LPX

The DragonBox Pyra has a 5 inch screen and a dual-core ARM-based processor. But it's not a smartphone. In fact, this handheld computer looks more like a cross between a tiny laptop and a Nintendo DS game system.

It has a physical keyboard, a bunch of storage and input/output options, dedicated buttons for playing games, and Debian Linux software which allows you to play games or run desktop software including LibreOffice and Firefox.

The DragonBox Pyra is developed by a team led by Michael Mrozek, who wanted to create a system that not only runs open source software, but which also features open designs: anybody can open up the case and replace the parts or download the schematics to design their own case for the hardware... or design their own CPU board and insert it into the case.

Mrozek began taking pre-orders for the DragonBox Pyra on May 1st, 2016 and I reached out to him to discuss the project in more detail.

The Pyra is the spiritual successor to another project Mrozek had been involved with. The Pandora game console/computer had a similar design, but much less powerful hardware (because it was first designed nearly 10 years ago).

That project was plagued with financial problems and shipping delays, but Mrozek eventually took over the production and distribution of Pandora devices and says he doesn't anticipate the same sort of problems with the Pyra.

Under the hood, the Pyra is powered by a TI OMAP 5 dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 processor and supports 2GB or 4GB of RAM. It has a 5 inch, 1280 x 720 pixel touchscreen display and 32GB of eMMC flash storage.

There are also two full-sized SDXC card slots for removable storage, as well as an internal microSDXC card.

There's a 6,000 mAh removable battery, two full-sized USB 2.0 ports, a micro USB 3.0 port and another micro USB port for charging or debugging the device. And the system supports dual-band 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0.

Mrozek says the Pyra has a modular design, which should make it easy to upgrade or repair. There are CPU and display boards that are separate from the main system board.

So while the Pyra's 500 Euro ($575) price tag might seem kind of high, it should be possible to buy a new CPU board or other hardware in the future for a fraction of the full price.

Want to know more about the price, hardware selection, and philosophy behind the DragonBox Pyra? Then listen to LPX episode 8 for the full conversation with Michael Mrozek.

Here are some links to projects mentioned in this episode:

You can also follow Michael Mrozek on Twitter and YouTube.

And if you want to help support the LPX podcast, please consider making a donation to our Patreon campaign.

Are chatbots the new apps? A lot of developers seem to think so. Facebook and Microsoft have both rolled out tools that make it easy for coders to create bots that you can chat with on Facebook Messenger, Skype, and other platforms including plain old SMS text messaging.

I wanted to get a better sense of what chatbots are, what they can do, and why we should use them. So for this episode of the LPX Show, I interviews Robert Stephens. He's founder of the Geek Squad, he was chief technology officer for Best Buy after that company acquired Geek Squad, and now he's co-founder of a new chatbot service called Assist.

Stephens says today's chatbots are pretty simple. But eventually they could change the way we interact with businesses.

The idea is to let you interact with services without downloading and installing an app and without having to learn a new user interface. Just type to the bot the same way you would if you were sending a message to a friend.

You can use chatbots to get weather forecasts, book a car ride, receive news updates, or send flowers. As more developers adopt the platform, you may be able to do even more things. Chatbots are still in their infancy in the US and Europe. But they're big in China, where hundreds of millions of people use the popular messaging service WeChat, and many interact with chatbots on a daily basis.

Right now, there's not really a lot of reason for most people to use chatbots. Typing out a conversation with a chatbot isn't necessarily easier or faster than opening an app or web page and tapping a few buttons to order a pizza or read the latest news.

But they do make sense from a developer perspective... because they could solve a problem: app overload.

Right now you probably don't want to download different apps for every news source, every airline, every restaurant, and every financial institution you use. But if you can get the same information without installing an app, just by opening a message window and typing a question, then maybe you'll be more likely to interact with those institutions.

So developers are hoping that by jumping on the chatbot wagon, they'll make it more likely that you'll use their services.

Businesses also see promise in chatbots, because they could save companies money by handling a lot of customer requests that currently require a person.

