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What to do with an old iPad

(odb.ar)
190 points owenmakes | 2 comments | 05 Sep 25 17:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source

Coming back with my own blog (hosted on iPad 2) after asking here the same question
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somat ◴[06 Sep 25 22:19 UTC] No.45153406[source]▶
Only slightly related, but I recently wanted to show some instrumentation on an old android phone. Now there are many good ways to do this. But I chose none of them, Instead I had just installed termux on the phone and noticed they had some sort of X11 package and went "This, I want this"

And honestly, it sort of rocked, despite using X11 for many years I have never actually sat down and just played with a raw, bare X server, only the encrusted, encapsulated ones tied down for desktop use. best I can describe it is having a a shared network attached monitor. I was using it sort like you would have a large central status display in an operations center, but small, on a phone.

If curious, I wanted to monitor system temps while playing a full screen game using the excellent but unsearchable "trend" program.

http://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/trend/

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imglorp ◴[06 Sep 25 22:36 UTC] No.45153548[source]▶
Networked X11 was a killer app back in the workstation days. "The network is the computer," was totally true in practice. With the rise of Wayland, I feel like we're due for a new networked interaction protocol, maybe rising from the ashes of X and also NeWS.
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1. somat ◴[06 Sep 25 22:49 UTC] No.45153619[source]▶
I think the arcan project is doing good work here. But honestly I suspect the days of networks attached displays is slowly coming to an end. Our modern alternative is probably the web, where you ship the program to the display server to run on it.

https://arcan-fe.com/about/

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2. jraph ◴[06 Sep 25 22:54 UTC] No.45153663[source]▶
Unfortunately, as far as old iPads are concerned, one of the major issues with old iPads is the old safari version. And so old web standards. I've this potentially nice projects to mirror screens from the web browser, but they won't run on old iPads for this reason. Shipping programs to the old iPad will suffer the same issues: only programs specifically written for these old Safari versions will work.

I suspect this will be an issue for most old devices. Especially old Apple devices (though there's hope for the newer ones now that the EU requires them to allow other browsers), but for all devices ultimately.