Cyberdecks (2013)

https://blog.rfox.eu/en/Hardware/Cyberdecks.html

by keiferski • 3 years ago

188 104 3 years ago

blog.rfox.eu

thih9• 3 years ago

Can we add 2016 to the title? The article starts with the "2016/02/13" date. Current title is just "Cyberdecks".

appplication• 3 years ago

They updated the title but the wrong year

alexpotato• 3 years ago

Didn't Immersed + Oculus 2 basically create the Virtual Desktop mentioned in the article?

swiftcoder3• 3 years ago

The one mentioned in the article exists as a commercial product too: https://www.vrdesktop.net/

tetris112• 3 years ago

I'd be interested to know what SDXL generates for "cyberdeck" based on the images, hopefully some of which come from this article

washadjeffmad3• 3 years ago

I'm making focaccia this morning, but give me an hour or two and I'll post a link.

washadjeffmad3• 3 years ago

"an hour or two"

https://imgur.com/a/mzQpB1u

minimal prompting - just variations on "handheld electronic cyberdeck, netrunner OR cyperpunk"

throwaway333817• 3 years ago

I always felt that a lot of the aesthetic choices in the cyberpunk genre have been subject to scrutiny as the genre aged. Things like black leather outfits to punk rock. The overall tone of cyberpunk as a genre has always been a favorite of mine. But that it hasn't really changed too much in the decades that came. Instead derivates instead of additions and adjustments to the core cyberpunk genre.

The Cyberdeck itself is well gone a bit off the rails, personally I think a more modern rendition work be more about discreteness it would provide in contrast to a conventional notebook, along with it's utility purposes. But the more modern renditions still heavily favor brick like designs which is fine, sometimes I wish the genre would change. Personally I think the addition of virtual reality and it's inclusion since early on in the genre was a mistake by authors who at the time didn't have an understanding of what the cyberspace really was. This is getting long but if anyone wants to talk I'm all ears.

swiftcoder3• 3 years ago

Personally I think the addition of virtual reality and it's inclusion since early on in the genre was a mistake by authors who at the time didn't have an understanding of what the cyberspace really was

It remains a neat way to get around the display problem, though. Even if most practical work in cyberspace takes place on 2D surfaces, nobody really wants to cart around a pair of 34 inch 4k monitors to work on the go.

throwaway333817• 3 years ago

Yeah that's true. Though usually I see more of a retinal display but that's also more of a times piece sort of thing. Carrying around goggles is also kind of makes you really stand out. Google Glasses were pretty interesting in the early 2010s. Realistically for a netrunner, you aren't even really coding while you're at the location, Mr.Robot does a good job with this but in a different way.

JKCalhoun5• 3 years ago

It may be a little boring but a laptop is basically a "cyber deck".

keiferski• 3 years ago

I generally agree with you, even though I have a soft spot for the 80s-inspired aesthetic that cyberpunk refuses to leave behind. Part of its staying power, I think, is because there simply hasn’t been an alternative “tech aesthetic” with as much appeal since. Devices themselves are no longer sculptural forms but just basic slabs of glass. Nor does there seem to be a relationship between computers and fashion style, as there sort of used to be.

This can also probably be placed in context with the general “death of genre” that has happened since the early 2000s.

throwaway333817• 3 years ago

Personally I don't think Cyberpunk as a genre has died but rather that it had failed to adapt, by the early 00s we weren't as sure as to how technology would progress into the future and many of the existing assumptions they had made were wrong. Publishers were tending to become less interested in continuing it as many parts of the writing world sort of just began to shift to a field of disrepair.

With science fiction as a whole as a genre sort of just wavering off, the problems with writing a systemic whole and how authorship works making it impossible for any progress to really be made. Comic books as well during this period began to waver off sales slumping as progressively all genres have begun to collapse.