The problem is that right now chatbots can be clunky and dumb. They might not be able to understand your questions. And you still might need to open a new chat window for every service you want to interact with... so instead of app overload, you might feel bot overload.

Maybe.

There are a number of new technologies that could make chatbots smarter, faster, and more fun to use. Natural language processing techniques allow you to communicate with a bot without having to learn which words or phrases it can or cannot understand. Machine learning means that the more you (or other people) interact with a chatbot, the better it will get at anticipating your needs.

Eventually you might not need to go out of your way to send a message to a chatbot at all. Instead you could have a personal bot that works on your behalf, and which communicates with third-party bots as needed.

Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, or Google Now/Voice Search could basically act as your personal assistant: tell your assistant that you want to make travel plans, and it can automatically initiate a conversation with airline, hotel, and car rental bots asking if you'd like to confirm a price, book a reservation, or even make a payment.

But all of that only works if people actually want to use today's chatbots... and right now that's kind of a tough sell.

It can be fun to check one out for a few minutes. But the novelty usually wears off once you realize just how limited they are.

Website Botlist.co is also creating a directory of chatbots for multiple platforms.

There's been a lot of talk about bots recently. But here's a good place to get started if you're looking for a reading list to better understand what bots are and why everybody seems to be chatting about chatbots in 2016:

You can help support the LPX podcast by making a donation to our Patreon campaign.

Vivaldi is a new web browser that's aimed squarely at power users.

Like to open 25 browser tabs at a time? Vivaldi has tools that makes it easier to manage your tabs and move from one to the next. Want to save notes and screenshots while you surf the web? There's a tool for that. Like to use mouse gestures or keyboard shortcuts? There are a ton of those.

Vivaldi 1.0 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, and the developers eventually plan to release mobile versions. But the initial target audience is people looking for a browser that's versatile, customizable, and which has features you won't find in other desktop web browsers.

Vivaldi Technologies is a startup founded by Jon von Tetzchner. Before starting the company, he was co-founder and CEO of Opera Software, a company that's been building web browsers since 1994.

Tetzchner says he started his new company because he was unhappy about some of the changes Opera made after he left. When he realized some of the features that had been removed weren't coming back, he decided to create a browser that he would still want to use... and says Vivaldi is basically a browser designed for his friends.

The company has been making preview and beta versions available since early 2015 and Tetzchner says Vivaldi has already been downloaded millions of times and has hundreds of thousands of active users.

Those numbers may seem tiny compared to the number of people using Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Edge... but Tetzchner says he just needs a few million active users to break even.

For now, he's paying for development of Vivaldi out of his own pocket rather than taking outside funding. He says he made enough money by selling his shares in Opera upon leaving the company to fund development for years to come.

You can help support the LPX podcast by making a donation to our Patreon campaign.

Most people probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about the materials used to build their phones, or the workers who put the hardware together. But Amsterdam-based Fairphone is trying to change that... by selling phones made with conflict-free minerals from Africa and by setting up a Worker Welfare fund for factory workers in China.

Even if you don't care about those things, the Fairphone 2 is interesting for another reason: it's the first modular smartphone to hit the market.

You can replace the screen, camera, battery, and other components with nothing more than a screwdriver.

At a time when many smartphones are designed to be replaced every two years or so, the Fairphone 2 is built to last for up to 5 years... and that's where the modularity comes in: if the screen breaks, it's easy to replace. If you want a better camera, you may be able to insert one.

It's the first phone to receive a perfect 10 out of 10 score for repairability from iFixit... which also helped write the official repair guide for the smartphone.

The Fairphone 2 is currently available in Europe for 529 Euros (about $580). While there are cheaper phones on the market with better specs, there's nothing else that's really like the Fairphone 2... and the company spells out exactly how much each of the phone's components cost.

The Fairphone 2 features a 5 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, a microSD card slot, a 2,420 mAh battery, and an 8MP camera. It ships with Android 5.1 Lollipop software and supports 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, and 4G LTE... in Europe.

Fairphone hopes to bring the phone to the United States eventually. It's showcasing the phone at this year's SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, where the phone was a finalist for an Innovation award. But the earliest the phone is likely to go on sale in the US is 2017.

