Took a break from the instrument adventure to play with my pinephone today.
pinephone side quest
I’ve seen people talking about side quests in their adventure logs and I like that phrasing. My side quest this morning (and a bit last night) has been to try playing around with the pinephone pro / keyboard combo I splurged on a couple years ago. After some frustrating initial experiences I put it away for a long while. This time around has been more promising though.
Yesterday I tried out postmarketos with sxmo. I love sxmo. Alpine linux (and postmarketos from what I can tell) have given me all positive experiences too – except for what seems to be maybe a problem with the modem software? Text messages would usually make the phone shut off. The phone would just shut off without warning. Sometimes it would reboot, sometimes it would stay off. I think using the modem made it more likely to shut off but it was hard to tell.
Support for the pinephone pro seems better on arch arm so far though! It comes with sxmo preinstalled, though the configuration seems more barebones than the postmarketos setup. It hasn’t crashed so far. I tried one very noisy call with a friend. We could talk to each other but he said I sounded extremely distorted and he was getting a terrible echo. I’m curious if I’ll be able to get a bluetooth headset to work with it, but since it’s routing audio with pipewire more ridiculous scenarios like piping audio to my laptop could be possible, too…
I also sent some text messages with a bash script. That was pretty satisfying to do without having to mess around with a service like twilio or go through an email gateway or something like that. A part of me likes the idea of leaving the pinephone at home and using it as a relay: pushing messages back and forth over the web so I can check my messages and make calls from my laptop instead? Perhaps…
I’m most interested in it as a potential console interface for astrid, though. Pippi and astrid install on the phone as well, and the test suites seem to run the same (slower though!) as they do on my laptop which is promising. I wonder if I can even do the pulsar synthesis for this piece on the pinephone? It might make a good controller anyway.