big fan of how much stuff you can still do with a slow, dated tablet!
i set mine up again, and all of my termux, tasker, and deskdock stuff still just works!
it usually is pretty light on battery, but when i plug it into my computer, it:
- watches a special calendar for commands and things to make a bluetooth speaker say
- extracts data from push notifications for annoying apps to make them actually useful
- acts as another syncthing node for my files to live
- starts an ssh server
- and acts as a starting point for a notification system for things i write that would take too much battery on my phone to always run
tablets are such a high baseline, honestly
even super-old ones can be extraordinarily useful, and it always feels nice being able to reuse things like this in such meaningful ways ^^
@thingywott I recently got an old tablet given to me, touch doesn't work, battery is dead (but it gots a barrel jack), was sad to learn termux needs android 7, since using it with mouse + keyboard is surprisingly pretty ok
@bx aww, dang. i know older builds worked on older versions, maybe you could sideload one of those..?
@thingywott ooooo, i'll def give this a shot, it'd be great if i can get termux on android 4.1 esp since then i could run it on my old phone too.
makes me wonder what newer apis termux actually uses at all, assuming it's nothing too essential wonder how hard it'd be to stub them out
@bx oh yeah!
that sounds like it would be a bit of a project, though i guess less of one if you're starting with something for android 5 rather than the newer releases
@thingywott yea definately, i'd also hope gur older builds wouldn't need me to install android studio :p
@bx unfortunately, the gradle plugin for android dev is a nightmare to use without it
i tried very hard to do without it, but they really do want you to use that ide
but, if you're not deterred, you can still grab the cli skdman and use that to install a version of the sdk that will run on your old stuff, and ./gradlew assemble can be your error checking--but you'll need to set the project to use the older sdk
you won't have any code assist or emulators, but it will work otherwise!
@thingywott i just want to be able to use my own text editor and have a command to compile that spits out errors, without having to deal with gur laggy interface and confusing menus of android studio :p
(oh and last i tried it used almost a quarter of my smol laptop's ram)
oh! it's really nice to use too! it reacts to me locking and unlocking my computer by doing the same, and can be controlled with my computer's keyboard and mouse by moving it off the far left of my screen
i used to just like...casually sit in tilde.town's irc! i still have my usenet, gopher, and gemini stuff still all set up too
i did need to grab a new termux before the one i was using would implode though, but that was an easy move