MNT Pocket Reform: a (literal) field test

Using the Pocket Reform outdoors

I am typing this while sitting in the Fountain Garden at Hampton Court Palace, as a test of being out with it. We are at the Hampton Court Food Festival today.

It is a sunny day but the sun is behind me, and I have the screen in my shadow. It is a reflective screen though, so it is not ideal in bright sun. The laptop is balanced on my legs and I’m able to type OK – not super fast still, but getting there (and I have read others in the forums comment about how they have been-able to level up their typing speed on the Pocket).

I’m using the GNOME app, Apostrophe, to do this basic writing, although I’ve also been using a number of TUI apps at the console for a lot of tasks. When I started out, I installed Tilix, which is a console app I use on other Linux machines, in place of Foot which is the default installed on the Pocket; I’m currently using Alacritty instead, as it is fast and minimal. I think I’d been put off from Alacritty before from the lack of menus or GUI for configuration, but do I really need those? Discovering that maybe they are overrated.

The laptop is sitting at 94% battery right now. I think it would benefit from a brightness slider adjustment for the screen (by default, the reform-tray tool only offers low and high brightness options). I just used brightnessctl s 80 to turn it down a bit to save on power.

I don’t have mobile phone data right now – I am on the EE network – when we come to this event, I usually do find that the network is patchy. I didn’t put my WWAN / modem card in the laptop before we came out, and I don’t know whether the SIM I am using (which is a network called Smarty) would fare any better! So this is an offline-only deal, which to be honest is fine for writing purposes.

CPU and Performance

I’ve experimented with the Banana Pi RCM4 A311D SoC module in the past week, and that works really nicely and runs slightly cooler than the default Freescale NXP i.MX8M Plus that came in the Pocket from Crowd Supply. I’ve now ordered the RK3588 SoC which will be available soon, as that will give a bigger performance boost and add much more memory. Day-to-day though, although I tinkered with the A311D option, so far the i.MX8MP has been fine for my current limited usage.

Noting that as I’ve been sitting here, the CPU temperature has barely gone near 60C – there is a light breeze out, I am in the shade slightly and the wifi is not doing anything right now, plus I’m not heavily stressing the machine with code compilation or anything like that.

Customisations

A few changes I’ve made to improve the default setup:

• I am using Sway over Wayfire. I’ve not really used tiling window managers before, and I’m still trying to get the shortcuts and patterns into my muscle memory, but I think this is ideal for a constrained display.
• I changed to a scaled display (output DSI-1 scale 1.5 in my .config/sway/config file) which means there is a bit more space for content without breaking my ability to read the text.
• the default system is based on Debian unstable, which means paying attention to bug reports if I run any package upgrades; I’ve learned to love apt mark and apt unmark.
• I borrowed a bunch of Waybar config from others, and now have the CPU load, temperature, multiple workspaces etc showing there. I’m sure that I should put my dotfiles online somewhere, at some point.
• I installed a lot of tools that have proven to be helpful. Definitely a non-exhaustive list, and YMMV as to whether they are useful to your workflows.
  wavemon, nvme-cli, hdparm, blktool, avahi-utils, mdns-scan, zip and unzip, build-essential to get compilers etc and git, fdisk, lshw, cups, plocate, fastfetch (ok this one is more just, “because…”), iw, wdisplays, azote, srain.

(BTW, reform-fetch is an alias I made that formats fastfetch to include the MNT logo etc, don’t look for it as a default tool)

I’m hoping that suspend and hibernate are possible in the future, as it would mean that I can shut the lid and throw in my bag when done and pick right back up where I left off later, but it’s not a huge issue for me right now. It is an ideal size for a small messenger satchel I tend to carry around town.

This post is a follow-up to my previous one about the MNT Pocket Reform, feel free to check that out if this was interesting. The Pocket Reform is now available directly in the MNT Shop with a choice of processor modules.