Android Tablet

[Kent Borg]

While Edward Ned Harvey and Richard Pieri were disagreeing I was doing a 
little experimenting. Certainly, Android is essentially an embedded box 
with a userland that is both limited and strange, but I can do things.

Though T-Mobile blocks port 2222 (and probably everything else), I can 
fire up quicksshd to listen on 2222, then use connectbot to ssh out with 
a reverse tunnel of 2222. Now an "ssh -p 2222 localhost" on my external 
machine gets me in.

Or, do a tether (USB or Wifi) and I can ssh to the phone's current 
T-Mobile address and not worry about any tunnels.

Make a bunch of busybox symbolic links in the 
/data/data/com.teslacoilsw.quicksshd/dropbear directory (which is on the 
path) and it starts to be almost useful.


- - = = - -


As for tablets replacing notebooks, I remember once seeing an old thing 
about how electric lighting was getting to be old-hat, and soon people 
will have a household electric motor! That could be used for *lots* of 
cool stuff. (Really!)

We don't have general purpose household motors, motors have disappeared 
inside many appliances. (Even inside my Android phone: a little 
mis-weighted motor is the vibrator.) Certainly, general purpose electric 
motors have not disappeared from our homes, but they are now on the 
workbench in the basement, mostly in the form we call a "drill". Big 
Kitchenaid mixers still have a PTO ("power take-off", any farm kids on 
the list?) to take advantage of that powerful motor, but mostly people 
don't really use it.

Reminds me of the idea that someday people will have home computers. 
("Yeah, sure, tell me all about it. I suppose you are going to keep 
recipes on it and calculate ingredient lists for custom batches. Get 
ready to measure 0.73 eggs!")

Home computers came, and now they are disappearing into appliances. 
Sure, some of these appliances will still take advantage of the 
flexibility of computers and be programmable, but it looks like the 
"programmable" will be limited to things like app stores. They are still 
appliances.

Soon, if you want a general purpose computer, you will have to buy a 
specialty item. You BLU people started out weird for being interested in 
computers, and you will finish weird for being interested in computers. 
Your dalliance with the mainstream was a fluke, normal people have no 
more interest in computers than they do in electric motors. (In a few 
years it will make perfect sense to reanimate The Boston Computer Society.)

If you start hacking your appliances to harness the computer you will 
void warranties as fast as you would if you started dismantling your 
dishwasher to harness the motor. Kind of sad because computers are so 
flexible, but it makes sense.


-kb