I know that several artists and writers are barely even struggling to get by. Essentially being screwed by the industry they had trusted to take care of them. Neil Gaiman talked about it, how he was paid $40 dollars per comic at times. Those rates are still the exact same today, not exactly 40 dollars but not livable. The same happened to Clarke's World and various other science fiction magazines like Asimov. I'd argue the genre did not die, the entire writing community supporting it has died.

swiftcoder3• 3 years ago

I'm absolutely here for retro hacking aesthetic inspired by the late 90's candy-coloured iMac phase

samstave• 3 years ago

Personally, I think that all the nostolgia with cyberpunk, at least for me, is that I grew up in the 80s and Neuromancer was a formitave book for me... and the thing is, as someone who has helped build the tech world we live in --

"Wouldnt it be cool if" was inspired in me and my ilk that we saw these opportunities in tech, and though "wouldnt it be cool if we did XYZ"

And then, as tech nerds from the 80s - we brought as much sci-fi and cyberpunk as we could to how we built out the technoscape.

While being too young to understand the consequences of "what if"... and thus we have Snowden and Wikileaks, and 100% surveillance state... and now we have FN UAP confirmation in the USG...

Cyberpunk has basically molded modern society even if one may not want to acknowledge it.

postmodest• 3 years ago

Having grown up in that era, I think the "cyberpunk" look is very much tied to the end of the 70's nostalgia for the counter-culture of the 50's (I'd even argue that Punk is the first symptom of that nostalgia; a reaction to the hippie aesthetic and a look back to the postwar rebellion of surplus military leather-wear.) So cyberpunk as a vibe is a neon Disco veneer atop the inward-looking exhaustion about the failed Space Age, over a substrate of 50's nostalgia. It was a mash up of dated styles from the start, ageless in the way that all postmodern thing are, because it refuses to imagine a "present", it's just a blend of every past moment.

Cyberdecks in particular though, are dated, because they imagined a Present, and came from the mind of an author whose idea of "a machine that creates a consensual hallucination" was the very typewriter he was using to hallucinate the tale. Gibson had never used a computer when he wrote Neuromancer. So his model starts with what he knows, and alludes to the computers of the day: typewriters you plug into your Sony TV. Having read the book in the 80's, I imagined the cyberdeck as being something between an ZX Spectrum and a TI-99. It had that Bertone wedge aesthetic, and was black. A Keyboard with a ROM slot for the Dixie Flatline. Because while Neuromancer was nominally a sci-fi novel, it wasn't imagining anything new in the way that other Big Science space-age authors did. It was a beat-inspired noir novel about demonology and ghosts, that only happened to take place in the future. It was in its own way backward-looking nostalgia.

And that's why I think it's hard to "date" Cyberpunk: it's not so much futurism as it is encompassing the whole 20th century ("Le Vingtième Siècle" if you will...) and placing it in the future context as a way of transposing it for examination.

coldtea• 3 years ago

Opposite take:

I don't see any 50s nostalgia or "postwar rebellion of surplus military leather-wear" in Bladerunner, one of the biggest influences in the cyberpunk aesthetics (even bigger than Neuromancer, who mostly provided language and concepts, not the look).

I do see 40s noir aesthetics, combined with the "rising Japan", "corporatism", and "dystopian future" ideas of the mid-late 70s.

And Gibson wasn't that far off with his Cyberdeck either. 40 years later and hs description is not that different to a Mac Mini, a Raspberry Pi 400, or even, with some minor form adjustments, to the Apple Vision setup.

If anything both our "cyberspace" and machines are still lackluster compared to the imaginations of that era, even with the authors being "soft" sci-fi and not into engineering.

I don't think it's "hard to date" cyberpunk either. It's a distinctive early 80s vision. The reason that it still looks cool, is because we've lost the knack for inventing new visions of the future (or even bold looking industrial design that's not some minimal Braun inspired fare).

forgetfulness• 3 years ago

I think that what makes Cyberpunk appealing has changed over time; it once reflected the concerns of the day, it invited you to reflect about the present and the future looking forward, now it offers solace in familiarity, with the social problems it presented being something that people are used to coping with, it invites you to look into a familiar past.

Back then, it explored the mystery of what the surge of computer technology in daily life meant, and what their makers would become as they grew more powerful. We know how that played out now.

