Franklin Planner Replacement: Update 2

Recently I began looking into how to make a mobile or portable option for the Franklin Planner Replacement project that I’ve been writing entries about on this blog. [Part 1, Part 2]

Luckily things have been going really well and getting things to work, but now comes the question of how the hell I’ll see this information when I am offline.

A few options I came up with were Android apps/Raspberry Pi, a LoRA-style pager running off Meshtastic, or a Windows Mobile device.
There are some pluses and negatives for each option, so let’s brainstorm, readers, what our options are.

The LoRA pager method would use the fact that you can send direct messages over Meshtastic via a Matrix network bridge.
This could work but would require an MQTT node somewhere on the local mesh network.

Now this could work, but the issue is that if I was offline I wouldn’t get any kind of information or update for my daily plans.
So that was possible but did have issues.

Now let’s move on to the ideal option, that being a Windows Mobile device. In my first article I talked about the issue that is Palm Day and why I am now having to deal with this issue.

I also talked about in the first article that Windows Mobile has issues with Linux, but I realized the easiest workaround would be to use a Windows NT virtual machine.

So that could work, but finding a working Windows Mobile PDA has been a bit of an issue, so we’ve gotta keep going and trying to find an option.

What about a Raspberry Pi? Well, that isn’t really an option. The primary reason is I intend to take it on a flight. Now some might be trying to tell me “What is wrong with that?”

In the 2015 Steve Jobs biopic we get this moment where Steve Wozniak shows off his Nixie tube watch and Steve Jobs points out to Woz that bringing that on a flight would make people panic since it looks so different and handmade.

Now onto the final option, an Android-powered device.

The primary issue with that is the fact that Android is slowly being locked down to the point where I would have to pay Google and give Google my photo ID to be able to sign APK files.

So I’d have to find a modded Android device and then deal with the risk of API and system call drift causing issues the longer I have the software running.

I want to make sure this works for the long term, so if anyone has ideas about what my options might be, I’d love to hear from my readers.