My older mac book recently died and instead of buying a new laptop I'm using termux to connect to a droplet for side projects. I've tried two different bluetooth keyboards so far and found one I liked with back-lit keys. Also recently setup wireguard on a raspberry pi at home and had fun working on my droplet through my VPN while on a flight. What a time to be alive.

You could probably set up Tailscail ssh that was recently posted here on HN. Though why do you need to go from VPN to droplet?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31837115

Cool, I'll check it out. It is an extra hop, but my fdroid termux install has been blown away (along with my ssh key) several times by the play store version. So now I save my key on my pi instead. I did turn off updates from play store for termux so hopefully it doesn't overwrite termux again.

Termux does not update on the play store anymore since 2020 or 2021. In fact, your repositories are probably outdated

If you ever need to upgrade, you have to install from somewhere else, like F-droid

Thanks, I think actually it was something else that made me re-install from F-droid, but I'm glad I can rule out the play store.

I don't know what is braver, if hiking for months or developing on a Bluetooth keyboard and a phone.

I don't know about brave, but the funniest thing I've done with my phone and keyboard is access an amazon workspace to run adobe InDesign for magazine layout while in my tent— sitting in a sleeping bag, a cold rain pattering against the "roof", with my back resting against my backpack and my phone angled nicely in my lap, using the keyboard's attached touchpad to carefully move and assign articles, tweak colors, and do the final bits needed for printing.

There was definitely some squinting at the screen involved, heh.

I’d love to know more about that. Isn’t running Adobe CC on AWS prohibitively expensive? You need a decent video card and at the very least 8GB of RAM.

Couldn’t you buy a laptop with what they’d charge you for a day of work? A quick simulation here is showing me US$ 140/h for a 4 core 16GB of Ram machine, no mention of video card.

You can easily stow a portable solar panel in a hiking bag that can charge your phone and the other accessories. A laptop would have a harder time getting charged, even if it was a Chromebook. Portable battery packs intended for phones would also be easy to stow. Not only do they fit more compactly, but they are light on your weight budget and not as fragile as lightweight laptops.

Sure, but I’m talking about price. AWS Workspace seems crazy expensive, to the point of being unusable almost.

I love the digital nomad lifestyle, but at that price it’s more of a gimmick than a real choice

A g3s.xlarge running Windows is just under a dollar an hour - 4 cores, 30GB ram, 8GB video ram on Nvidia GPUs.

$140 gets you a t3.xlarge 4 core 16gb ram instance (on linux) for a whole month.

But that’s not Amazon Workspace he mentioned. That’s just EC2.

Check out the hourly price of Workspace:

https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/?pg=workspaces&sec...

Sorry this comes a bit late, but the answer is you don't really need a performance machine for doing layout. Since Adobe's apps were originally built 30 years ago, the minimum requirements remain quite low. Moving images around a page can handle quite a bit of lag. You don't even need a rented machine with a quality GPU.

I pay for this workspace: $9.75/month-Hourly-Windows licensed-Performance-2vCPU,8GB Memory,80GB Root,50GB User

Since I'm only doing layout on an as-needed basis while hiking, rather than doing it full time, I tend to spend around $45 or less a month.