It speculated on what the direction taken by the hegemon of the West, the United States, meant for common people in the future, as it vested itself on the idea that removing fetters on large businesses would deliver boons on the far less powerful, entirely atomized individual. We're well into that now.

The architectural aesthetic was familiar then, more so now. Fear over Japanese investments in the US seem quaint and innocuous, though the wealth transfer from West to East took that was prognosticated was as difficult as portrayed.

That's all forecasting from the state of affairs of the early 80s.

Reading cyberpunk today is done more an act of escapism from the struggles tearing at the seams of society today than exploring current or new ones.

Cyberware and bioware aren't part of the transhumanist experience that cyberpunk primed you for; instead, we have the polemics surrounding the transgender experience, with an intense debate and division on what it means to accept it, going as far as questioning if society should accept it.

Renegades working outside the law aren't clad in anything derived from Punk, that British subculture of rowdy youths espousing familiar ideologies in unsophisticated ways; what we got instead is the aesthetic created by the racial minorities of the US and their feedback loop with the countries of origin of the gangers proper, or their parents, or grandparents, which have more elements that are difficult to deal with for onlookers or people affected by them, from their origin, to consequences, and biases. These people give no space to the rugged individualist, the cartel will demand the submission of individuals to it like a fief, the liberty that the cyberpunk protagonist enjoyed at the margins of society doesn't exist.

29athrowaway3• 3 years ago

High tech = cyber, low life = punk

Income inequality and resource scarcity will make the average person a cyberpunk.

jhbadger• 3 years ago

Cyber actually means self-regulating. It comes from the Greek for "good at steering". Cybernetics was the study of self-regulating systems. I'm not sure where computers and high tech got in the picture other than the fact that cybernetics researchers used computers to analyze things.

joshspankit3• 3 years ago

I think this comment highlights why cyberpunk has fallen by the wayside.

Even in the 80s, the mainstream culture didn’t understand what cyberpunk (or even punk) represented. Now? probably less so.

Cyberpunk chose not to endorse the oppressive system and it’s heroes were not just self reliant but collaborative. The aesthetic said “your cultural ‘ideals’ are not ours. Keep your distance (because that means we are bothered less by you)”. (Cyber)punk is only counter-culture because of the prevalence of the culture around it. Otherwise it would just be an alternate culture on it’s own.

The reason they were labelled “low lives” or criminals is due to the fact that that culture still had to operate within the bounds of western capitalism.

As a thought experiment to everyone (though will this land if you don’t at least have second-hand knowledge of the existing societal problems? I’m not sure): If you choose not to participate in the credit system and don’t already have money, where do you sleep without being called a criminal or a vagrant? How do you feed yourself without having access to tillable land? How do you communicate with others to expand ideas and share resources?

vorpalhex• 3 years ago

One of the important concepts in cyberpunk, and this applies to the cyberdeck, is the customization of hardware and connectedness between the power user (the jockey) and their gear.

A good cyberdeck isn't clean or new. It's well used, customized, hand repaired.

Which means it has to be customizable and hand repairable. Which (in the common mind) means chunky. Cyberdecks are about a love affair with good tech (full size mechanical keyboard, a trackball, an outdated OS) than slick hardware.

When brand new slick cyberdecks show up in cyberpunk culture they aren't the ones that belong to hackers but signs of a corporate entity. The classic trope is the jockey who takes on a corporate job and discovers his employer is actually a corp because they provide some hot and brand new cyberdeck.

The hacker/jockey/protagonist subverts their culture because they have a personal connection to their tech. It is not disposable, it is loved.

krainboltgreene• 3 years ago

A good cyberdeck isn't clean or new. It's well used, customized, hand repaired.

This is not by choice, the subjects of the fiction are criminals who largely do not have legal means to get new equipment.

navane• 3 years ago

A lot of emphasis on neuromamcer was on punk, you know, from cyber punk. 70s punk, dirty, scraggy, poor, filth. This part is omitted in a lot of later Cyberpunk. The cyber part, the internet, was very different envisioned than it turned out to be. Today, cyberpunk is not a vision of a future, but an alternative reality for today. The parts where megacorps are running the world, including militech, resonates, but of course the implementation differences are numerous.

ehutch79• 3 years ago

Cyberpunk is 100% a product of the 80s.