I spoke with Fairphone's public engagement manager Daria Koreniushkina for this episode of the LPX Show, and she explains how the project was started, and where it's going.

I also interviewed iFixit founder Kyle Wiens about modularity and repairability in smartphones... why it's useful, and why it's not exactly common.

Here are some related links:

You can help support the LPX podcast by making a donation to our Patreon campaign.

Most people in the United States who pay for TV have to use a set-top-box rented from their cable provider. In February, the Federal Communications Commission voted to adopt an "UnblockTheBox" plan that could change that by requiring TV providers to open up the data streams so that you could access content on something like a Roku, Chromecast, or Apple TV.

But the cable, satellite, and other TV providers are fighting back... saying they're already starting to do that and that the proposed regulations are unclear, costly, and possibly even dangerous.

The debate is far from over. The FCC is taking public comments on the project through mid-March and a second comment period (for replies) will run for another 30 days after that... and if the FCC decides to move ahead, TV providers will almost certainly take legal action to stop it.

In this episode of the LPX Show, we take a look at the FCC's #UnblockTheBox effort... and the industry's proposed alternative, #EliminateTheBox.

Update 9/8/2016: FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has announced a new compromise that largely adopts the industry's approach of creating apps that can run on a wide range of platforms including iOS, Android, Roku, and Windows, as well as web apps.

But while the new proposal gives TV providers control over the presentation of their content, it requires them to provide access to their content in universal searches -- so users would be able to see on-demand content from Comcast and Netflix in the same search results, for instance.Featured guests:

Special appearances (recorded from an FCC webcast):

Links:

You can help support the LPX podcast by making a donation to our Patreon campaign.

Remix OS is a customized version of Android designed to look and feel like a desktop operating system. You can use it to run just about any Android app, but there's a desktop, a taskbar, and support for viewing multiple apps at once in windows that you can resize and reposition on the screen.

Here are some links that you may be interested in:

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You can also get the latest updates by following LPX on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter or by visiting our website, LPXShow.com

Remix OS is a customized version of Android designed to look and feel like a desktop operating system. You can use it to run just about any Android app, but there's a desktop, a taskbar, and support for viewing multiple apps at once in windows that you can resize and reposition on the screen.

It basically looks like a cross between Windows and Android.

The operating system is developed by a Chinese startup called Jide, which was founded by three former Google employees. They introduced the operating system to the public in early 2015 when they unveiled a 2-in-1 tablet that came with a keyboard cover, sold for $400, and bore a striking resemblance to Microsoft's Surface tablets.

Later in 2015 Jide followed up the Remix Ultra Tablet with a tiny desktop computer called the Remix Mini, which sells for just $70.

I met Jide co-founder David Ko at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show, where the company was showing off its new Remix OS for PC software that lets anyone download the operating system and try it on a computer they may already have. But what really caught my attention was Ko's vision of the future.

Right now most of the people using Remix OS are early adopters, beta testers, and geeks. But eventually Ko figures Remix OS could change the way people use computers in emerging markets, where many people's first experiences with the internet come through a phone and not a laptop or desktop computer. So if and when they make the jump to a desktop, why not give them one that runs software they're familiar with?

I recently had a chance to do a more in-depth interview with Ko over the phone, and decided to flesh out that interview with a bit of context from a few friends and colleagues. There were some insights from our talk that didn't make it into the episode, but you can read more on what I learned about Jide's plans for Remix OS at Liliputing.

This week's show features David Ko, senior director of industry analysis at App Annie, Ross Rubin, science fiction and fantasy writer (and tech blogger) KT Bradford, and blogger Lory Gil who has written for Liliputing and who is now at iMore.

Here are some links that you may be interested in:

Update: This contest has now ended. Congratulations to our winner, MrWed!

Oh yeah, and as mentioned in the episode, we're also giving away a Bluetooth speaker. Just fill out this form by February 28th and enter the code-word mentioned in the episode for a chance to win.

The speaker was given to me by Zotac at this year's Consumer Electronics Show and it also functions as an FM radio. This contest is open to residents of the continental United States.

