If none of the online and similar stuff works, it might be time for the family to file a missing person report. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Agre about a guy who disappeared like that. He was eventually confirmed to be ok, but had apparently decided to go off the map for personal reasons.

There was also a medical researcher whose name I’ve forgotten, who also went dark iike that. Her family eventually found her and she said oh, she hadn’t been up to much, and just didn’t realize that anyone was looking for her. She did some well known work connecting allergies with cancer but I haven’t been able to identify her through a few web searches. Anyone remember?

Added: aha, found. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margie_Profet

See also: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201205/the-mysterious-case-the-vanishing-genius

Added 2: Oh my, I didn’t know the whole story. Profet apparently had physical and mental health issues, possibly schizophrenia, and she gradually pulled away from people who knew her, rather than suddenly vanishing. After she had been missing for years, the article above found its way to her and she contacted her family. IDK what if anything she has been doing since then, but she appears to still be around. She reminds me a bit of John Forbes Nash, mathematician who was the subject of the book and movie “A Beautiful Mind”. https://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/05/missing-biologist-surfaces-reunites-with-family.html

Person rebuilds an N900 to use a battery eliminator and replace the micro usb port with USB-C, and then sets it up as a media player. Ok but why bother?

It’s still useless as a phone, at least in the US, because the 3G network is dead. Sigh. Its UI was also hopelessly slow, as was the later N9’s.

Thanks, yeah, I’ve been using Ublock Origin plus some local DNS blackholing when browsing on my laptop, and will do the same on a pi if I use one.

Maybe I’ll now see if I can figure out if something is misconfigured on my 400, instead of buying a 5 or 500. I have some FOMO because of expected further increases in ram and ssd prices, but meh.

The pi 4 and pi 5 both have 64 bit cpu architecture, though it’s sort of possible that the 400 has a 32 bit OS (I just used the default one). Maybe I’ll check into it and see if I can run an OS that I’m sure is 64 bit. Thanks!

Ah, oh well, thanks for the effort with homedepot. Yeah all sites on the 400 were bad, but homedepot was especially bad. I guess aliexpress is also pretty bad so if you can view that, it’s a good sign ;).

If you’re in the US, can you homedepot.com on your pi 3? How much ram does it have? That was interesting to hear. Thanks.

Thanks, I actually never tried Firefox on my 400. I only tried the built-in Raspbian browser which I think might be Chromium based. The 400 has 4GB of ram which should really be enough to view any reasonable web page, I hope? I mean just the one page, not 100 open tabs at the same time. Anyway, the 500+ has 16GB of ram, and I browse a lot right now with an x86 laptop with 4GB. So whatever the problem with the 400 was, I don’t think it was ram per se. CPU too slow, SD card too low, browser too slow, some combination of the above.

I got the 400 for purposes unrelated for browsing and it worked fine for that. I only tried browsing a few times and it was awful, so I just didn’t use it for that. But now I think of migrating from my laptop to a Pi 5 or 500, so have to ask about this.

That’s good to hear, thanks. I wonder why the pi 4 is so bad. It’s much worse than my lower-midrange mobile phone, for example.

Lol oops, thanks.

Thanks, I appreciate it. The 400’s built in browser was unusable and I never got around to trying Firefox on it. It didn’t occur to me to try another OS distro. I just used Raspian (what the box came with) and I’ll presumably keep doing so. But the 500’s faster cpu, more ram, and SSD, should all help.

A reddit post I saw suggested Firefox was slowed down due to a ton of small disc writes to the SD card. Maybe it’s better with the SSD.

Do you have to disclose 5 years of social media to get that?

$500 and $630, respectively. Lol. Do not want.

I’ve bought most of mine on craiglist but either way you sort of have to know what you’re doing. I’d say just sort by price and scroll through the results in the range you want to pay. You might also filter on “within 25 miles” or whatever, and get a unit that you can pick up in person. Or at least, try to talk to the person on the phone to get a sense that they know what it is that they are selling.

Thinkpads forum is still around and has a forsale section. It has slowed down but is still active:

https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewforum.php?f=11

I’ve bought stuff from there in the distant past.

This looks like vague handwaving. I don’t see a mathematical idea there.

My sister has a 13 inch ipad and it’s a nice size, 14" should be fine. I have some doubts about the big Lenovo though. My main interest is reading full page PDFs so anything less than 14" will be annoying. Ok I’ll give it more thought. Laptop prices are going to go up because of the dram shortage too. Sigh.

Good luck with that. Maybe also incorporate Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics.

Thanks, it is kind of intriguing though I keep telling myself to just use normal Linux stuff instead of Android. I’d want the 14 inch one which is around $300. Is there any trouble installing F-droid and apps from there?

Alternatives I’m thinking of include Lenovo Yoga laptop (16 inch) and a Raspberry Pi thing with an HDMI monitor (that would be plug-in only but I mostly read at home).

Well, MCU programming and hardware is another thing to know about ahead of time, but ok. There are tons of displays of all sizes on waveshare.com if you want. Tons more on aliexpress. A standard large billboard is apparently 48 ft wide (per web search) so you’d want to scale accordingly. Maybe with e-ink to simulate a reflective billboard. OLED’s would be for neon signs and stuff.

I like the Raspberry Pi Pico because it’s very well documented, but yeah, ESP32 stuff might be cheaper.

Post some pics when it’s working!

I think if you don’t already have a more solid plan than that, then this project is probably too complicated for now, and you might start with a single display. If the origina megacity is 22 miles across (fairly small for a megacity) then 1/220th of that is 1/10th of a mile which is pretty huge. A standard 48 foot billboard would scale to 2.6 inches wide.

I thought syncthing had fallen out of favor some years ago. I have nextcloud but I don’t currently use automatic sync so I can’t compare them.