I disagree that it should change. Moving beyond what it was kind of ruins it, in the same ways 80s horror movies could be solved with a cell phone.

It's better to look at it as a sub-grene or alternate historical fiction.

gpderetta• 3 years ago

I think you have to distinguish between the aesthetic and the themes. The former, is very definitely tied to the '80 and it feel very retro-futuristic today (still cool in its own way).

The themes I think are still relevant today, so much that they are hardly sci-fi anymore.

joshspankit3• 3 years ago

Now that you mention it, I’d like to see a modern version based on “solar punk” https://youtu.be/z-Ng5ZvrDm4

bloopernova2• 3 years ago

I'd like a cyberdeck that uses a Linux tablet as its display. So I could dock it and use a good small mechanical keyboard, maybe a low profile Keychron, or use it on the go.

An Android tablet would also do, since there's a lot that can be done with Termux, but I'd much rather have a "real" Linux device.

Seeing a keyboard like this one[1] makes me wish I could get some sort of origami fold out dock for a tablet, that would be so cool I'd have to wear shades indoors.

[1] https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/75acdf98-6bb5-4d5b-8dd5-a87...

seltzered_• 3 years ago

I've been using this as my setup for two years, but I've been calling it more humbly an ergonomic mobile computer ( https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/ ) , not a cyberdeck.

I'm aiming more for a boring everyday setup to hopefully own less electronics compared to the virtualism/maximalism/tacticool stuff I see in the cyberdeck world. The other thing is I hesitate around maximizing around personal computing - I think we need setups friends can walk up to and use when appropriate.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/comments/vzs8mm... for my particular linux tablet setup.

bloopernova2• 3 years ago

Oh that is really nice, thank you for sharing!

WillAdams• 3 years ago

Now that Raspberry PIs are back in stock, I'm actually working on this concept using a Wacom One screen.

The RasPad v3 isn't too far from it:

https://raspad.com/products/raspadv3

but touch only, no stylus.

maxwell• 3 years ago

Now that Raspberrt PIs are back in stock

Didn't see retail 8 GB models in probably over a year, had to confirm, sweet:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/raspberry-pi/RASP...

Beached2• 3 years ago

I am really close to buying the astro slide for this reason. they plan to support debian, and I'm just waiting for the day that they say debian is fully supported to buy one.

syx• 3 years ago

Nice article I would say the most cyberdeck looking computers from 80s would probably be MSX/MSX2. I remember reading a blog post from a guy converting an old MSX to a working cyberdeck using Raspberry Pi. Now I want to look up the article again!

hoherd• 3 years ago

Adafruit makes a cyberdeck HAT for the pi400 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4863 It's definitely not the same aesthetic as what people think of as a cyberdeck, but as far as retail cyberdecks go, it might be the closest thing.

Beached2• 3 years ago

I have one of these and they work well, my only issue is display support is limited. running this with a secondary display isn't currently support, you will have to write that yourself. also, window scaling and resizing of windows is not fully supported and you have issues with normal daily use at a screen that size.

if you are 100% sold on a single 3.5" screen and no gui, then it will work. outside of that, it's a novelty item

slim• 3 years ago

that pictured black msx with double cartridge + diskette is a Sakhr

https://www.msx.org/wiki/Sakhr_AX-370

karaterobot• 3 years ago

I love that they credit Tumblr and Pinterest for the illustrations, most of which are just taken from the Shadowrun sourcebook. It would be like me crediting The Pirate Bay as the director of a movie.

anthk9• 3 years ago

Sometimes I fire up a MegaDrive/Genesis Shadowrun romhack under Mednafen, it adds lots of stuff and balances the game difficulty a bit down.

