Portable personal computing
Tobias Buckell likes the idea of taking his computing environment with him wherever he goes, but doesn’t want to carry a full-sized laptop. The post and discussion there is regarding various ways to package up your OS, frequently-used apps, and home directory on a thumb drive or an iPod and whenever you need to use a computer away from home, you just boot using that portable data storage as your drive.
I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and I think it’s just a stopgap measure. Right now laptops, while portable, are generally bigger than most people want to carry everywhere with them, and PDAs or UMPCs are really too small to effectively use for anything other than simple computing tasks. I want something that provides the full functionality of a laptop with the portability of a PDA. Carrying your personal stuff around with you and booting into it is all well and good, but what would really be most useful is an unobtrusive wearable computer that, when activated, can function just like a desktop. With a head-mountable display device that looks to the user like a full-size monitor, a tiny chorded keyboard/mouse that can easily be manipulated with one hand, and an iPod-sized CPU/battery/flash drive combo to do the processing, you could easily take your entire computer with you. None of this rebooting other computers to use your environment, or attempting to type on a tiny fold-out thumb keyboard.
For more information in this vein, see the wearable and life_recorder tags on qumbler.
