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by dracyr 97 days ago
I just spent vacation deciding not to bring a laptop, but to use my android phone (a galaxy s22) with a hdmi adapter and Bluetooth travel keyboard. Plugged it in to the TV in our accomodation and had a lot of fun.

Running neovim on termux was fine. Developing elixir was no problem, the test suite took 5s on my phone, and takes 1s on my laptop. Rust and cargo compiling was slow enough that I didn't really enjoy it though.

Meant that I could just pack up instantly and have an agent do review workflows while I was out and about as well in my pocket, and didn't really notice a big battery hit.

5 comments

Interesting vacation activities.
Ikr. Vacation for me would be : get away from electronics as much as possible. Maybe stay connected with family or do payments but not beyond that.
I brought my 13 inch macbook pro to japan for three weeks last month for photo editing. i was able to pack up immediately by slipping it into my backpack laptop pocket.

Not sure the difference other than weight, but I wasn't carrying it day to day when i could leave it in my hotel room.

I don't really enjoy compiling rust on my M2 Pro, so I wouldn't necessarily blame the phone
Local LLMs and compiling rust are the only two things that I have seen saturate my M4 Max, hahaha.
And nowadays we have Debian running in a VM on Android [1]

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-use-the-new-linux-termi...

This doesn't really sound like a vacation.
Seems like vacation from things you have to do to things you enjoy doing.
Exactly that, I have too many ideas for side-projects and never enough time for them.

The main activity was still the traveling, hiking and enjoying some calm time. But instead of spending the usual downtime reading or something else, I had a blast coding and experimenting.

According to Google AI > A vacation (American English) or holiday (British English) is a designated period of time for rest, recreation, or travel, often taken away from home. It involves a break from work or school routines, usually lasting several days or weeks. Vacations are crucial for mental health, reducing stress, and fostering better relationships.

So maybe different meaning for everyone. For me it’s getting away from technology and into nature.

> a break from work... are crucial for mental health

When I'm hacking on my Linux desktop automation scripts on my free time, I can assure you that my good mood is positively contributing to my mental health.

> So maybe different meaning for everyone.

Indeed.