ChikkaChiChi• 3 years ago

Most underrated game of all time. Thanks for the tip on the hacked version.

chongli• 3 years ago

Ahhh, I thought this would be about real cyberdecks people are actually building now. These devices are basically laptops without a hinge. A "slab" computer with a small, wide-format display and a compact mechanical keyboard layout. They seem to be an off-shoot of the mechanical keyboard builder hobby.

nvy2• 3 years ago

The overwhelming majority of cyberdecks I see get posted on reddit are basically raspi + pelican case + ortho/ergodox. It's grown quite stale and certainly almost none of these devices get toted around despite the emphasis on portability in the source material.

I think a really useful cyberdeck would be something like one of the old chunky ThinkPads with the guts replaced with something smaller, leaving space for a KVM switch and other interconnects/peripherals, so that you can use its keyboard and display for an external server box, or accessing the serial console on random digital signage boxes/IOT things.

JKCalhoun5• 3 years ago

Prefer to see more SDR (Software Defined Radio) decks. If this isn't a thing, it should be.

Bystroushaak• 3 years ago

The overwhelming majority of cyberdecks I see get posted on reddit are basically raspi + pelican case + ortho/ergodox. It's grown quite stale and certainly almost none of these devices get toted around despite the emphasis on portability in the source material.

Yeah, that's basically why I disassociated myself with the subreddit and gave admin to someone else. Originally, I wanted a shared place to have links to interesting projects, but what was for me about functionality, was for most of the others about aesthetics.

eternityforest• 3 years ago

It's just extra stress to go out and do real work with handmade tools. Now I have two points of failure. The cyberdeck (unless I have a backup regular laptop) and the actual device I'm working on. If either goes wrong the client is unhappy and I get yelled at(or more likely, they don't actually yell but might like to). Making a cyberdeck as reliable as a laptop is going to be hard, there's lots of mechanical stuff to consider. Might be worth it, but I wouldn't trust a random reddit build with an important job I don't think.

The pi is just OK at best for actually using like a laptop.

I think a really useful cyberdeck would probably be something that could be put together with no soldering or real diy, just 3d printed aesthetic parts, a tablet and keyboard, power bank, etc, nicely mounted but still just some gear in a box like a normal technician would carry.

Or, something not at all meant to be used like a computer, that isn't already portable. No reason solar generators or NASes or something can't look like cyberdecks.

Or maybe something modular in multiple cases. Keyboard/monitor/serial adapter/battery/Ethernet in one, just use a phone for the actual computer part to ssh into stuff, or a secondary pi box if you really need it.

TigeriusKirk• 3 years ago

I just set the device name in my phone as "cyberdeck" and called it a day.

ruleryak• 3 years ago

The article is from 2016, not 13. I was confused for a minute, like wait did the rift come out then years ago? 2016 was a fairly monumental year for VR and hmds

DonHopkins• 3 years ago

The Deck I would like to build: Given unlimited budget and access to good workshop, I would build highly customized workstation, with highly customized software.

I was playing around with the Smalltalk/Self/Alternate Reality Kit kind of highly customized software side of that equation in NeWS PostScript, with the PSIBER Space Deck and Pseudo Scientific Visualizer (inspired by Gibson's Neuromancer of course):

The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...

Abstract: The PSIBER Space Deck is an interactive visual user interface to a graphical programming environment, the NeWS window system. It lets you display, manipulate, and navigate the data structures, programs, and processes living in the virtual memory space of NeWS. It is useful as a debugging tool, and as a hands on way to learn about programming in PostScript and NeWS.
PostScript Source Code Available Here:

http://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/NeWS/litecyber/

Introduction: Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding …. [Gibson, Neuromancer]

[...]