You can help support the LPX podcast by making a donation to our Patreon campaign.

Intel's is expanding its line of Compute Stick mini-PCs in 2016, so I decided to accompany my 2nd-gen Intel Compute Stick review with a state-of-the-stick episode of LPX.

This episode features interviews with Intel's marketing manager for the lineup and Ian Morrison, an Australian developer who has been working to port Ubuntu and other open source software to run on Intel's tiny desktop computers.

The Intel Compute Stick is a full-fledged computer, but it looks more like a USB flash drive than a PC. Stick it into the HDMI port of your TV and you can run Windows software on the big screen.

The first PC-on-a-stick devices launched in 2012, but models like the Rikomagic MK802 featured ARM processors and Android software. We started to see models with Intel chips and Windows software in late 2014, and Intel launched its own Compute Sticks in 2015.

This year the company is expanding the lineup with several new models featuring more powerful processors, better WiFi, and other improvements.

It's not just the hardware that's changing: Intel offered models with Windows or Ubuntu software in 2015. But the 2016 lineup will be available with Windows 10 or no operating system at all. If you want to install Ubuntu, Android, Chromium, or another operating system, you'll have to do it yourself.

That's one of the reasons I wanted to speak with Ian Morrison. He's put more effort into porting Ubuntu to run on Intel's stick PCs than anyone else that I'm aware of, and he's particularly excited about some of the changes coming to the Compute Stick lineup in 2016... although he also wonders whether PC sticks will one day be replaced by smartphones that can connect to your TV.

You can find Morrison's latest work at his website, Linuxium.com.au, as well as at his Google+ page.

Program  Notes

Don't forget, you can find the LPX Show in iTunes, on Stitcher, and just about anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you've got a minute, please leave a review in iTunes to let everyone know what you think of the show!

And of course you can let us know what you think by leaving a comment on this page.

You can help support the LPX podcast by making a donation to our Patreon campaign.

For our first episode, we have interviews with two people hoping to change the way we use computers.

Shane Lewis wanted a smartphone that could run Android apps... but which could also work as a full-fledged Windows desktop computer when attached to a docking station. And since there was nobody selling a phone that met that description, he decided to build his own.

The Nitro Duo was one of the most unusual products I saw at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, 2016. Not only does it run both Android and Windows 10... it can run them both at the same time, because it basically has the guts of two separate computers in one case.

Following CES, Lewis has been tweaking the design and he plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the project.

You can find out more about the Nitro Duo at SL-Interphase.com.

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton has a vision for a future where computers are easy to upgrade. Buy a laptop, tablet, or desktop today and if you want a faster processor, more memory, or other improvements in a few years all you need to do is pop out a card and insert a $50 replacement.

For the last 5 years he's been working to design and manufacturer those PC cards, and this year he's finally getting ready to ship some of his first products.

They'll include two PC cards, one with an ARM-based processor, and another with a MIPS-based chip, and two devices that let you use those cards as full-fledged computers: a 15.6 inch laptop and a tiny desktop dock that lets you hook up a keyboard, mouse, and display.

Update: The first EOMA68 project has launched a crowdfunding campaign at Crowd Supply. Working prototypes have been produced, but the goal is to raise money for further production of a PC card, laptop shell, and mini-PC shell.

The first EOMA68 cards won't be speed demons, but Leighton says they're good enough for basic computing including word processing and web browsing. And once the first units ship to enthusiasts, he's hoping to get help developing software and hardware for the platform.

In the future there could be EOMA68 cards with more powerful processors including Intel chips, allowing you to run anything from Windows to Debian on a computer with one of the PC cards.

Leighton is just starting to show off the laptop prototype, and in our first podcast, but he plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign soon and begin shipping products early in the second half of 2016.

You can find out more about the project at Rhombus-Tech.net.

Here's a run-down of the first episode of LPX:

If you'd like to hear the full, unedited version of the interview with Luke Leighton, you can find it on YouTube.

You can help support the LPX podcast by making a donation to our Patreon campaign.