Sunday, 29th October, 2023

I worked myself into a terrible black mood last night. Bought an O2 Joggler from ebay the other week for £20. It’s quite a nice device, especially for £20, to quote the wiki:

The O2 Joggler is a remarkable system for a number of reasons, not least that they are a highly capable touchscreen device for a bargain price. They are pretty robust, relatively easy to recover from the even most comprehensive of fails and fairly powerful. A Joggler consists of a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520 processor, Intel GMA500 graphics with hardware acceleration (yes, you can play 1080p H.264 video), 512MB RAM, a single-touch capacitative touchscreen and two small speakers in a ‘picture frame’ chassis.

They came out in about 2015 and were quite impressive at the time, although expensive. O2, the cell company, stopped supporting them. There’s quite the hacker community around them and O2 even gave them the firmware, which is nice.

Anyway, I wanted to make a browser kiosk mode display, which seemed easy enough. Anyway, I waste the whole evening on it and couldn’t get it to work. No doubt the issue of trying to use various (old)tutorials to combine together and something has changed since then. I should’ve added things one at a time and looked at their instructions to validate it works properly first.

I went back to loading hamclock image. I read the manual and found it did more than I realised so that’ll do for now.

I still want to have it as my node-red dashboard where I can control stuff from it. The touchscreen is very handy.

A popular use case is a squeezebox client. It has a nice display and audio out, or even plug in a USB DAC and get high quality audio out together with a nice interface.

I’m also burning OS X Tiger isos to CDs for my G4 mac mini. I hope to reinstall the OS on a SSD that’s in a special enclosure so it fits the PATA connector of the mac. The G4 mini is nice but it’s absolutely useless. All the SSL/TLS crypto stuff is too old to use the web. It’s also slow…although I’m hoping the SSD will make it feel snappier. Maybe it’s an offline device but why not use a typewriter or pen and paper. Probably I’d be better running PowerPC linux on it but at that point, why not just run a rpi or any other computer.

I’ve also burnt a OS 9 image that someone made that should just work as if by magic on the G4 mini and so I don’t have to do any messing about. That’s probably more interesting to do. Although I want to verify I can install Tiger first, as there’s no restore from internet etc. on these old macs. I suppose the worst case is I have to buy the Tiger install CDs from ebay…or just sell it as is and be done with it. Makes me regret selling the 2012 i7 mac mini, but then I think about it and maybe it’s better just to get the latest one anyway 😅 Round and round I go. Maybe a £100 mini might be okay, whatever model that is, vs. a £500 M2 or a £20 G4 mini.

Weather is terrible. Rain and wind, has been and seems it will continue to be.