The Pseudo Scientific Visualizer
Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become… And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something tore. The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case’s consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be counted. [Gibson, Neuromancer]
The Pseudo Scientific Visualizer is the object browser for the other half of your brain, a fish-eye lens for the macroscopic examination of data. It can display arbitrarily large, arbitrarily deep structures, in a fixed amount of space. It shows form, texture, density, depth, fan out, and complexity.
It draws a compound object as a circle, then recursively draws its elements, scaled smaller, in an evenly spaced ring, rotated around the circle. The deeper an object, the smaller it is. It will only draw to a certain depth, which you can change while the drawing is in progress.
It has simple graphical icons for different data types. An array is a circle, and a dictionary is a circle with a dot. The icon for a string is a line, whose length depends on the length of the string. A name is a triangle. A boolean is a peace sign or an international no sign. An event is an envelope. A process is a Porsche.
It randomly forks off several light weight processes, to draw different parts of the display, so there is lots of drawing going on in different places at once, and the overlapping is less regular.
After the drawing is complete, the circular compound objects become mouse sensitive, selectable targets. The targets are implemented as round transparent NeWS canvases. When you move the cursor over one, it highlights, and you can click on it to zoom in, pop up a description of it, open up another view of it, or select it, and then push it onto the stack of the PSIBER Space Deck.
Figure 9 shows a Pseudo Scientific Visualization of the NeWS rootmenu instance dictionary, also shown in figure 3 and figure 8. Figure 10 shows two views of a map of Adventure. Figure 11 shows two views of a map of the ARPAnet. [...]

[...]

References: [...] Shu, Nan C.: Visual Programming; 1988; Van Nostrand Reinhold; New York

https://archive.org/details/visualprogrammin00shu_2pf

anthk9• 3 years ago

    - Get a netbook, even the libretto would work with a wired conn/pcmpcia/wifi-wpa2 would work with a  custom current-ish kernel such as Hyperbola GNU/Linux once you strip linux-libre of all the unneded junk.

    - Connect kbtin or tintinplusplus to cs.netsville.com 

    - type in "help"

Congrats, you got a recursive retrofuturist experience.

Also, if you use slrn/lynx/links/irssi/gopher/gemini software/networks, you already are in the retro cyberpunk dream.

Finally: gopher://midnight.pub or gemini://midnight.pub . Best viewed under sacc or bombadillo.

anthk9• 3 years ago

OK, I'l correct myself:

    cs.netsville.com 7777

That's it, a cyberpunk MUD.

wazoox• 3 years ago

The Hosaka OSC7 looks almost exactly like a TI99/4A... with a neural interface cartridge :)

retrocryptid• 3 years ago

Is it just me or does the Hosaka OSC 7 look an awful lot like a TI 99/4A?

corysama• 3 years ago

This is pretty darn close

https://www.theverge.com/23727583/spacetop-augmented-reality...

https://www.sightful.com/

throwaway2903• 3 years ago

The whole point of the cyberdeck was that it was a way to see VR in your minds eye rather than with a screen. Hence the no screen. I always thought the decks themselves would be rather boring looking - the keyboard would just be a black rectangle. Only Case could like the aesthetic in any way that was meaningful, which was why Armitage had to have his approval. To anyone else it just looks like a plastic brick.

29athrowaway3• 3 years ago

I recommend this post from the r/cyberdeck subreddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/comments/jzvvli/a_7_scree...

pimlottc• 3 years ago

The black and white line drawing of the Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 [0] is basically an exact copy of the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A [1]

0: https://blog.rfox.eu/en/Hardware/Cyberdecks/Untitled_12_thum...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A#/media/File:TI99-IMG_...

zoklet-enjoyer• 3 years ago

https://www.nathanandersonart.com/neuromancer

araes• 3 years ago

If you're doing a cyberdeck, and you already include some form of AR display, then why include the keyboard? Haptic feedback gloves [1] are already a thing, and would allow typing wherever. They frankly need to get smaller, and not include such bulky hardware, even if it means "light, soft" feedback, yet they exist. I'd be happy with a floating "type zone" and soft "you touched a key" response. Wolfram's mobile computing piece [2] was one of the only tech things I've been a bit envious of lately.

Now if smart/digital contacts could just get around all the patent fortresses / other issues, and actually produce a working product. Saw research prototypes back in the early 2000's. Apparently people are still trying. [3]

[1] https://www.manus-meta.com/vr-gloves

[2] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...

[3] https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/augmented-reality-co...

