaller than
usual.

Of course, the non-standard Esc is a problem for us, active vi/vim users…

I typed this text on that keyboard which was connected to by E4.5 phone without issues (no missing/doubled letters and so). The only problem is too agressive energy-saving policy (the interval to disconnect the keyboard is too short) but
it should be an issue of the phone OS (the OTA-13 Ubuntu update didn’t changed this behaviour, by the way).

SGI Indigo

As you might already noticed on my gopher, I have got the SGI IRIS Indigo workstation. Actually. a Simenens Nixdorf RW 320 which is an Indigo with grey plastics and S-N logo.

My machine is an first-generation one, which has 32-bit MIPS processor R3000 on 33 MHz (there is a second generation of the machine which sports a much more advanced R4000 at 100 MHz – that’s the 64-bit processor, one of the first that were used in desktop computers). The Indigo was introduced in 1991. My one is from 1992 or so.

The full specification of the machine are (according to the output ot the hinv command):

1 33 MHZ IP12 Processor
FPU: MIPS R2010A/R3010 VLSI Floating Point Chip Revision: 4.0
CPU: MIPS R2000A/R3000 Processor Chip Revision: 3.0
On-board serial ports: 2
On-board bi-directional parallel port
Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
Main memory size: 48 Mbytes
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 0
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision C
Tape drive: unit 3 on SCSI controller 0: DAT
Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
Iris Audio Processor: revision 10
Graphics board: GR2-XS24

The GR2-XS24 graphics board is quite advanced for its time. It supports 24-bit colors, some 2D and 3D acceleration and make machine to feel to be fast. It’s only drawback is absence of a Z-buffer hardware (it makes some 3D thing slower and, surprisingly, even erratic: for example graphics in the Battalion is a bit incorrect). By the way, the graphics supports 1280×1024 resolution at max.

My machine came with IRIX 5.3 preinstalled and it can run it very well. The GUI is snappy and responsible and it’s low CPU speed and small memory is only noticeable when something large has to be computed.

Of course, I didn’t tried to run softare like the Mozilla/Firefox or the OpenOffice (it simply does not run here) and even not the Netscape. But Adobe Acrobat Reader (3.0.x line) runs well. Also GNU Octave (2.0.5) works quite nicely and there is also things like Gnuplot. I also compiled my own software and it runs flawlesly and on a decent speed (for small data, of course). But I only tried a GLUT-based version as I am lazy to install Gtk+ (and I don’t believe that anything based on the Gtk+ can be fast os any SGI).

There are also some 3D packages that can run here – of course old versions have to be used (a Blender 1.x, and old AC3D to mention these less or more freely available).

For Internet tasks I have installed the Lynx (yes, there were times when computers were shipped without Internet browsers pre-installed.. you may remember…). It’s enough for the machine as it can access gopher:// and http:// (and for such machine, the Gopher is more useful today, in my opinion).

A quite bad news are that there is a lack of modern text editors. The Vim can be fond precompiled only in the version 3.0 which is quite limited (no syntax highlighting and so). Fortunately, at the ftp.nekochan.net (in the folder of the user foetz) is a NEdit in quite modern version (5.6). It needs a long time to start (about twenty seconds) but then it is fast and it supports lot of things (including syntax highlighting).

The computer itself is relatively quiet (and extremely quiet for being a SGI workstation). I found that it can be used for a lot of things: writing of texts, small programming (C/Fortran/…), typeseting of documents (in TeX, for example) , for some computing (there is an Octave for that) and for many other tasks (there are some pre-installed applications for sound editing and 3D graphics so some people can use also these applications).

If you will get the Indigo then it is recommended to visit Megarat’s Indigo site not only for tips and tricks but also for a software archive.