Re: Linux e-readers do they exist?

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The Raspberry Pi 400 I mention doesn't need to be hacked into anything.
The board is inside of a regular keyboard. It's not the full 101-key
keyboard like I use on most machines, but it has 78 keys and has an fn
key that when held down turns the right side of the keyboard into a
number pad. Yes, I do use an external battery pack that connects to the
power, but I carry the whole thing in a very small case that has a
pocket on the outside for the battery, the very small USB sound device
and a pair of small speakers or headphones. It is far less cumbersome to
carry around than a laptop, and is even smaller than a tablet. And just
to be clear, this is no "note taker" or e-reader, it is rather a fully
functional computer with a standard input interface that is easy for
anyone to use.


Stormux isn't a hack either. I use the MATE desktop on it, but you can
also use GNOME, a window manager like I3 or a regular shell if you like.
It's completely up to you, and the interface that makes all this work is
menu driven using arrow keys and the like. Yes, it does come up talking
so that anyone can use it without seeing it, and that makes it highly
configurable with little stress. It also took little time or effort to
get DECTalk speaking on this machine, though I believe it comes with
RHVoice out of the box, which some people feel sounds a little better,
especially at high speeds. I personally have come to love DECTalk over
the years though, and find that its rather newly available source code
and lack of licence file serial number stuff is a great thing whose time
should have come long ago, so I took the time to get it working, which
is actually a fairly simple and fast build process.


I hesitate slightly to say too much about this in public forums, but I
think charging a ridiculous price like $800 or more for something based
on a $75 Raspberry Pi that has a braille keyboard with only 7 keys on it
because it says "blind" on it is criminally insane, and I personally
won't even give such a device a second look. I nearly died of sticker
shock when I saw that price, especially since I made a Raspberry Pi 400
that is built into its own keyboard do more stuff than the base version
of that thing can do for less than a tenth of the price of the pro
version. I'm sure someone will pay that much for something like that,
but it most certainly would never be me, and I do know how to read and
write braille.

~Kyle

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