Groxx• 3 years ago

https://www.tapwithus.com/product/tap-strap-2/ seems like a very pragmatic option, tech-wise - I'm not convinced floating will ever actually be good. Bouncing off a surface is extremely efficient, self-calibrating, and basically always available in some form (e.g. tap on yourself).

ilyt• 3 years ago

Make it look like knuckle dusters and it will look cyberpunk too

Vecr• 3 years ago

Nah, typing on a keyboard is faster and more precise. I think having a split keyboard with each side on the cummerbund of your plate carrier (split by the mag pouches or med kit you have on the front of your carrier) would work better. Assuming you actually want this to be practical and not just an aesthetic/signaling thing.

rcarr2• 3 years ago

- Steam Deck

- Viture AR glasses

- Ferris Sweep 34 key Bluetooth Split Keyboard

- Magic Trackpad

This is my intended setup for long term travel, about as cyber deck as it gets.

valzam• 3 years ago

Have you tried the glasses already? I always wanted something like this but from the LinusTechTips review they seem horrible.

rcarr2• 3 years ago

Yes I've tried both the XReal Air and the Viture. I like them. The XReal pinch my head which is really fucking annoying which is the main reason I ended up going for the Viture. The Viture are crystal clear apart from the very edges which are a bit blurry. From comments I've read on reddit, I believe this might be due to mild astigmatism so I'm going to the opticians soon to get my prescription so I can get the custom lenses and see if that fixes it. I think this is the better way forward if you have myopia/astigmatism rather than using the myopia dials on the top of the glasses, I think I have very mild myopia in one eye (like -0.5 or something) so I played around with the dials and you can dial it in with a bit of trial an error but it is an annoying process trying to get it right - they really should have done it so that when you change the dial it shows you what level you're changing it to on the screen (e.g -0.25, -0.5, -0.75 whilst you're turning) which would have made it far easier. Other than that I think they're great. If you want more detail I did a bit of a longer post here where I go into a more detailed comparison of why I went with the Viture over the XReal:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36659411

causality0• 3 years ago

Odd to me that futurists always seem to eschew the power of convenience. Everything runs on a balance between opportunity and convenience. Technology is created to generate opportunity, then refined to create convenience without losing that opportunity. Decks were never going to take off because nobody wants to deal with a setup that has all the inconveniences of a laptop and a headset and almost none of the advantages of either. Not to mention that the nature of the internet means it's all available at home anyway. There's no advantage to hiding in the back of a delivery truck with your deck and breaking into an evil company's network from their underground parking lot when whatever exploit you used may as well be deployed from your multi-monitor desk at home.

bullen• 3 years ago

http://move.rupy.se/file/last_computer.png

If you want to drive VR you'll need minimum Jetson Nano and 15W.

prenoob• 3 years ago

Applause for the cyberdeck that looks like a TI99/4A.. saved

dtx1• 3 years ago

Whenever I get a swept into the Cyberdeck Youtube rabbit hole and think about building one, after a while of planning, Ideas, etc, I end up realising I just want a notebook with lots of USB Ports.

IOT_Apprentice• 3 years ago

I think back to the movie Hackers with a young Angelina Jolie. Lord Nikon, the Sony game at the arcade, the fight over the late night cable channel. Mess with the best, die like the rest.

Hack the Planet !

kmstout• 3 years ago

Imagine cleaning out the case of a Kaypro II [0], replacing the internals with a RPI or something more capable; the display with an LCD of the same size; and a large battery pack. After leaving a dedicated space for a flask of whiskey, you'd still have a lot of space to put in modules for extra capabilities.

[0] https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=550

gumby• 3 years ago

Deck or CyberDeck is this mobile computer first imagined by William Gibson in Neuromancer ...

The Cyberdeck was first used in the 1980 John M. Ford novel Web of Angels, about half a decade before Neuromancer, and before Vinge's far more influential "True Names" for that matter.

I have always had a fondness for Ford's cyberdeck as it had analog sliders as well (and a few other absurd features).

Cyberdecks (2013)

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