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Best Screen for Coding on the Beach?
7 points by londons_explore on July 23, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments
Summer is here for most of us, and the ability to get stuff done from the beach would be amazing.

How can it be done?

Sandproof, waterproof, sunlight readable, all-day battery powered computing device wanted with sufficient power for compiling stuff.

Bonus points if it has an ice-maker.

Does it exist? What's the closest?



No ice-maker but I'll second mymail about Panasonic toughbooks. I used to be involved with 911 systems in the U.S. (EMS/Fire etc) and we provided the crews all with toughbook laptops on the ambulances and eventually toughbook tablets for electronic medical records. If anyone can kill a computer it is a paramedic, I took grief in the press because some police agencies were using cheaper toshiba's in their cars which were like $1k where my toughbooks were like $4k, difference was every-time we did have one break, Panasonic replaced it for FREE, even out of warranty the costs were minimal to get a new machine essentially. And they didn't break often so I could go for 3 years on a single machine, the toshiba's were good machines but replaced annually typically.

I live in a coastal community and literally the crews had these things on the beach, a couple of times dropped in the shallows and picked back up and still fully functional. Those machines are insane. Had one medic drop one in a horse trough full of water, he literally called me and was worried about picking it up out of the water. I told him pick it up, dry it off and let me know if he was good, he did and used the computer the rest of his shift.

One drawback is they typically aren't the latest CPU or the fastest machines but they were always solid. I haven't used one in years but I would venture to bet they are still the same way.


What I tried to do was buying Onyx Boox Nova Pro [1]

It is a fairly decent ebook reader, with decent PDF support, stylus and a nice note-taking app.

The interesting thing is, it has bluetooth-support and runs Android 6 (heavily modified, it still is a reader-first) but you can run Termux on it.

I ran into some problems with 32bit processor it runs and it isn't the fastest, but I was able to do some i.e. Rust excercises :-)

It even has blue-tooth, so you can hookup a real keyboard to it.

[1] https://onyxboox.com/boox_novapro


Speaking from recent experience, do NOT use a 2016 Macbook Pro. Ambient humidity in Cancun snuck into the screen and I've had it sitting in front of a large dehumidifier for a couple weeks. It's noticeably better, as in it's Japan-shaped instead of Africa-shaped, but it's still present. It was nowhere near water and had no pre-existing physical defects.


I need a real, full sized keyboard. I can't do real work on a laptop keyboard. Worse, I can't do real work on a laptop that has a touchpad just below the keyboard. I'm always bumping the touchpad and having the mouse jump to a different part of the window. That's very very not good when editing code...


Palm rejection is a thing even on Linux


This sounds like something that could make my life better. How do I enable it or activate it or whatever, on Windows? Any gotchas that I ought to know about?


Those toughbooks are getting more and more powerful. They're made for jungle and desert (military contractors), have replaceable batteries, can be operated with gloves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnJAtSapAnQ




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