The first four posts in this series were theory and design. This one is the honest post. The slate has been on my desk for about ten weeks, in my bag for about half of those, and used in anger for board prep, RF experimentation, two trade events, and one customs encounter. It is fair to be fair about it now.
Here is what living with it has actually been like.
What is easier than I expected
The cold-boot ritual. I assumed I would resent typing the LUKS passphrase at every power-on. It turns out the boot sequence is fast — under twelve seconds from power button to login — and the act of typing the phrase is a small ritual that puts me into the right operating mode. By the time I am at the desktop I have already decided what I am about to do with the slate. There is none of the open the lid and start scrolling drift that the work laptop creates.
The VT100 mode. I added it to the control panel as a half-joke and a nod to a particular aesthetic. It has turned out to be the mode I leave it in. Green phosphor on black, monospaced everything, the faintest scanline overlay. It looks ridiculous and it works. Six hours into a long day, my eyes are less tired in this theme than in either of the alternatives. There is a discipline lesson buried in there about how interfaces that demand attention also leak it; I am still working out the precise shape of that argument.
The lack of notifications. The slate does not have a Slack client. It does not have email. It does not have any application whose primary purpose is to interrupt me. I had expected to find this restrictive. What I found instead was that the work I do on the slate is the work I have decided to do, not the work the slate has decided to ask of me. The first week of this was strange. The fifth week was a quiet revelation.
What I gave up that I miss
The keyboard. Honestly. The BlackBerry-style Q10 layout is wonderful for what it is — small, mechanical, distinctive — but it is thirty-five keys. There is no number row. Symbols are layered behind modifier holds. My fingers know full-size keyboards in a way they will not unlearn for a thirty-five-key layout in ten weeks. I am faster on a normal keyboard. I am more accurate on a normal keyboard. The slate's keyboard is part of its identity and part of its honesty about being a portable device, but it is also a real cost.
Quick lookups. I have lost the muscle of quickly check something on the internet. The slate is not a frictionless browser. To check something I need a network, which means deciding to bring up a Wi-Fi connection on a hostile network or tether through my phone, which means deciding whether the lookup is worth that decision. Half the time I conclude it is not. The other half I conclude it is, do the lookup, and proceed. The first half is the cost; the second half is the system working as designed.
Spotify. Briefly. I missed it for about a week. Then I stopped missing it.
What surprised me
How much the deck makes me think about borders.
I had written the RIPA section of the threat model assuming the airport scenario was rare and theoretical. The slate has been through customs three times now. On each occasion I was conscious of which jurisdiction I was crossing into, what their position on encrypted devices is, whether the key fob was with me or not, and what I would say if asked. None of the three occasions involved any actual question. All three changed how I think about routine air travel.
How quiet the SDR work is.
I had assumed the EMI shielding of the HackRF inside its tin can would be adequate. It is more than adequate — the noise floor when the slate is closed and the SDRs are running is within a few decibels of an open-bench reference. I have done two days of urban RF survey work with this slate that would previously have required carrying a laptop, a powered USB hub, the SDR on a cable, and a separate battery brick. Doing it from a single 280 × 230 millimetre slab is a quiet productivity gain I had not anticipated.
How visible the keyboard is.
The Q10 is a beautiful piece of hardware, but it has small backlit keys and a distinctive shape that does not look like anything else. In a crowded room, the slate does not blend in the way the matte ASA chassis promised it would. The keyboard is the giveaway. This is fine — covert in the design doc means visual profile, not concealment of intent — but I had not expected the keyboard to be the part of the slate strangers asked about.
What broke
Two things, in the order they broke.
The first NVMe SSD I tried — a brand I will not name — would not stay enumerated through suspend cycles. The carrier resumed cleanly; the NVMe came back missing. I lost an evening to dmesg and an hour to a kernel update before swapping the drive for the Samsung 980 that is in there now. The Samsung has been faultless.
The fan. The 40 mm Noctua I specified in the design doc whined at low PWM for the first three days. I assumed it was breaking in. It was, in fact, an out-of-spec unit. Noctua replaced it next-day, in matte black, no fuss. The replacement has been silent.
What I have not done that I should have
I have not yet written the small Python tool to flash the GL3523's SPI configuration via libusb. I am still using Genesys MPTool on a Windows virtual machine to program the hub descriptors. This is a known gap and a future rev-B task. It bothers me when I think about it, which is to say not often, but enough.
I have not yet exercised the tamper switch. The lid has stayed on. I intend to provoke the kernel-panic-and-keyslot-wipe path on a non-production slate at some point — the production unit is sealed for now, and the design rationale of an anti-tamper feature you have not actually tested is worth less than nothing.
What the bargain feels like
Mostly, it feels like a small thing well made. The slate is one of perhaps four computers I rely on; the other three I cannot describe in any meaningful sense. The deck is the only one I can.
This is also where the bargain feels silly. The slate cost me about a thousand pounds, several weekends of PCB layout, three months of build-and-validate, and ongoing inconvenience around any task involving a number row. The work laptop costs the firm more than that, requires no design effort on my part, and types a number row without ceremony. Most professional contexts demand the work laptop. The slate is a thing I have chosen to add to my life on top of that, not a replacement for it.
But it is now the device I think about computing on. The work laptop is the device I do computing on. They are different verbs. The slate has been the one that taught me which verb mattered.
What is next
Post six is the last one. It is the reflection — what designing and living with the slate has changed about how I think about my other machines and the machines whose security I am paid to advise on.
The slate itself is the prop. The argument is the thing.